The relevance of the concepts of local syntactic selection and constraints on locally selected dependents in modeling how arguments are syntactically realized has been virtually unchallenged and is assumed to be universal. In this article, we examine more closely these assumptions and ask whether there is anything invariant in the realization of arguments. We argue that the facts of Oneida, and Iroquoian in general, suggest the answer to this question is No. There is no use in Oneida for local selection of phrases realizing semantic arguments (and lexical records of this selection), and words are, as a result, functionally complete. We also argue that there is no use for a level of argument structure or any analogous notion in Oneida. The kinds of processes that justify positing such a level are systematically absent. The facts of Oneida suggest that there is less universality in the syntax/semantics interface (particularly when it comes to the realization of semantic arguments) than is typically assumed and that languages may vary widely in the way semantics is mapped onto syntax. We end with a formal model of the relevant fragment of Oneida within head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG).

This paper uses research from two projects, conducted for Sport England and for the Central Council of Physical Recreation (CCPR), to analyze pressures on volunteers in sport in the United Kingdom (UK). Both research projects were contract research, conducted to inform policy and therefore were not designed to build on theoretical insights. However, from the results the research developed an understanding of the interrelated pressures on the voluntary sector in sport, which was informed by theory. This paper describes the pressures and relates them to previous research into volunteers. Contextualizing the issues faced by volunteers in sports organizations suggests several questions for further academic work, not only focussed on sports volunteers, but the voluntary sector in general. In particular, are the pressures experienced by the voluntary sector in UK sport common to sports volunteers in other countries, and to what extent are they also a reflection of general pressures on the voluntary sector?

On March 27 and 28 Italy underwent its first experience of the new electoral system which merges elements of the majoritarian principle and proportional representation. As a result of the 1993 referendum on the change of the electoral system for the Senate (from PR to plurality for three-quarters of the seats), which passed with an overwhelming majority (82.7% in favour), a new electoral law was approved for both the Lower and the Upper chambers. At the risk of over-simplifying what is actually a very complex mechanism (see Yearbook 1994), three-quarters of the seats were allotted on the basis of a single-ballot first-past-the-post system and the remaining quarter on the basis of a proportional formula. The system applied to both chambers with some minor variants.

The international aid system forms a powerful structural force impacting organizational landscapes and civil societies all over the world in complex ways we do not yet understand. Dominant NGO research has failed to properly address this crucial issue, because of a conceptual, theoretical, and ideological tradition that is itself embedded in this very same system’s normative, rhetorical agenda. This paper suggests some conceptual and theoretical approaches that should encourage more comparative research on the role of the development NGOs in shaping national and global civil societies.

In 2023, the World Health Organization declared the end of the public health emergency brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. The sustained voluntary participation of community volunteers in the era after the COVID-19 pandemic emergency is of vital importance to community-level social governance and is one of the goals pursued by modern volunteer service. However, factors contributing to volunteers’ sustained voluntary behavior or intention have not been sufficiently investigated. This study examines the psychological determinants of volunteers’ sustained voluntary intention by constructing an expanded theory of commitment-trust. A dataset involving 507 respondents from Weihai city in China is developed. The empirical results based on a structural equation modeling analysis show that the comprehensive model explains 69% of the total variance in volunteers’ sustained voluntary intention. Volunteer trust is an important antecedent to activate other influencing factors, while community commitment has a directly positive effect on volunteers’ sustained voluntary intention. Volunteer satisfaction not only significantly affects volunteers’ sustained voluntary intention directly, but also impacts the dependent variable through community commitment indirectly. Besides, volunteer engagement has a significant positive effect on volunteers’ sustained intention through volunteer satisfaction. The results verify the applicability of the commitment-trust theory in the field of voluntary service and provide new perspectives for understanding the psychological mechanisms of volunteers’ sustained participation.

Nonprofit organizations serve the public good by offering services that benefit communities and the individuals who live in them. While many large for-profit companies and a few international nonprofits have begun voluntarily assessing and reporting their environmental, cultural, economic, and social sustainability performance in response to growing public awareness of sustainability issues, nonprofit organizations have generally been slow to adopt the practice. This paper makes the case that nonprofits have an obligation to assess and report sustainability performance to account for their positive and negative environmental, cultural, economic, and social impacts in the communities they serve precisely because of their promise to serve the public good; and that sustainability assessment and reporting are not only possible, but that they can actually offer several practical advantages for organizations that integrate the practice into their missions and models. Several sustainability reporting frameworks are reviewed. Two case examples are presented to illustrate the utility of sustainability assessments and reports for different types and sizes of nonprofit organizations. Challenges to the process of adoption and implementation of sustainability programs in the nonprofit sector are discussed.

Labor force mobility, both between economic sectors and between different regions of a country is one of the major consequences of industrialization and urbanization in Western societies. There is reason to believe that the attitudes toward this development at the political elite-level have changed quite drastically, both when it comes to the theoretical understanding of what benefits a society would have from such a redistribution of labor and what means should be used to control or advance this development. In this paper we have described the attitude development at the Norwegian parliamentary level toward the problem mentioned above for the postwar period. We have also formalized a model which we think would make comparative research more feasible on attitudes towards labor market policies, labor market mobility, development of different economic sectors and related areas.

A large set of research argues that policy responsiveness towards excluded societal factions such as minorities of immigrant origin improves through the presence of group members in parliaments because they bring forward different perspectives during parliamentary debates. This article challenges the straightforwardness of this relationship by demonstrating that the ability of legislators with immigrant backgrounds to shift the parliamentary agenda closer to the ideal points of citizens of foreign descent is conditional on two factors. First, representatives of immigrant origin need incentives to cultivate a personal vote, and second, their overall proportion of parliamentary seats has to remain rather marginal to influence the policy positions of the majority of representatives. The article's findings thus stress the importance of studying the contextual factors that moderate the relationship between group belonging and the capacity to promote group interests. Empirical evidence from nine European Democracies between 2002 and 2014 substantiates this argument – so that the analysis constitutes the first cross‐country comparison in a research field that has so far been dominated by single country studies. By using policy congruence as a measure for responsiveness, this article shifts the focal point from individual representatives’ attempts to promote the interests of citizens with immigrant backgrounds towards effectiveness of these endeavours.

This research demonstrates how sustained charity fraud is supported when organisations do not develop strong accountability links to salient stakeholders. Whilst increased regulation is one response to reduce charity fraud and to increase organisational accountability, regulators seldom recognise the myriad heterogeneous needs of stakeholders. This research explores the tactics employed by beneficiaries and the donating public to escalate their accountability demands on such charities. By preferring the most powerful stakeholders, charities miss the opportunity to design effective processes to discharge accountability to meet their moral obligations to legitimate stakeholders. This article calls for increased ‘stakeholder understanding’ by charity governors as a policy to recognise the moral rights of these stakeholders and to reduce charity transgressions.

Recently, a focus on democratic innovations emphasising an increasing and deepening citizen participation in political decision-making has been evident. Deliberative Walks offer a participatory–deliberative process in which the participants, by deliberating in small groups and joining facilitated walks, tackle a complex policy issue that has highly intertwined social and physical dimensions. Deliberative Walks builds on the principle that two participatory methods, citizens’ juries and development walks, are combined. Deliberative Walks are influenced by place-based learning. And like in outdoor pedagogy, learning by moving between the abstract and concrete, as well as transforming experience into knowledge through reflection and communication, is encouraged. We analyse an implemented education-oriented version, Studentlab Deliberative Walks, with nineteen university students. The results, based on questionnaires, interviews and essays, indicate that it is fruitful to experience an issue with all senses. The development walk was seen as more important than the citizens’ jury. Participating in Deliberative Walks promoted inclusion in the decision-making process, enhanced learning, boosted self-confidence and developed feelings of empowerment.

This article suggests that a “crisis of democracy” can be understood not simply as a deterioration of specific representative institutions but as a repositioning of democratic politics vis-à-vis other principles of social coordination, most notably the capitalist market, and the attendant decline of democratic subjectivity—people’s attunement to claims appealing to the common good. I trace this process to the post–World War II era. I show that the crisis of democracy was shaped by the substantive imperative of fusing democracy with free-market capitalism. Many postwar democratic theorists believed that the welfare state could manage the tension latent in this fusion. But an analysis of Friedrich Hayek’s theory of neoliberal democracy, which recognizes that tension more acutely, reveals that the incorporation of free-market capitalism creates tendencies that undermine democracy from within.

This study investigates whether alternation learning is facilitated by a matching phonotactic generalization. In a series of artificial grammar learning experiments, English learners were trained on artificial languages evincing categorical vowel harmony alternations across morpheme boundaries. These languages differed in the degree of harmony within stems (disharmonic, semi-harmonic, and harmonic), and thus the degree of phonotactic support for the alternation. Results indicate that alternation learning was best when supported by matching stem phonotactics (harmonic language; experiment 1). Learners, however, were reluctant to extend a learned phonotactic constraint to novel unseen alternations (experiments 2 and 3). Taken together, the results are consistent with the hypothesis that alternation learning is facilitated by a matching static phonotactic generalization, but that learners are conservative in positing alternations in the absence of overt evidence for them.

The paper proposes to discuss the issue of civicness in the governance of social services by analyzing policy changes relative to the regulation and governance of social services in Europe. The empirical analysis is structured around the concept of “governance regime.” The paper shows that modernization processes within the field of social services in Europe develop along two radically different regulative conceptions reflected into two different governance regimes: market-based or competitive governance vs civic-based or partnership governance. The governance of social services in Europe appears to take place within a mix between two ideal-typical governance regimes: the market-based and partnership-based governance regimes.

Light Warlpiri, a new Australian mixed language combining Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan) with varieties of English and/or Kriol that has emerged within approximately the last thirty-five years, shows radical restructuring of the verbal auxiliary system, including modal categories that differ from those in the source languages. The structure of Light Warlpiri overall is that of a mixed language, in that most verbs and some verbal morphology are drawn from English and/or Kriol, and most nominal morphology is from Warlpiri. Nouns are drawn from both Warlpiri-lexicon and English-lexicon sources. The restructuring of the auxiliary system draws selectively on elements from Warlpiri and several varieties and styles of English and/or Kriol, combined in such a way as to produce novel constructions. It may be that when multiple sources provide input to a rapidly emerging new system, innovative categories are likely to appear.