In recent years increased attention has been devoted to evoked potentials (EP) in newborns. This paper reviews the literature and data from our research group in an attempt to assess the diagnostic and prognostic value of evoked responses in the first weeks of life and their use in different age-specific clinical conditions. The results show that EP are a very sensitive measure of the integrity of the sensory pathways. They make it possible to follow normal physiological maturation and the abnormalities of development resulting from neurological lesions. Repeated measurements of visual evoked potentials and somatosensorial evoked potential are prognostically useful in term infants, but seem much more limited in preterm newborns in predicting neurodevelopmental outcome.
This article presents an analysis of the news bulletins broadcasted by South Lebanese radio station Ṣawt al-Ğanūb (SaJ, Voice of the South). SaJ broadcasted its news bulletins in fuṣḥā (Standard Arabic), as well as in Lebanese. This is interesting because in most news bulletins tend to be broadcasted in the standard language, rather than in spoken varieties. This is definitely the case for so-called diglossic societies, such as Arabic-speaking societies, in which the linguistic metanorm for ‘serious programs’ is fuṣḥā. After presenting a brief linguistic description of a small corpus of news bulletins that were broadcasted in January 1998, this article focuses on how language (choice) functions symbolically in the extra-linguistic world. It argues that the choice to breach the metapragmatic norms, while framing the language use in the news bulletins explicitly as ‘the Lebanese language’ (al-luġa al-lubnānīye) can be interpreted as an implicit comment on Lebanese national identity.
Diglossia is, as far as the Arabic language is concerned, a concept that has been taken for granted, as much as it has been criticized. First, based on Ferguson’s article on diglossia and subsequent interpretations and ramifications of the concept and with a special focus on how language variability is discursively deployed and how it is perceived in the Arab speech community, I will argue that diglossia does not so much describe actual language use, but rather how language variability is ‘read’ in the Arab world. In the second part of the article, an analysis of labeling in a 19th century debate will show how the dichotomy between fuṣḥā and non-fuṣḥā varieties (ʿāmmīya),1 which is the basis of diglossia, was already taken for granted long before the concept and the term existed, and even before fuṣḥā and ʿāmmīya were used as independent lexical items. The analysis in both parts of the article shows how much diglossia is taken for granted by most native speakers of Arabic, even if it defies linguistic descriptions of actual language use. It is exactly this ‘common-sense-ness’ that suggests that diglossia is a useful tool to describe language ideological attitudes.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.