This volume represents the culmination of an extensive research project that studied the development of linguistic form/function relations in narrative discourse. It is unique in the extent of data which it analyzes--more than 250 texts from children and adults speaking five different languages--and in its crosslinguistic, typological focus. It is the first book to address the issue of how the structural properties and rhetorical preferences of different native languages--English, German, Spanish, Hebrew, and Turkish--impinge on narrative abilities across different phases of development. The work of Berman and Slobin and their colleagues provides insight into the interplay between shared, possibly universal, patterns in the developing ability to create well-constructed, globally organized narratives among preschoolers from three years of age compared with school children and adults, contrasted against the impact of typological and rhetorical features of particular native languages on how speakers express these abilities in the process of "relating events in narrative." This volume also makes a special contribution to the field of language acquisition and development by providing detailed analyses of how linguistic forms come to be used in the service of narrative functions, such as the expression of temporal relations of simultaneity and retrospection, perspective-taking on events, and textual connectivity. To present this information, the authors prepared in-depth analyses of a wide range of linguistic systems, including tense-aspect marking, passive and middle voice, locative and directional predications, connectivity markers, null subjects, and relative clause constructions. In contrast to most work in the field of language acquisition, this book focuses on developments in the use of these early forms in extended discourse--beyond the initial phase of early language development.

"Relating Events in Narrative, Volume 2: Typological and Contextual Perspectives" edited by Sven Stromqvist and Ludo Verhoeven, is the much anticipated follow-up volume to Ruth Berman and Dan Slobin's successful "frog-story studies" book, "Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study" (1994).
Working closely with Ruth Berman and Dan Slobin, the new editors have brought together a wide range of scholars who, inspired by the 1994 book, have all used Mercer Mayer's "Frog, Where Are You?" as a basis for their research. The new book, which is divided into two parts, features a broad linguistic and cultural diversity. Contributions focusing on crosslinguistic perspectives make up the first part of the book. This part is concluded by Dan Slobin with an analysis and overview discussion of factors of linguistic typology in frog-story research.
The second part offers a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, all dealing with contextual variation of narrative construction in a wide sense: variation across medium/modality (speech, writing, signing), genre variation (the specific frog story narrative compared to other genres), frog story narrations from the perspective of theory of mind, and from the perspective of bilingualism and second language acquisition. Several of the contributions to the new book manuscript also deal with developmental perspectives, but, in distinction to the 1994 book, that is not the only focused issue. The second part is initiated by Ruth Berman with an analysis of the role of context in developing narrative abilities.
The new book represents a rich overview and illustration of recent advances in theoretical and methodological approaches to the crosslinguistic study of narrative discourse. A red thread throughout the book is that crosslinguistic variation is not merely a matter of variation in form, but also in content and aspects of cognition. A recurrent perspective on language and thought is that of Dan Slobin's theory of "thinking for speaking," an approach to cognitive consequences of linguistic diversity. The book ends with an epilogue by Herbert Clark, "Variations on a Ranarian Theme."

This volume represents the culmination of an extensive research project that studied the development of linguistic form/function relations in narrative discourse. It is unique in the extent of data which it analyzes-more than 250 texts from children and adults speaking five different languages-and in its crosslinguistic, typological focus. It is the first book to address the issue of how the structural properties and rhetorical preferences of different native languages-English, German, Spanish, Hebrew, and Turkish-impinge on narrative abilities across different phases of development. The work of Berman and Slobin and their colleagues provides insight into the interplay between shared, possibly universal, patterns in the developing ability to create well-constructed, globally organized narratives among preschoolers Contact Susan Barker at (201) 258-2282 for more information. from three years of age compared with school children and adults, contrasted against the impact of typological and rhetorical features of particular native languages on how speakers express these abilities in the process of "relating events in narrative." This volume also makes a special contribution to the field of language acquisition and development by providing detailed analyses of how linguistic forms come to be used in the service of narrative functions, such as the expression of temporal relations of simultaneity and retrospection, perspective-taking on events, and textual connectivity. To present this information, the authors prepared in-depth analyses of a wide range of linguistic systems, including tense-aspect marking, passive and middle voice, locative and directional predications, connectivity markers,null subjects, and relative clause constructions. In contrast to most work in the field of language acquisition, this book focuses on developments in the use of these early forms in extended discourse-beyond the initial phase of early language development. The book offers a pioneering approach to the interactions between form and function in the development and use of language, from a typological linguistic perspective. The study is based on a large crosslinguistic corpus of narratives, elicited from preschool, school-age, and adult subjects. All of the narratives were elicited by the same picture storybook, Frog, Where Are You?, by Mercer Mayer. (An appendix lists related studies using the same storybook in 50 languages.) The findings illuminate both universal and language-specific patterns of development, providing new insights into questions of language and thought.

Joshua Berman engages the text of the Hebrew Bible from a novel perspective -- as a document of social and political thought. He proposes that the Pentateuch can be read as the earliest prescription on record for the establishment of an egalitarian polity. The blueprint that emerges is that of a society that would stand in stark contrast to the social orders found in the surrounding cultures of the ancient Near East -- Egypt, Mesopotamia, Ugarit, and the Hittite Empire -- where the hierarchical structure of the polity was centered on the figure of the king and his retinue. Berman shows that the Pentateuch's egalitarian ideal is articulated in comprehensive fashion and is expressed in its theology, politics, economics, use of technologies of communication, and in its narrative literature. Throughout, he invokes parallels from the modern period as heuristic devices to illuminate the ancient developments under study. Thus, for example, the constitutional principles in the Book of Deuteronomy are examined in the light of principles espoused by Montesquieu, and the rise of the novel in 18th-century England serves to illuminate the advent of new modes of storytelling in biblical narrative.

This is the HARDBACK version. From 2000 to its final episode in 2007, Gilmore Girls raised the bar for television writing, redefined the dramatic comedy, and cultivated a dedicated fan base not seen since the heights of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. However, unlike Buffy, little has been published about what went on behind-the-scenes of Gilmore Girl. Until now. The Gilmore Girls Companion provides the first detailed account of the creation of this groundbreaking series, based on dozens of exclusive interviews with the actors and behind-the-camera talent who brought Stars Hollow to life. Also check out the blog at http: //gilmoregirlsbook.wordpress.com/ . Over 500 pages

The original essays in this collection chronicle the transformation of Arnold Schoenberg's works from music as pure art to music as a vehicle of religious and political ideas, during the first half of the twentieth century. This interdisciplinary volume includes contributions from musicologists, music theorists, and scholars of German literature and of Jewish studies.

This volume represents the culmination of an extensive research project that studied the development of linguistic form/function relations in narrative discourse. It is unique in the extent of data which it analyzes--more than 250 texts from children and adults speaking five different languages--and in its crosslinguistic, typological focus. It is the first book to address the issue of how the structural properties and rhetorical preferences of different native languages--English, German, Spanish, Hebrew, and Turkish--impinge on narrative abilities across different phases of development. The work of Berman and Slobin and their colleagues provides insight into the interplay between shared, possibly universal, patterns in the developing ability to create well-constructed, globally organized narratives among preschoolers from three years of age compared with school children and adults, contrasted against the impact of typological and rhetorical features of particular native languages on how speakers express these abilities in the process of "relating events in narrative." This volume also makes a special contribution to the field of language acquisition and development by providing detailed analyses of how linguistic forms come to be used in the service of narrative functions, such as the expression of temporal relations of simultaneity and retrospection, perspective-taking on events, and textual connectivity. To present this information, the authors prepared in-depth analyses of a wide range of linguistic systems, including tense-aspect marking, passive and middle voice, locative and directional predications, connectivity markers, null subjects, and relative clause constructions. In contrast to most work in the field of language acquisition, this book focuses on developments in the use of these early forms in extended discourse--beyond the initial phase of early language development. The book offers a pioneering approach to the interactions between form and function in the development and use of language, from a typological linguistic perspective. The study is based on a large crosslinguistic corpus of narratives, elicited from preschool, school-age, and adult subjects. All of the narratives were elicited by the same picture storybook,Frog, Where Are You?, by Mercer Mayer. (An appendix lists related studies using the same storybook in 50 languages.) The findings illuminate both universal and language-specific patterns of development, providing new insights into questions of language and thought.

Designed to assist practitioners in developing interview procedures for their organizations, this work shows how competence-based human resource management techniques can be applied to employment interviews. Research has shown that the traditional interview does not predict employment success as well as the structured interview, while the structured interview is also the method of choice to ensure a fair and nondiscriminatory hiring process. Leading the practitioner through the three-step interview process--preparation, interviewing techniques, and evaluation of applicants--this guide provides sample questions, a case study, and forms to help the reader conduct successful structured interviews. Also included is a chapter on issues related to equal opportunity employment and a comprehensive review of the literature on structured interviewing.

Contents:
Editors' Introduction. Abstract Polyphonies: The Music of Schoenberg's Nietzschean Moment, William Benjamin. Arnold Schoenberg as Poet and Librettist: Dualism, Epiphany, and Die Jakobsleiter, David Schroeder. Androgyny and the Eternal Feminine in Schoenberg's Oratorio Die Jakobsleiter Jennifer Shaw. Von heute auf morgen: Schoenberg as Social Critic,Stephen Davison. Schoenberg in Shirtsleeves: The Male Choruses, Op. 35, Robert Falck. The Prophet and the Pitchman: Dramatic Structure and Its Musical Elucidation in Moses und Aron, Act I, Scene 2, Edward Latham. Schoenberg's Moses und Aron: A Vanishing Biblical Nation, Bluma Goldstein. Schoenberg Rewrites His Will: A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46,David Isadore Lieberman. Texts and Contexts of A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46, Camille Crittenden. Returning to a Homeland: Religion and Political Context in Schoenberg's Dreimal tausend Jahre, Naomi Andr. Schoenberg's Modern Psalm, Op.50c, and the Unattainable Ending, Mark Risinger

In this commentary, Joshua Berman considers Lamentations as a literary work that creates meaning for a community in the wake of tragedy through its repudiation of Zion theology. Drawing from studies in collective trauma, his volume is the first study of Lamentations that systematically accounts for the constructed character of the narrator, a pastoral mentor who engages in a series of dialogues with a second constructed character, daughter Zion, who embodies the traumatized community of survivors. In each chapter, the pastoral mentor speaks to a different religious typology and a different sub-community of post-destruction Judeans, working with daughter Zion to reconsider her errant positions and charting for her a positive way forward to reconnecting with the Lord. Providing a systematic approach to the careful structure of each of its chapters, Berman illuminates how biblical writers offered support to their communities in a way that is still relevant and appealing to a therapy-conscious contemporary society.

Why would highly skilled, well-trained pilots make errors that lead to accidents when they had safely completed many thousands of previous flights? The majority of all aviation accidents are attributed primarily to human error, but this is often misinterpreted as evidence of lack of skill, vigilance, or conscientiousness of the pilots. The Limits of Expertise is a fresh look at the causes of pilot error and aviation accidents, arguing that accidents can be understood only in the context of how the overall aviation system operates. The authors analyzed in great depth the 19 major U.S. airline accidents from 1991-2000 in which the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found crew error to be a causal factor. Each accident is reviewed in a separate chapter that examines events and crew actions and explores the cognitive processes in play at each step. The approach is guided by extensive evidence from cognitive psychology that human skill and error are opposite sides of the same coin. The book examines the ways in which competing task demands, ambiguity and organizational pressures interact with cognitive processes to make all experts vulnerable to characteristic forms of error. The final chapter identifies themes cutting across the accidents, discusses the role of chance, criticizes simplistic concepts of causality of accidents, and suggests ways to reduce vulnerability to these catastrophes. The authors' complementary experience allowed a unique approach to the study: accident investigation with the NTSB, cognitive psychology research both in the lab and in the field, enormous first-hand experience of piloting, and application of aviation psychology in both civil and military operations. This combination allowed the authors to examine and explain the domain-specific aspects of aviation operations and to extend advances in basic research in cognition to complex issues of human performance in the real world. Although The Limits of Expertise is directed to aviation operations, the implications are clear for understanding the decision processes, skilled performance and errors of professionals in many domains, including medicine.

In this commentary, Joshua Berman considers Lamentations as a literary work that creates meaning for a community in the wake of tragedy through its repudiation of Zion theology. Drawing from studies in collective trauma, his volume is the first study of Lamentations that systematically accounts for the constructed character of the narrator, a pastoral mentor who engages in a series of dialogues with a second constructed character, daughter Zion, who embodies the traumatized community of survivors. In each chapter, the pastoral mentor speaks to a different religious typology and a different sub-community of post-destruction Judeans, working with daughter Zion to reconsider her errant positions and charting for her a positive way forward to reconnecting with the Lord. Providing a systematic approach to the careful structure of each of its chapters, Berman illuminates how biblical writers offered support to their communities in a way that is still relevant and appealing to a therapy-conscious contemporary society.

Inconsistencies in the Torah is a critical intellectual history of the theories of textual growth in biblical studies. The historical critical approach to the Pentateuch has long relied upon scholarly intuition concerning some of its narrative and legal discrepancies, which scholars have taken as signs of fragmentation and competing agendas. Those hypotheses are, Joshua A. Berman argues, based on anachronistic, nineteenth-century understandings of ancient Near Eastern and biblical law as statutory law. Indeed, the Pentateuch's inconsistencies are not dissimilar to types of narrative inconsistencies from Egyptian monumental inscriptions and the historical prologues of the Hittite vassal treaty tradition. Berman here explores the inconsistencies between the Pentateuch's four corpora of law by surveying the history of legal theory and its influence on the critical study of biblical law. He lays bare how the intellectual movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries impeded the proper execution of historical critical method in the study of the Pentateuch. Ultimately he advocates a return to the hermeneutics of Spinoza and the adoption of a methodologically modest agenda. This book is a must-read for Biblicists looking to escape from the impasse and extreme fragmentation gripping the field today.

Likened to a second Tsar in Russia and attaining prophet-like status around the globe, Tolstoy made an impact on literature and the arts, religion, philosophy, and politics. His novels and stories both responded to and helped to reshape the European and Russian literary traditions. His non-fiction incensed readers and drew a massive following, making Tolstoy an important religious force as well as a stubborn polemicist in many fields. Through his involvement with Gandhi and the Indian independence movement, his aid in relocating the Doukhobors to Canada, his correspondence with American abolitionists and his polemics with scientists in the periodical press, Tolstoy engaged a vast array of national and international contexts of his time in his life and thought. This volume introduces those contexts and situates Tolstoy-the man and the writer-in the rich and tumultuous period in which his intellectual and creative output came to fruition.

This book offers a new understanding of the relationship between family structures and narrative structure in the nineteenth-century novel. Comparing Russia and England, it argues that the two nations had fundamentally different conceptions of the family and that these, in turn, shaped the way they constructed plots. The English placed primary value on the vertical, diachronic family axis-looking back to ancestors and head to progeny-while the Russians emphasized the lateral, synchronic axis-family expanding outward in the present from nuclear core, to extended and chosen kin. This difference shaped the way authors plotted consanguineal relations, courtship and marriage, and alternative kinship constructions. Idealizing the domestic sphere and emphasizing family continuity, the English novel made family a conservative force, while Russian novels approached it as a backward site of patriarchal tyranny in desperate need of reform. Russian family plots offered a progressive, liberalizing push toward new, nontraditional family constructions. The book's comparative approach calls for a re-evaluation of reigning theories of the novel, theories that are based on the linear English family model and cannot accommodate the more complex, Russian alternative. It reveals where these theories fall short, explains the reasons for their shortcomings, and offers a new way of conceptualizing family's role in shaping the nineteenth-century novel. Classics from Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev are contextualized in the broader literary landscape of their day, and Russia's great women writers regain their rightful place alongside their male counterparts as the book draws together family history, literary analysis, and novel theory.

In Created Equal, Joshua Berman engages the text of the Hebrew Bible from a novel perspective, considering it as a document of social and political thought. He proposes that the Pentateuch can be read as the earliest prescription on record for the establishment of an egalitarian polity. What emerges is the blueprint for a society that would stand in stark contrast to the surrounding cultures of the ancient Near East -- Egypt, Mesopotamia, Ugarit, and the Hittite Empire - in which the hierarchical structure of the polity was centered on the figure of the king and his retinue. Berman shows that an egalitarian ideal is articulated in comprehensive fashion in the Pentateuch and is expressed in its theology, politics, economics, use of technologies of communication, and in its narrative literature. Throughout, he invokes parallels from the modern period as heuristic devices to illuminate ancient developments. Thus, for example, the constitutional principles in the Book of Deuteronomy are examined in the light of those espoused by Montesquieu, and the rise of the novel in 18th-century England serves to illuminate the advent of new modes of storytelling in biblical narrative.