Insights and Motifs

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Upcoming Posts on Language Structure & Language Learning

Four closely related themes:

  • Encoding as a key concept in language structure and language learning
  • Getting back to roots: recovering simplicity in linguistic analysis
  • The converse case: managing complexity in language learning and foreign language instructional design
  • Non-uniqueness of solutions in linguistic analysis and language learning

Two forms of puzzlement related to the above:

  • Analyzing linguistic phenomena that just don’t (seem to) make sense
  • Contrastive historical linguistics: when languages move in different directions from similar starting points

Upcoming Insights from Investigative Practice

Aphorisms that arose while investigating crimes within the mandate of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia:

  • “With enemies like that, who needs friends.”
  • “Reality has a quality all its own.”
  • “The best way to support the prosecution case is—not to.”
  • “The greatest enemy of knowledge is common knowledge.”
  • “The hardest thing to prove is the obvious.”
  • There’s a big difference between theory and case theory.”

Some key insights from investigative experience:

  • The complex nature of objectivity in fact-finding
  • Roles and levels of responsibility in fact-finding: the press, NGOs and tribunals
  • Investigative vs. analytical approaches to document exploitation
  • Hazards of dependence on local translating resources for document exploitation and other investigative purposes, with cross-over implications for the field of language learning
  • Limitations and hazards of translation in investigating genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity: some bases of forensic translation
  • The “battle over the first paragraph”
  • The value and challenges of “background expertise” in core international crimes cases

Insights regarding the causes of conflict:

  • Competing conceptions of the nation as a cause of war in the former Yugoslavia, with cross-over significance for the United States, Near East and other regions today
  • Paradigms of provocative rhetoric: propaganda and the toolbox of incitement