School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

About: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences is a facility organization based out in Villejuif, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Politics. The organization has 1230 authors who have published 2084 publications receiving 57740 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales & EHESS.

Reflections on State-Making and History-Making in South India, 1500-1800

Abstract: This paper is concerned with early modern southern India, and in particular, the areas ruled over by Vijayanagara, the Nayakas of Senji and the Nawwabs of Arcot. Its primary intention is to point out that states as diverse as these produced important narratives that served as points of self-definition. Positivist historians have often struggled to understand what to do with these texts, asking in effect whether they are “truths” or “lies,” and often rejecting them wholsesale for the ostensibly more “reliable” stone and copper-plate based inscriptions.The paper argues against the divide in south Indian history between “textualists,” who read narrative texts, and “epigraphers,” who prefer the “hard” evidence of inscriptions, and contends that any general historical analysis must of necessity be based on a reading of both forms of materials. In this context, the paper develops the argument for the emergence of a certain historical self-consciousness in early modern south India, both in the Perso-Islamic and the vernacular traditions, and in their interface. It would naturally be tempting to see matters in terms of a succession of expressive forms, each one successfully and finally displacing its predecessors, but it is proposed that the realities one encounters are rather more complex than this model would suggest.

Adjustment and income distribution

Abstract: This paper presents a structural macro simulation model to quantify the effects of alternative stabilization packages on the distribution of income and wealth. The model combines the explicit microeconomic optimizing behavior characteristic of computable general equilibrium models with asset portfolio behavior of macroeconomic models in Tobin's tradition. In this model there are four main mechanisms by which policy changes affect the distribution of income and wealth. First, changes in factor rewards affect directly household income distribution. Second, household real incomes are affected by changes in their respective cost of living indexes. Third, household real incomes are affected by changes in real returns on financial assets since household incomes include income from financial holdings. Fourth, household wealth distribution is affected by capital gains and losses. Illustrative simulations with the model are carried out for a representative economy subject to the interest rate and terms-of-trade shocks of the early 1980s. The simulations suggest a large adverse impact on the distribution of income of a sharp contractionary package.

Comparing exhaustivity operators

Abstract: In this paper, I investigate the formal relationships between two types of exhaustivity operators that have been discussed in the literature, one based on minimal worlds/models, noted exh-mw (van Rooij & Schulz 2004, Schulz & van Rooij 2006, Spector 2003, 2006, with roots in Szabolcsi 1983, Groenendijk & Stokhof 1984), and one based on the notion of innocent exclusion, noted exh-ie (Fox 2007). Among others, I prove that whenever the set of alternatives relative to which exhaustification takes place is semantically closed under conjunction, the two operators are necessarily equivalent. Together with other results, this provides a method to simplify, in some cases, the computation associated with exh-ie, and, in particular, to drastically reduce the number of alternatives to be considered. Besides their practical relevance, these results clarify the formal relationships between both types of operators. BibTeX info

Acoustic-phonetic differences between infant- and adult-directed speech: the role of stress and utterance position

Abstract: Previous studies have shown that infant-directed speech (IDS) differs from adult-directed speech (ADS) on a variety of dimensions. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether acoustic differences between IDS and ADS in English are modulated by prosodic structure. We compared vowels across the two registers (IDS, ADS) in both stressed and unstressed syllables, and in both utterance-medial and -final positions. Vowels in target bisyllabic trochees in the speech of twenty mothers of 4- and 11-month-olds were analyzed. While stressed and unstressed vowels differed between IDS and ADS for a measure of F0, and trended in similar directions for vowel peripherality, neither set differed in duration. These profiles held for both utterance-medial and -final words.