22 results
Effects of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid supplementation on cognitive functioning in youth at ultra-high risk for psychosis: secondary analysis of the NEURAPRO randomised controlled trial
- Nicholas Cheng, Alison McLaverty, Barnaby Nelson, Connie Markulev, Miriam R. Schäfer, Maximus Berger, Nilufar Mossaheb, Monika Schlögelhofer, Stefan Smesny, Ian B. Hickie, Gregor E. Berger, Eric Y. H. Chen, Lieuwe de Haan, Dorien H. Nieman, Merete Nordentoft, Anita Riecher-Rössler, Swapna Verma, Rebekah Street, Andrew Thompson, Hok Pan Yuen, Robert Hester, Alison Ruth Yung, Patrick D. McGorry, Kelly Allott, G. Paul Amminger
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- BJPsych Open / Volume 8 / Issue 5 / September 2022
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- 08 September 2022, e165
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Background
Cognitive impairments are well-established features of psychotic disorders and are present when individuals are at ultra-high risk for psychosis. However, few interventions target cognitive functioning in this population.
AimsTo investigate whether omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid (n−3 PUFA) supplementation improves cognitive functioning among individuals at ultra-high risk for psychosis.
MethodData (N = 225) from an international, multi-site, randomised controlled trial (NEURAPRO) were analysed. Participants were given omega-3 supplementation (eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid) or placebo over 6 months. Cognitive functioning was assessed with the Brief Assessment of Cognition in Schizophrenia (BACS). Mixed two-way analyses of variance were computed to compare the change in cognitive performance between omega-3 supplementation and placebo over 6 months. An additional biomarker analysis explored whether change in erythrocyte n−3 PUFA levels predicted change in cognitive performance.
ResultsThe placebo group showed a modest greater improvement over time than the omega-3 supplementation group for motor speed (ηp2 = 0.09) and BACS composite score (ηp2 = 0.21). After repeating the analyses without individuals who transitioned, motor speed was no longer significant (ηp2 = 0.02), but the composite score remained significant (ηp2 = 0.02). Change in erythrocyte n-3 PUFA levels did not predict change in cognitive performance over 6 months.
ConclusionsWe found no evidence to support the use of omega-3 supplementation to improve cognitive functioning in ultra-high risk individuals. The biomarker analysis suggests that this finding is unlikely to be attributed to poor adherence or consumption of non-trial n−3 PUFAs.
1 - Scientific Tractability and Relevance Theory
- from Part I - Relevance Theory and Cognitive Communicative Issues
- Edited by Kate Scott, Kingston University, London, Billy Clark, Northumbria University, Newcastle, Robyn Carston, University College London
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- Relevance, Pragmatics and Interpretation
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Summary
Nicholas Allott considers how relevance theory can be seen as responding to doubts about the possibility of any kind of systematic pragmatic theory. He considers three sceptical positions: Fodor’s argument that pragmatic processes are not amenable to scientific study because they are unencapsulated (highly context-sensitive), Chomsky’s claim that human intentional action is a mystery rather than a scientifically tractable problem, and a third view which maintains that intentional communication is too complex for systematic study. Allott argues that work in relevance theory can be seen as successfully challenging these sceptical views and he gives concrete examples of its achievements.
Some linguistic properties of legal notices
- Nicholas Allott, Benjamin Shaer
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- Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique / Volume 58 / Issue 1 / March 2013
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In this article, we consider legal notices of various forms, including imperative, indicative, and non-sentential. We argue that these convey various illocutionary forces depending on their particular content. In particular, those that prohibit actions — unlike laws that do so — typically have “directive” illocutionary force, with different linguistic classes of legal notices achieving this force through different means, given their distinct linguistic properties. We propose a “bare phrase” treatment of non-sentential notices, whereby these are underlyingly and not just superficially non-sentential; and a semantic treatment in terms of Discourse Representation Theory, which perspicuously describes their contribution to interpretation. Finally, we argue that assigning such sparse syntactic and semantic representations to non-sentential notices has conceptual and empirical advantages over analyses that posit richer underlying structure, capturing a broader range of data, including patterns involving default case and the absence of articles, and minimizing the need to posit linguistic ambiguity.
Conclusion
- Neil Smith, University College London, Nicholas Allott, Universitetet i Oslo
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No-one has ever said it better than Gramsci… “you should have pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”
(Chomsky, 1992b: 354)By any criterion Chomsky's achievement is vast. As the guiding spirit of the cognitive revolution, he has been instrumental in changing our view not just of language but of human nature. He has tamed the infinite complexity of language, and in doing so has given us a new appreciation of what we owe to the hand of nature and what we owe to the environment. He has done it through insight, through fanatical hard work and by devoting his efforts to problems rather than mysteries. The problems have come in different forms: some, like I-language, are amenable – when suitably dissected – to theoretical discussion; others, like politics, require not so much a theory as the dispassionate application of common sense in the scrutiny and presentation of the facts. Solving any of them requires dedication.
By contrast, there are mysteries where neither of these techniques appears to work. The creativity of genius, the everyday problem of free will, even the apparently banal Cartesian problem of what causes our particular use of language on given occasions, all seem still to lie beyond the reach of our intellect. Chomsky has had little to say on these areas, since he thinks agnosticism is the only rational position to adopt, but even here he has clarified the issues by drawing relevant distinctions and by proposing a framework for the debate.
In some cases he has also raised the prospect of transferring particular phenomena from the status of “mysteries” to “problems.” The most obvious such area is the evolution of language that, because of the difficulty of getting relevant evidence, had long seemed inscrutable. For many years Chomsky suggested that we could say little of interest beyond the truism that language is the result of evolution, but his recent work with ethologists and evolutionary biologists, building on a massive cross-disciplinary base, has begun to shed light here too. A related example comes in his latest preoccupation with the question of how “perfect” language is as a solution to the problem of linking sound and meaning. A few years ago such questions could not even be posed and it is not yet clear whether they can be convincingly answered.
1 - The mirror of the mind
- Neil Smith, University College London, Nicholas Allott, Universitetet i Oslo
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One reason for studying language – and for me personally the most compelling reason – is that it is tempting to regard language, in the traditional phrase, as “a mirror of mind.”
(Chomsky, 1975a: 4)Frogs are not like us. They are better at catching flies but not, it seems, at explaining how they do it. The frog mind is narrowly specialized to control tasks such as locating small black specks, escaping predators, and finding mates, but not for reflecting on the ethics of eating insects or the issue of equal rights for toads.
This view of the limited intellectual capabilities of amphibians is unlikely to be controversial. If we extended it to apes the reaction might be different, and it would clearly be false of humans. How do we know? Because humans can tell us so and the others cannot. Although having a language is not a prerequisite for having a mind, language is overwhelmingly our best evidence for the nature of mind. Language is definitional of what it is to be human, and the study of language is a way in to the study of the human, but not the frog, mind.
Despite the complexity and variety of animal communication systems, no other creature has language like ours. Although chimpanzees and bonobos can be taught to manipulate an impressive array of signs and use them to communicate with us or with each other, human language, in particular the syntax of human language, is sui generis. As far as we know, even the singing of whales and the color communication of cuttlefish have nothing like (human) syntax. Surprisingly, the closest parallel with human language, more accurately speech, is found in birdsong. It is surprising because birds and humans are evolutionarily only remotely related, suggesting that the many shared properties of birdsong and speech are the result of convergent evolution rather than shared descent, although such analogic convergence may be controlled by the same genetic mechanisms, reflecting “deep homology.” In one respect our linguistic uniqueness is trivial: the inherent interest of our abilities would not be diminished just because it turned out that other species had even more in common with us than we had previously suspected.
Frontmatter
- Neil Smith, University College London, Nicholas Allott, Universitetet i Oslo
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Notes
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2 - The linguistic foundation
- Neil Smith, University College London, Nicholas Allott, Universitetet i Oslo
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By studying the properties of natural languages … we may hope to gain some understanding of the specific characteristics of human intelligence.
(Chomsky, 1975a: 4–5)Introduction
Many of Chomsky's arguments for the relevance of language to issues in philosophy and psychology derive their force from the strength of their linguistic foundation. The perception that he has formulated and solved a range of descriptive and explanatory problems in the formal study of language ensures that his other ideas are taken seriously. This attitude makes sense: his arguments for innateness and rationalism, for instance, rest crucially on the validity of his views on language. By rationalism is meant the idea, best represented in the work of his intellectual ancestor Descartes, that “there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience.” Chomsky has provided the best evidence in existence for the innateness of some aspects of our knowledge of language, and hence for a modern version of Cartesian rationalism. In contrast, no such direct relation holds between his linguistics and his politics. As we shall see in detail in Chapter 5, there are connections between the strands of his different activities, but the intellectual justification for his political work does not rest on his syntactic insights in the way that much of his philosophical work does, and he frequently emphasizes that there is at best a tenuous relation between his two careers.
It is of course unsurprising that people who know and admire one strand of his output should be sympathetic to the other. Chomsky himself was drawn into linguistics in part because of his interest in and sympathy for Zellig Harris's political views. Like many linguists, NVS became interested in his political ideas because of prior exposure to his linguistics, and he has more than once interviewed potential students for linguistics courses who had been made curious about the field because of their admiration for his political dissent. However, to be able to evaluate Chomsky's philosophical and psychological contribution it is necessary to have some understanding of the linguistic background, while no such background knowledge is necessary to evaluate his political contribution. What follows in this chapter is an (intermittently historical) overview of certain central notions in his linguistics.
Introduction
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A Child of the Enlightenment.
(Chomsky, 1992b: 158)Chomsky's achievement
Why is Chomsky important? He has shown that the immense complexity of the innumerable languages we hear around us must be variations on a single theme, Universal Grammar. He has revolutionized linguistics, and in so doing has set a cat among the philosophical pigeons. He has resurrected the theory of innate ideas, demonstrating that a substantial part of our knowledge is genetically determined, reinstating in a new way rationalist ideas that go back centuries, but which had fallen into disrepute; and he has provided evidence that “unconscious knowledge” is what underlies our ability to speak and understand. He has played a major role in overturning the dominant school of behaviorism in psychology, and has returned the mind to its position of pre-eminence in the study of humankind. In short, Chomsky has changed the way we think of ourselves, gaining a position in the history of ideas on a par with that of Darwin or Descartes. And he has done this while devoting the majority of his time to dissident politics and activism: documenting the lies of government, exposing the hidden influences of big business, developing a model of the social order, and acting as the conscience of the West.
In recent history his peers in influence are such disparate figures as Einstein, Picasso, and Freud, with each of whom he has something in common. Like Freud – but with added intellectual rigor – he has changed our conception of the mind; like Einstein, he blends intense scientific creativity with radical political activism; like Picasso, he has overturned and replaced his own established systems with startling frequency. The most recent example of this iconoclasm – his “Minimalist Program” – calls into question a considerable proportion of his earlier achievement documenting the richness of the innate basis of the language faculty, with the aim of putting it on a sounder footing. Perhaps his greatest similarity is to Bertrand Russell, whose early work, Principia Mathematica, redefined the foundations of mathematics, and who devoted much of his life to political writing and activism. But while everyone knows something about mathematics, that most people have even heard of linguistics is largely due to Chomsky.
Envoi
- Neil Smith, University College London, Nicholas Allott, Universitetet i Oslo
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Chomsky has created, and for fifty years has dominated, the field of modern linguistics. Working in this field, he has revealed the amazing complexity of human languages but at the same time has provided striking evidence that (from a suitably objective point of view) there is really only one language, and that it is largely innate. He has demolished the behaviorist framework that guided research in psychology, he has restored the mind to its previous position of Cartesian eminence, and he has challenged traditional philosophical thinking on what constitutes human knowledge. In passing, he provided new impetus to mathematical linguistics, and stimulated debate in fields as disparate as education and anthropology, stylistics and immunology. And he has done this while devoting the majority of his time to political activism, engaging in a relentless struggle against the lies of government and the evils of concentrated power. To do this he talks and writes to every conceivable audience – from the House of Representatives to rap-metal bands, from academics in Western universities to prosecuting magistrates in Turkey.
Chomsky doesn't believe in heroes, but it is not surprising that for many he has become one. And there can be little disagreement that he has fulfilled his expressed hope that “I've done something decent with my life.”
Preface to the third edition
- Neil Smith, University College London, Nicholas Allott, Universitetet i Oslo
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It is more than a decade since the second edition of this book appeared: a decade in which the perils besetting the world have increased, in which developments in linguistics and the cognitive sciences have burgeoned, and in which Chomsky has continued to make a seminal academic contribution while still devoting the majority of his time and energy to political activism and the exposure of the lies and obfuscations of business and government across a huge range.
To understand and explain these developments and to do justice to Chomsky's continuing work it seemed necessary to widen the authorial expertise, so NVS enlisted the help of NEA, who has all the relevant knowledge and experience needed.
We have again left the basic plan of the book unchanged but we have attempted to update and revise it to reflect both advances in understanding and Chomsky's role in those advances. Where we have become aware of them we have corrected any mistakes and elucidated any obscurities in the earlier editions, and we have highlighted what we perceive to be the most notable innovations. This means that apart from adding some corroborative evidence we have left the opening introductory chapter mostly unchanged. The other chapters were less straightforward. In linguistics there has been a ferment of activity. While the Minimalist Program is still the dominant paradigm within the generative tradition, it has undergone some radical changes. Accordingly, we have modified and extended Chapter 2 in an attempt to explain and make more accessible the sometimes opaque theoretical and formal innovations in current work. Apart from his technical contributions to current syntactic theory, which we explain in some detail, Chomsky has devoted the majority of his recent academic work to the study of the evolution of the language faculty and we elaborate the earlier brief discussion accordingly.
In the psychology of language and psycholinguistics the most significant changes have been the increasing, and increasingly hostile, reactions to Chomsky's postulation of an innate “Universal Grammar” (UG), and the appearance of a range of “emergentist” alternatives. In Chapter 3 we discuss a number of these alternatives, dissect the claims being made, and adjudicate appropriately.
Index
- Neil Smith, University College London, Nicholas Allott, Universitetet i Oslo
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Preface to the first edition
- Neil Smith, University College London, Nicholas Allott, Universitetet i Oslo
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Summary
My greatest debt, both intellectual and personal, is to Noam Chomsky. Without his work, and inspiration, my career would have been radically different, and this book would obviously not have existed. In addition, he has made time over the years to talk and correspond with me, despite the overwhelming pressures of his innumerable other commitments. When I sent him the pre-final version of the manuscript, he replied with some sixty pages of comments and suggestions. If I have still misrepresented him in any way, he is not to blame. It has been a privilege to work in his shadow.
A number of colleagues and friends have discussed all or parts of the contents of this book over the five years or so that I have been preoccupied with it: Stefanie Anyadi, Misi Brody, Robyn Carston, Ray Cattell, Teun Hoekstra, Rita Manzini, Milena Nuti, Ianthi Tsimpli, Hans van de Koot, Nigel Vincent, and especially Annabel Cormack and Deirdre Wilson. Needless to say, they are not to be taken to agree with what I have written, nor to be blamed because I have sometimes failed to take their advice. Closer to home my family – Amahl, Ivan, and Saras – have inspired and supported me with sage advice, heartfelt encouragement, and good food.
Part of the work for this book was carried out while I was in receipt of a British Academy research grant, which was matched by a comparable period of sabbatical leave from University College London. I was also granted travel expenses by the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at UCL to visit Chomsky at MIT. I am grateful to the Academy and to the College for their support, and to my colleagues for shouldering my duties while I was away.
Preface to the second edition
- Neil Smith, University College London, Nicholas Allott, Universitetet i Oslo
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Much has happened in the five years since I finished the first edition of this book. Linguistics has advanced, the cognitive sciences have exploded, the world has become ever more dangerous, and Chomsky has continued to lead a dual existence as academic and activist.
To take account of all these changes is impossible. I have left the basic plan of the book unchanged, but I have made many additions and amendments. First, I have corrected mistakes where I have become aware of them, and attempted to clarify points which were unclear. Second, I have updated the notes and references where that has been within my ability. As no one can be master of all the disciplines touched on here, I have concentrated on updating those sections pertaining to areas where Chomsky's recent work has been directly relevant. As a result, the bibliography contains entries for about forty new works by Chomsky himself: over fifteen new or revised books, and another twenty-five new articles. At the same time, the secondary literature on Chomsky has also burgeoned: major works have appeared by Antony & Hornstein (2003), McGilvray (1999), Mitchell & Schoeffel (2002), Winston (2002), and many others. These, as well as about a hundred other new entries are likewise included and, where relevant, I have simultaneously expanded the notes to include reference to these new items.
Third, I have attempted to give some indication of how the field and the world have changed since 1998. Chomsky has continued to produce seminal work in linguistics, and I have revised the relevant sections of Chapter 2 and added some discussion of developments in Minimalism accordingly. This has entailed making a number of modifications to the first edition, where I had failed to lay the relevant groundwork for some of the issues that now occupy center-stage. I have also updated the discussion of evolution, another area where Chomsky has produced interesting new work. Most obviously, I have added a section on the events of September 11, 2001 and their aftermath – “9-11” – which have overwhelmingly preoccupied Chomsky's time and energy. These revisions and extensions have necessitated other minor changes throughout the book.
Bibliography
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4 - Philosophical realism: commitments and controversies
- Neil Smith, University College London, Nicholas Allott, Universitetet i Oslo
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Introduction
Every now and then [there] occurs a figure in the history of thought [who] completely revolutionises the way people have thought about a domain, often by making plausible certain possibilities that were not taken seriously prior to the time … Noam Chomsky is without doubt such a figure … the kinds of facts about linguistic structures and innate capacities to which he has drawn our attention are now an essential ingredient of our psychological understanding.
(Rey, 1997: 107–8)Chomsky has radically changed the way that we think about language and the mind. As we have seen, he has shown that we have linguistic abilities whose intricate details go far beyond what a child experiences, and that the best explanation for these abilities is that our minds have considerable innate structure. This is a devastating blow against empiricism, the view that the mind is just a general-purpose learning device and the adult mind is therefore largely shaped by its environment. Chomsky's view is a modern version of rationalism, a position that had been espoused by many philosophers including Plato and Descartes, but which had largely fallen out of favor by the mid twentieth century.
More than fifty years of work inspired by Chomsky has reasserted a realistic, naturalistic view of the mind, against several anti-mentalistic views that were influential in philosophy and psychology. These include the claims that there are no mental states or events (eliminativism about the mental), that talk of mental events/states is only for the purposes of prediction with no claim to truth (instrumentalism about the mental), and that psychology should confine itself to the study of publicly observable behavior, in particular how actions can be understood as responses to conditioning by stimuli (behaviorism). As we saw in the last chapter, Chomsky contributed directly to the demise of behaviorism in psychology with his devastating review of Skinner's book Verbal Behavior. In philosophy, the cognitive revolution that Chomsky set in motion, putting mental structures at the center of linguistics and psychology, has cast serious doubt on twentieth-century anti-mentalism, including the sophisticated behaviorism of Quine, and the claim of Wittgenstein and his followers that explanations of behavior in terms of internal mental states are somehow unnecessary.
Contents
- Neil Smith, University College London, Nicholas Allott, Universitetet i Oslo
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3 - Language and psychology
- Neil Smith, University College London, Nicholas Allott, Universitetet i Oslo
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Summary
Linguistics is simply that part of psychology that is concerned with one specific class of steady states, the cognitive structures that are employed in speaking and understanding.
(Chomsky, 1975a: 160.)We have grammars in our heads. That's why we can produce and understand unlimited numbers of sentences; why people who suffer damage to their heads often lose some or all of their linguistic abilities; why PET scans show increased blood flow in particular bits of our brains when we carry out linguistic tasks under experimental conditions. The list is almost endless. But are the grammars (or I-languages) in our respective heads “psychologically real” as well as neurophysiologically real? The question has seemed unnecessarily vexed to many linguists and it has certainly attracted a mass of debate. Why should there be a problem?
Many psychologists and philosophers are happy with the idea that we have something in our heads which accounts for these phenomena. What some balk at is the complexity and opacity of the linguist's account of what we have in our heads. It is unexceptionable to suggest that there is a rule specifying that verbs precede their objects in English, because we can see immediately what the effect of contradicting that rule is: silly sentences like John onions eats instead of the correct John eats onions. It is not so obvious that the correct analysis of John was too clever to catch should contain three empty categories of the kind we saw in the previous chapter. You may by now be convinced that the evidence for such empty categories is pretty good, but postulating three of them in a six-word sentence still strikes many as excessive, just as the physicist's claim that the universe has ten (or eleven or twenty-six) dimensions seems unnecessarily baroque.
One response is to temporize and deny that such complexity is really necessary. Some linguists may like to talk about this plethora of empty categories, for instance, but they are not psychologically real: they are not represented in our heads as nouns and verbs are. In Chomsky's view, this reaction is either patronizing (when the linguists grow up they'll see the error of their ways) or uncomprehending, or both.
5 - Language and freedom
- Neil Smith, University College London, Nicholas Allott, Universitetet i Oslo
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Summary
There is no living political writer who has more radically changed how more people think in more parts of the world about political issues.
(Glenn Greenwald, quoted on the cover of Chomsky, 2014c)Explanation and dissent: the common threads
working in a science is useful because you somehow learn … what evidence and argument and rationality are and you come to be able to apply these to other domains.
(Chomsky, 1988c: 696)Relentless dissent
The pressure to conform is great. It takes courage to speak or act in contradiction to the majority of one's fellows. Chomsky's work in all fields can be described as an unrelenting refusal to follow the herd: a book of interviews with him is entitled Chronicles of Dissent (1992b) and a political biography by R. F. Barsky has the title A Life of Dissent (1997). His dissent is no mere obstinate rejectionism, as it is combined with a sustained defense of alternatives: scientific creativity in the case of his linguistics; anarchist humanity in the case of his politics; the centrality of explanation in both. In his words, “the task of a scientific analysis is to discover the facts and explain them.” In this final chapter we look at the strands linking Chomsky's scientific work to his political activism: his commitment to rationality, his refusal to take things at face value, his passionate defense of what he conceives to be right, and his dispassionate and painstaking analysis of relevant alternatives. We begin with a glance at the tension between common sense and scientific explanation, and give a brief overview of his intellectual background, before turning to a more detailed analysis of the main areas of his polemical work.
Common sense and theory
It is obvious that two people can speak the same language; that it makes sense to talk of English from medieval times to the present; that children are taught their first language, or at least learn it from their parents and peers; that language is somehow socially defined and its purpose is communication.
Dedication
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