Reality: Each Day I Escape It

I was dreaming. But the realness of my dream with frighteningly vivid and at the same time morbid, and as it progressed it took on nightmarish proportions..

Ensuring Linguistic Access in Health Care Settings: An Overview of Current Legal Rights and Responsibilities

Focuses on the language access responsibilities of healthcare and coverage providers pursuant to federal and state laws and policies

Etruscan Settlement, Society and Material Culture in Central Coastal Etruria

This volume includes a description, and the results, of a field survey in the Albegna Valley and Ager Cosanus area of southern Tuscany, focusing on evidence from the first millennium BC. Philip Perkins describes the methodology, aims and GIS approaches to the field study and then presents the evidence in terms of the Etruscan settlement patterns, burials, farming and subsistence, ceramic evidence, finally reconstructing a population and economic history for the study area. The survey project has revealed a highly organised and hierarchical settlement pattern in the Etruscan period, with an evolving and diversifying agricultural system

Twisting eigensystems of Drinfeld Hecke eigenforms by characters

We address some questions posed by Goss related to the modularity of Drinfeld modules of rank 1 defined over the field of rational functions in one variable with coefficients in a finite field. For each positive characteristic valued Dirichlet character, we introduce certain projection operators on spaces of Drinfeld modular forms with character of a given weight and type such that when applied to a Hecke eigenform return a Hecke eigenform whose eigensystem has been twisted by the given Dirichlet character. Unlike the classical case, however, the effect on Goss' $u$-expansions for these eigenforms --- and even on Petrov's $A$-expansions --- is more complicated than a simple twisting of the $u-$ (or $A-$) expansion coefficients by the given character. We also introduce Eisenstein series with character for irreducible levels $\mathfrak{p}$ and show that they and their Fricke transforms are Hecke eigenforms with a new type of $A$-expansion and $A$-expansion in the sense of Petrov, respectively. We prove congruences between certain cuspforms in Petrov's special family and the Eisenstein series and their Fricke transforms introduced here, and we show that in each weight there are as many linearly independent Eisenstein series with character as there are cusps for $\Gamma_1(\mathfrak{p})$.Comment: Research funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundatio

DNA and Etruscan identity

From the time of Herodotus, who suggested that the Etruscans were immigrants to Italy, to the present day, the origin of the Etruscans has been debated. Since the mid-twentieth century a convincing academic consensus has been built that the Etruscans were an autochthonous people. The development of molecular archaeology, investigating ancient biological molecules, particularly DNA, has brought new evidence to the debate. This area is still developing and many of its findings are experimental or provisional

The Legendre determinant form for Drinfeld modules in arbitrary rank

For each positive integer $r$, we construct a nowhere-vanishing, single-cuspidal Drinfeld modular form for \GL_r(\FF_q[\theta]), necessarily of least possible weight, via determinants using rigid analytic trivializations of the universal Drinfeld module of rank $r$ and deformations of vectorial Eisenstein series. Along the way, we deduce that the cycle class map from de Rham cohomology to Betti cohomology is an isomorphism for Drinfeld modules of all ranks over \FF_q[\theta].Comment: 14 page

Editorial. Clinical pragmatics: an emergentist perspective

[First Paragraph] Clinical pragmatics has been a major growth area in clinical linguistics and speech and language pathology over the past two decades. Its scope is vast: if we define pragmatics in broad terms, there are no communicative disorders which do not involve pragmatic impairment at least to some degree (Perkins, 2003). Early work in the area tended to focus on the application of pragmatic theory in the analysis of pragmatic impairment (e.g. speech act theory (Hirst, LeDoux, & Stein, 1984), conversational implicature (Damico, 1985) and, more recently, relevance theory (Leinonen & Kerbel, 1999)) and on the development of pragmatic assessments, tests and profiles which included a theoretically eclectic range of items drawn from both pragmatic theory and elsewhere (e.g. Bishop, 1998; Penn, 1985; Prutting & Kirchner, 1983). In more recent years there has been an increasing interest in the neurological and cognitive bases of pragmatic impairment (e.g. Paradis, 1998; Perkins, 2000; Stemmer, 1999) and in the use of interactional approaches such as conversation analysis (e.g. Goodwin, 2003). This special issue of Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics draws on all of these areas but focuses on a particular aspect of pragmatic impairment which has often been overlooked – namely, that the behaviours we describe as pragmatic impairments are in fact the outcome of very varied and highly complex processes. This neglect is partly due to a common tendency to see pragmatics as a separate ‘level’ or even ‘module’ of language, on a par with syntax and semantics. Influenced on the one hand by speech act theory, with its distinction between language structure and communicative acts, and on the other hand by clinical populations who were either able to communicate well despite being linguistically impaired or else were poor communicators despite having good linguistic ability, clinicians assumed there to be a clear dissociation between linguistic and pragmatic competence. Although there is still considerable neurological evidence for a broadly modular view in terms of the lateralisation of linguistic and pragmatic functions, there is also compelling evidence for seeing pragmatic impairment as a more complex, non-unitary phenomenon. Non-modular, or ‘interactional’, views of pragmatic impairment have been influenced by connectionist and functional models of linguistic and cognitive processing (e.g. Bates, Thal, & MacWhinney, 1991), by a growing awareness of the role played in pragmatics by cognitive capacities such as inference, theory of mind and executive function (Martin & McDonald, 2003), and by approaches such as Conversation Analysis (e.g. Damico, Oelschlaeger, & Simmons-Mackie, 1999) which focus on those features of pragmatics which can only be accounted for in terms of interpersonal, collaborative activity. All of these interactional approaches share a view of pragmatic impairment as ‘emergent’, or ‘epiphenomenal’ (Perkins, 1998), rather than as a stand-alone, monadic entity