text:
Home > Numéros > 13.2 > Studying the diachronic dimension...
Contents - Previous document
13.2 | 2018 : Approches diachroniques des discours et cultures spécialisés
Studying the diachronic dimension of specialised languages through an intentional approach to their social ontology
Michel VAN DER YEUGHT
Because specialised languages (SLs) stem from human activities, they exist in human time. Yet, their obvious diachronic dimension is rarely acknowledged, let alone explored. Mainstream approaches, notably English for Specific Purposes, focus on the present synchronicity of SLs to cater for the urgent needs of learners in the – apparently – most effective way. In contrast, the aim of this paper is to account for the diachronic dimension of SLs by showing that it is a central feature of their social ontology. It uses the theory of intentionality propounded by John Searle, an American philosopher, to establish that "specialisedness" and SLs result from "collective intentionality" as the underlying constructing factor of social reality (Searle 1995: 37–43). In that conceptual framework, the paper shows that specialised domains, communities and languages are basically "institutional" in nature as they follow Searle's constitutive rule of social institutions: "X counts as Y in context C" (ibid.: 26). The paper analyses the various facets of the C variable of the rule and highlights its essential diachronic component. It identifies same-language specialised dictionaries and specialised encyclopaedic knowledge (inspired from Eco [1986: 68–86]) as effective tools to master the C contextual variable and interpret SLs correctly. The approach adopts a thoroughly holistic perspective since it is built on connections involving the mind, language, institutions, history and communities as key components of social ontology.
Parce que les langues spécialisées (LS) émanent de l'activité humaine, elles se déploient dans le temps humain. Néanmoins, leur dimension diachronique, quoique manifeste, est rarement reconnue et, a fortiori, très peu explorée. Les approches des LS les plus répandues, notamment l'English for Specific Purposes (ESP), se concentrent délibérément sur leur présent synchronique pour servir les besoins les plus immédiats des apprenants, dans un souci d'efficacité plus apparent que réel. À l'inverse, l'objectif de cet article est de rendre compte de la dimension diachronique des LS en montrant qu'il s'agit là d'une caractéristique centrale de leur ontologie sociale. La démarche a recours à la théorie de l'intentionnalité proposée par le philosophe américain John Searle afin d'établir que le spécialisé et les LS découlent « d'intentionnalités collectives » qui opèrent comme les facteurs constitutifs sous-jacents de la réalité sociale (Searle 1995 : 37–43). Dans ce cadre conceptuel, l'article montre que, par nature, les domaines, les communautés et les langues spécialisés sont profondément « institutionnels » puisque leur existence découle de la règle constitutive des institutions sociales formulée par Searle : « X compte pour Y en contexte C » (ibid. 26). L'article analyse les différentes facettes de la variable C de cette règle et met en évidence sa dimension essentiellement diachronique. Il trouve dans les dictionnaires spécialisés monolingues et dans le savoir encyclopédique spécialisé (concept inspiré de Eco [1986 : 68–86]) des outils efficaces pour s'approprier la variable contextuelle C et interpréter correctement les LS. La démarche adopte une perspective résolument holistique dans la mesure où elle se fonde sur des mises en relation impliquant l'esprit, la langue, les institutions, l'histoire et les communautés, c'est-à-dire l'ensemble des composants fondamentaux de l'ontologie sociale.
Langue de spécialité, anglais de spécialité, diachronie, institution, intentionnalité collective, dictionnaire spécialisé, encyclopédie spécialisée
1. ESP and the intentional approach to specialisedness
1.1. Diverging from the epistemological position of ESP
1.2. Defining "specialisedness"
1.3. Purpose, network and background
1.4. From individual to collective "specialisedness"
1.5. From collective intentionality to social reality: the institutional dimension of specialisedness
2. How collective intentional constitutive rules generate SLs
2.1. Assigning the conventional power of symbol and meaning
2.2. Clarifying the difference between general and specialised language
2.3. The crucial importance of the C factor for meaning
2.4. Building SLs into contextual social reality and into diachrony
2.5. Examining two diachronic dimensions of SLs
2.5.1. The diachronic dimension of constitutive rules
2.5.2. The diachronic dimension implied by the C variable
3. Mastering the context variable in SLs: specialised dictionaries and encyclopaedias
3.1. Specialised dictionaries
3.2. Specialised encyclopaedias
3.3. Specialised encyclopaedias as the core business of SL teachers
4. Discussion: dispelling a sense of déjà vu
4.1. Getting priorities right: first, specialisedness; second, language
4.2. Opting for a holistic view
1In his Cours de linguistique générale (1995 [1916]: chapter 3), Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished between the synchronic and diachronic approaches to linguistics. He famously opted for the former to propose his structuralist analysis of language. Saussure's option left a lasting bias in favour of synchrony in many language studies and that bias can also be observed in English for Specific Purposes (ESP). For example, in The Handbook of English for Specific Purposes (Paltridge & Starfield 2013, hereafter The Handbook), a landmark in ESP studies, the index has no entries for synchrony and diachrony; the only entry devoted to history refers to that of ESP, not of language phenomena. The book defines ESP as "the teaching and learning of English as a second or foreign language where the goal of the learners is to use English in a particular domain" (ibid.: 2). Since the goals of the learners are generally, if not always, present or near-future goals, synchrony is taken for granted and diachrony ignored.
2In this paper, by contrast, my main objective is to introduce diachrony in the study of specialised languages (SLs) – e.g. medical English, legal German and Spanish for engineers. Although diachrony is only one of the facets in the nature of SLs, I believe it is a key epistemological dimension that determines whether SLs exist or not. As I see it, denying the diachronic dimension of SLs amounts to denying their enduring existence as language phenomena; conversely, acknowledging their diachronic dimension makes SLs exist. Yet, stipulating that SLs have a diachronic dimension is not satisfactory enough. I attempt here to outline a theory that may build an ontology of SLs that inherently includes their diachronic dimension. To fulfil this aim, I develop an "intentional approach to SLs" inspired from the philosophy of intentionality posited by John Searle, an American language and social philosopher.
3In a first section, I present my theoretical hypotheses and I distinguish them from traditional views in ESP studies. The main argument of the paper is that the intentional approach to SLs does not start from an analysis of language, but from the study of the mental states that generate language. In our research context, these mental phenomena are specialised intentional states that produce specialisedness. From the examination of individual intentional states, I then move on to collective ones which enable us to account for the social nature of specialisedness and of SLs. The second section examines how specialised collective intentionality generates SLs thanks to constitutive rules that create social reality. The institutional nature of specialisedness and of SLs is grounded in the central notion of context, which contains diachrony as a key component. This section looks into the analysis of the several diachronic dimensions of SLs in more detail and clarifies the way diachrony is built into the process of interpretation of specialised messages. The third section presents two tools that may help learners and teachers to master the diachronic dimension of SLs: specialised dictionaries and specialised encyclopaedias. It shows how these tools fit into Searle's intentional approach and apply his institutional constitutive rules. The discussion section puts the paper's proposals into perspective by contrasting them with some ESP tenets, notably those expressed by Vijay K. Bhatia (2004). This section highlights the necessary primacy of mental phenomena over linguistic ones in the study of SLs. It also underlines the holistic dimension of the approach which positions all specialised phenomena within the vast sphere of human institutional reality as described by Searle (2010). The conclusion shows that the institutional character of specialised phenomena necessarily includes diachrony in their social ontology because context is one of the key components of the constitutive rules that bring them into existence.
4To clarify my theoretical proposal, I first have to contrast it with the epistemological assumptions of ESP. ESP, as envisaged by most Anglophone researchers, does not define itself as the study of language phenomena but as an approach to the teaching and learning of English suited to the needs of learners (Paltridge & Starfield op. cit.):
ESP is an approach to language teaching in which all decisions as to content and method are based on the learner's reason for learning. (Hutchinson & Waters 1987: 19)
We believe that a theory of ESP could be outlined based on either the specific nature of the texts that learners require knowledge of, or on the basis of the needs-related nature of the teaching. (Dudley-Evans & St John 1998: 1)
5In this approach, learners' needs determine what sort of language is to be taught. In other words, the specificity of English for medical or legal purposes does not stem from the domains of medicine or law, but from the needs of learners as would-be members of a specialised community. The logical consequence of this position is that these language contents only exist in teaching and learning situations, but not as independent language phenomena, even though ESP instructors take 'target situations' into consideration. Hutchinson and Waters thus conclude that there are no such things as Specialised Varieties of English (SVEs):
ESP is not a matter of teaching 'specialised varieties' of English. The fact that language is used for a specific purpose does not imply that it is a special form of the language different in kind from other forms. (Hutchinson & Waters 1987: 18)
6The declared non-existence of SVEs tends to reduce most ESP processes to the present synchrony of teaching and learning operations, which practically excludes the diachronic perspective from practitioners' interests.
7In this paper, I attempt to build an approach to the subject by starting from very different hypotheses which I detail as follows. There are specialised languages – e.g. SVEs such as medical or legal English – and they develop as enduring language phenomena independently from any teaching or learning situation. Historical evidence attests to the publication of specialised dictionaries as early as the 17th century in the European context (see Charpy 2011 for medical dictionaries), showing that language specialisation applied to major European idioms long before ESP developed in the 1960s. The "specialised" nature of SVEs does not derive from learners' use or needs, but from specialised domains – such as professional activities or intellectual disciplines – and from their related specialised communities. These domains antedate SVEs as it is implausible to assume that medical English generated medicine or that legal English generated common law. If SLs derive from specialised domains and communities, the particular relationships between these and the language are to be carefully explained. The inherent diachronic character of SLs results from their social nature and the main part of the paper's contribution is to put forward a convincing theory that embeds them into social reality. These are the main hypotheses of this paper and, since I assume that specialised domains generate specialised languages, I shall first examine the notion of "specialisedness".
8Throughout this paper, I will use "specialised" as the standard criterion characterising the varieties of language under study. However, authors vary in their choice of qualifiers. For example, ESP authors have taken some time to decide on the "S" in ESP. They first used special, specialised or specific until some consensus generalised "specific" in the 1990s (Williams 2014: 138). Similarly, domain content is varyingly called disciplinary knowledge, expert knowledge, specialist or specialised knowledge. For the sake of consistency, I opt for the family of terms deriving from the verb "to specialize", like specialist, specialisation, specialty, specialism, specialised, etc. I think that, when contrasted with "general English", as is often the case, "specialised English" or "Specialised Varieties of English" offer the clearest expression of opposition. This choice is also consistent with the French notion of langue de spécialité which I espouse. It relates a language to a specialty, i.e. a specialised domain of activity or an academic discipline, and the intentional approach I propose accommodates this view.
9The notion of specialised domain is familiar enough and several examples have been mentioned above. However, since the specialisation process extends to other realities like languages, communities and people, it may be worthwhile to examine the meaning of the abstract notion of specialisation (the process) or even "specialisedness" (the character of what is specialised). A French scholar, Michel Petit, initiated research on that line and examined the notion of le spécialisé (specialisedness) in relation to specialised discourse (Petit 2010). Interestingly, he distinguished between professional and disciplinary types of specialisedness, adding a "third-type" variety to refer to hobbies, amateur groups, fan clubs and such like which are neither professional nor disciplinary in the strict sense of the term, but which "specialise" in some form of knowledge or activity.
10Defining the notion of specialisedness is interesting because we may wonder where it lies. At bottom, is the nature of specialisedness social, cultural, psychological or otherwise? I argue that it may belong in many of these realms of reality, but that, fundamentally, to specialise takes place in the human mind and that the process of specialisation is part of a class of mental phenomena which John Searle, an American philosopher, calls "intentional states" (1983: 1–4). Although Searle is also famous as a language scholar, he has not studied SLs as far as I know. Yet, I think that his research into the social ontology of language and human institutions provides a highly relevant framework to account for specialised phenomena, in particular specialised communities and languages. This paper complements previous research that aim at harnessing Searle's theory to structure research into these subjects and it focuses on the social nature and diachronic dimension of SLs.
11In his theory of intentionality, Searle identifies mental states which direct the mind towards one particular object outside itself (1983: 1–4; 2004: 19–20, 112–135). In intentional states, the mind refers to or is about objects which are perceived under one particular aspectual shape and not others (Searle 2004: 19, 65, 112, 117; see also 1983: 1). Searle gives the example of water which may be perceived as something to drink or as H2O (2004: 65). Similarly, an intentional state may be about the sun, but under the various aspectual shapes of a star in the galaxy, or of a divinity in some religion or of a provider of energy for solar panels. Examples of intentional states include to hope, to fear, to hate, to love, etc., and, in that series, "to have an intention" is just one particular form of intentionality (Searle 2004: 19).
12As a rule, intentional states are passing mental dispositions that concern an infinity of objects. So, I argue that "to specialise" may be defined as one such type of intentional state where the mind is consistently directed towards one and the same object, in a focused, selective, repetitive and durable way and under a particular aspectual shape (Van der Yeught 2016: 47). For example, someone "specialising" in water perceived as H2O is perhaps developing a chemist's interest in water that may materialise into some form of speciality like chemistry. Similarly, the various aspectual shapes of the sun I mentioned above may give rise to various forms of specialisation although the object is the same: astronomy, the study of religions or solar technology.
13In intentionality, the mind produces a mix of beliefs and desires about the object which are in search of their conditions of satisfaction: conditions whereby these beliefs are true or false and these desires are fulfilled or not (Searle 1983: 7–8; 2004: 117–119). In beliefs, the mind tries to formulate propositions which correctly fit the world; Searle writes that they have a "word-to-world direction of fit", i.e. words try to fit the world. In desires, the mind tries to make the world fit its aspirations which Searle describes as a "world-to-word direction of fit" (ibid. 1983: 8; 2004: 118). Intuitively, I think this mix of volitive-cognitive mental states adequately describes the general purpose of specialisation in human beings without involving the psychological features of individual characters. When a person's mind is increasingly directed towards one particular object, the person wants to know more about it and to develop actions or activities in relation to it to fulfil some purpose made of beliefs and desires. At that stage of the analysis, the process develops in individual minds, but, as I see it, there lie the primitive origins of the professional – volitive and desire-driven – and disciplinary – cognitive and belief-driven – forms of specialisation that will materialise into specialised domains and communities at the collective level.
14In complement to this theory, Searle explains that intentional states do not come alone but rather in connection with many other intentional states which he calls the "network". For example, directing one's mind towards the sun as a star may imply beliefs that the cosmos exists and that stars combine into constellations; and desires to observe them more closely during eclipses, carry out experiments on solar energy, etc. Additionally, intentional states also require what Searle calls the "background", i.e. a set of abilities, skills and dispositions which are not intentional themselves, but which enable intentional states to develop (ibid. 1983: 141–159; 2004: 121). In the same example, background abilities may include a sense of cosmic orientation, capacities of observation, comparative skills, mathematical competences, etc. I am now going to examine how this theoretical framework can apply to specialised intentionality when it develops at a collective level.
15Since our ultimate concern points to language, a capacity that enables humans to communicate with one another, our next stage of analysis has to explain the passage from individual to collective intentionality. When several people share the same type of intentionality, it becomes collective and Searle devoted a whole book to the subject: The Construction of Social Reality (1995). He explains that collective intentionality develops when people cooperate – e.g. in sports teams, orchestras or firms – to achieve the satisfaction of their common beliefs and desires as a group (1995: 23–26; 2010: 43–45, 54–56). This fits nicely with specialised intentionalities, since individuals who share the same types may meet in amateur groups or clubs (of sun-gazers in our example) to further their common goals.
16At a higher level of organisation, these individuals may establish or join associations with professional and/or disciplinary objectives which form fully fledged specialised communities. In doing so they generally immerse themselves in a body of knowledge and know-how harnessed to serve a common purpose – a specialised domain or speciality – which results from the accumulated experience of people sharing the same intentionalities. In the sun example, that would be astronomy. These domains are to be distinguished from the people that form these communities. Domains like medicine, science and law transcend their hosting communities; they expand over various countries and continents and develop over long periods of time, sometimes centuries and even millennia. Many of them constitute World 3 "objective knowledge" as Karl Popper understands it (Popper 1994 [1972]: 106–190; 1978; see also Author 2016: 50–51). As such, they may survive long after the communities that generated them disappeared. Basically, the intentional approach explains how individual specialised intentionality may become collective and form specialised communities. The following section now examines how the process also creates social reality.
17When intentionality becomes collective, it develops the highly significant power of creating social reality thanks to declarative speech acts and collective acceptance. Searle explains that a bewildering number of social facts are created by explicit or implicit declarative speech acts which take the form of constitutive rule "X (object or person) counts as Y (is assigned function Y) in C (context C)" (Searle 1995: 43–46; 2010: 9–10). For example, this piece of paper (X) counts as a $20 bill (Y) in the United States (C). The power of constitutive rules is that, in specific contexts C (here, the U.S.), they create social reality (here, money) by attaching a new symbolic, semantic or status function Y (here, the status of money) to an object or person X (here, a piece of paper marked "$20") that X cannot have through its own brute characteristics.
18The rule is effective if it is socially recognised: e.g. pieces of paper that have specified standard characteristics count as money in the U.S. through the public acceptance of the rule that creates the institution of money in that country. The same applies to an infinite number of other social phenomena that are founded on similar constitutive rules: marriage, presidential elections, companies, cocktail parties, wars, football matches… The astonishing power and discretion of constitutive rules come from the fact that they are largely "invisible", i.e. people generally use them without being aware of their existence and without even thinking that they accept them to create these social phenomena (ibid. 1995: 4–5, 47–48). Searle calls them institutions and defines them as systems of constitutive rules that have the power to create institutional facts, i.e. elements of social reality the existence of which stems from a constitutive rule.
[…] institutional facts can exist only in human institutions. (1995: 27)
An institution is a system of constitutive rules and such a system automatically creates the possibility of institutional facts (2010: 10).
19Admittedly, a large part of the objective knowledge of specialised domains does not result from the collective acceptance of constitutive rules; for example, scientific knowledge is derived from logical demonstration and not from collective acceptance. Still, the main portion of the social reality of specialisedness falls under Searle's explanatory framework. In a sample of institutions, he lists general forms of human and professional activities "that are not themselves institutions but which contain institutions" and they are specialised in nature: "science, law, medicine, academia" (2010: 92). As a result, all specialised institutions create an infinite amount of institutional facts to serve their intentional purposes. A characteristic example is that of the American community of Certified Public Accountants (CPA) which uses official accounting rules called GAAP. The acronym stands for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, and the qualifier "Accepted" clearly reveals the underlying rule constituting U.S. accounting regulation: "GAAP (X) count as the official accounting rules (Y) in the United States (C)".
20This intentional approach to specialisedness thus provides the basic theoretical framework that can explain how SLs are embedded in social reality and in diachrony. I will now develop these points in the following section.
21Searle details the structure of function Y as accepting the assignment of "conventional power" on X in context C (1995: 104). This conventional power is the representation of a status, a symbol or a meaning assigned to X. Simple objects may be assigned symbolic powers and specialisedness makes use of many of them in insignia, uniforms, court dress, university gowns, etc., which are common in many specialised communities. For example, the Rod of Asclepius (X) counts as the professional symbol (Y) of doctors in (generally) western societies (C). Similarly anchors represent seamen, wings airmen and mallets lawyers (in the U.S., but not in England).
22Words are objects too, and they can also be assigned symbolic power or meaning through constitutive rules. Because specialised communities are institutions, they create specialised institutional verbal facts which generate specialised languages. In many cases, a new meaning is assigned to an already existing word. For example, English-speaking stock market operators call pessimistic investors "bears" (from the fact that bears attack their preys by crushing them down, a move similar to falling markets). The constitutive rule then is: "'bear' (X) counts as 'pessimistic investor' (Y) in stock market English (C)". Other examples include "cloud" in computing, "sherpa" in diplomacy, "string" in physics, "sprite" in astronomy, "cluster" in economics… Alternatively, new terms are often coined to be specifically assigned a particular meaning so as to avoid any misinterpretation; many of them are validated by official domain experts. Examples include "quasar" in astronomy, "deoxyribonucleic acid" in chemistry, "Pipistrellus pipistrellus" (a common type of bat) in zoology. The rule is: Pipistrellus pipistrellus (X) counts as common bat (Y) in zoology (C).
23Specialised conventional meaning may apply to words, but also to phrases, sayings and to particular types of discourse like genres. For example, "My word is my bond" counts as the motto of the London Stock Exchange; the IMRaD format counts as the standard genre in scientific research. In many specialties, different types of texts like reports, memoranda, abstracts, research papers, etc., are highly codified forms of discourse, and often genres in their own right, following acceptance of constitutive rules by the related communities. I will now clarify how the approach accounts for the difference between specialised and general language.
24The difference between general and specialised language is a long-standing issue in SL studies. The answer derived from this paper's approach is that SLs are generated by constitutive rules whereas general language is not. Searle explains that language is the "primary social institution" because "it is constitutive of social reality", but that it is the only institution which is not created by Declaration (2010: 109–110). The sentence "Snow is white" needs no socially accepted constitutive rule to signify that snow is white: its meaning is sufficient (ibid.: 112). On the other hand, in constitutive rules, language assigns some new function to X that did not previously exist in X and the process creates some new form of social reality.Two examples illustrate the point in a specialised context. Let us consider sentences (1) and (2):
(1) Bears are dangerous animals.
(2) In stock market downturns, bears are dangerous animals.
25Sentence (1) needs no other information to mean that bears are dangerous animals. This is its bottom meaning in any context. Sentence (2) contains exactly the same declaration but a specialised context is added ("in stock market downturns"). This change in context triggers the constitutive rule mentioned above – "'bear' (X) counts as 'pessimistic investor' (Y) in stock market English (C)" – which is necessary to make sense of the message. In this new context, the meaning of the sentence is that when stock prices fall, "bears" often resort to "bear sales" (or "short-selling", a speculative operation to make money by selling shares you do not have, a move which often results in further price declines and may cause a crash). In sentence (2), just one word, ("bear"), is assigned specialised meaning, while the rest is plain English. Yet, that word introduces an overriding pragmatic context which is required by the conditions of satisfaction of the declaration. This context opens up to a whole world of specialised intentionality and presuppositions which contaminates the rest of the sentence and specialises the message, separating insiders – who share in this intentionality – from outsiders – who do not (for further detail, see Van der Yeught 2016: 55–56). Searle observes that institutions "are enabling structures that increase human power in many different ways" (2010: 105). Likewise, the new function assigned to "bear" has enabling effects that go beyond the general meaning of the word bear. It enables stock market operators to serve their domain's purpose; e.g. they may communicate professionally with other traders, analyse situations, draw conclusions and act accordingly. This enabling power is the main motivation behind the specialisation of language: it creates a social reality that helps specialists to improve the conditions of satisfaction of their beliefs and desires. Additional explanations on this point are given in section 3.
26To conclude on this question, the need of constitutive rules to make sense of messages is one of the key characteristics of specialised discourse. This does not imply that all discourse that requires constitutive rules to be understood is necessarily specialised: army passwords, and coded messages, which are also created by constitutive rules, are good counter examples. An additional necessary criterion to generate specialised language is that constitutive rules have to stem from specialised communities and serve the purpose of specialised domains.
27The approach to introduce the study of the diachronic dimension of SLs now needs to be fine-tuned and I am going to do so by focusing on the C context variable in constitutive rules.
28In constitutive rules, the context variable is always a crucial determinant of meaning, but all the more so in specialised contexts, even within the same language. Stock market operators trade "shares" in Britain, but "stocks" in the U.S. Yet, in British accounting, "stocks" are what their American colleagues call "inventory". Context also determines the degree of specialisation of terms. For example, the term "Omega 3" was mostly used by chemists in the 1930s when it was invented. At the time, the constitutive rule of meaning was strictly limited to domain specialists and the term was highly specialised. Nowadays, the meaning has not changed, but context C has dramatically widened since the 1980s and the term is now widely accepted in general English (and in many other languages). Similarly, "Oedipus complex" in psychoanalysis and "cloud" in computing have "despecialised" by a widening of context. I am now going to examine the relationships between the contextual variable and social reality.
29Social reality is made of the iteration of constitutive rules and interlocking institutional systems (Searle 1995: 80–81, 116):
[…] there are institutions within institutions. For example, the U.S. government, one institution, contains Congress, another institution, and Congress sets up government departments, other institutions. Business corporations set up subsidiary businesses. (Searle 2010: 92)
30As sets of constitutive rules, specialised communities contain other institutions such as research labs and professional groups; institutional objects such as insignia and uniforms; and institutional facts such as the fact that Mr Smith is a doctor or Mr Jones a lawyer. The latter specialists are also SL users and this status may be acknowledged by their communities through an implicit constitutive rule such as: "a competent SL user (X) counts as a specialist member (Y) in such specialised community (C)".
31According to Searle, constitutive rules provide people with what he calls "deontic powers". He defines them as "rights, duties, obligations, requirements, permissions, entitlements" (2010: 9). For example, the rule "Barack Obama (X) counts as the president (Y) in the U.S. (C)" entitled Obama to all sorts of powers and obligations related to his presidential functions. In the same way, being counted as a (competent) SL user provides people with similar deontic powers. The pompous or over-sophisticated use of technical jargon sometimes displayed by specialists to impress their audiences indicates that SL use is an effective status indicator (Searle 1995: 119–120). Conversely, the timidity of profanes in SL use highlights their lack of status in the specialised domain and community.
32The rights, permissions and entitlements of SL users include the capacity to serve the domain's purposes, the possibility to claim they are members of a specialised community because they master its language code, the recognition of their authority in the related specialisedness as displayed by their fluency in the language, the opportunity to further their own interests and ambitions in the specialised domain by using oral or written discourse, etc. On the other hand, SL users also have obligations and duties. They have to keep up with the evolution of the language and they generally face a professional and/or technical obligation of accuracy and relevance in using specialized terms. For example, doctors' diagnoses, judges' verdicts, auditors' recommendations and scholars' research papers require the careful application of technical terms and the strict observation of discourse deontology. Indeed, professional malpractice may concern the faulty use of specialised language. Many specialist communities and domains have their own deontology (e.g. lawyers, doctors, scientists…) which are often couched in specialised discourse: e.g. the Hippocratic Oath illustrates doctors' general deontic powers and the correct use of medical English falls under its obligations. When they study SLs, learners not only strive to achieve linguistic competence, they also aim to acquire the deontic powers associated with SL use. The acquisition of status in SL learning should also be taken into account by SL teaching.
33For all these reasons, the deontic powers created by the constitutive rules related to SL use generate complex interlocking institutional connections which insert SLs into the contextual fabric of social reality. As a result, SLs are structurally immersed in a human world of causes and consequences, rights and obligations, opportunities and duties. Without the (C) variable, constitutive rules do not operate, and since (C) comprises time, diachrony is constitutive of SL ontology. In empirical terms:
34men are born, live and die in the dimension of time, their social world's backdrop is necessarily diachronic and the temporal dimension of SLs cannot be ignored.
35I now have to refine the notion of diachronic dimension and sort out several types of diachronic determinants. In SLs, at least two main levels of diachronic constraints can be distinguished: (1) one that bears on the constitutive rules themselves; and (2) one that stems from the context (C) variable of the rules.
36In general terms, the diachronic dimension of all constitutive rules is empirically obvious, since rules appear and disappear in human history. There was a time when the institution of money did not exist and a time when it emerged and developed; a time when computing did not exist and now. Searle explains that the emergence of institutions is sometimes extremely gradual so that no one knows exactly when constitutive rules initially came into action (1995: 21–22; 2010: 94–95). Conversely, the origins of institutions may also be sharply situated in history especially when they result from datable declarative speech acts (e.g. when a war is declared or a meeting adjourned).
37Similarly, the specialisation of language may be extremely gradual and difficult to date – in particular when it mainly serves oral communication – or easy to position in history. For example, we know that the financial meaning of "bear" roughly dates from the end of the 17th century in England, but that the meaning of "cloud" in computing most probably appeared in 1997 (Lacaze 2013: 56). The diachronic dimension of constitutive rules thus informs us on the general history of SLs. We know whether terms, phrases or genres are old or new, still active or obsolete.
38As regards the context (C) variable in constitutive rules, it concerns both the perimeter where a rule applies – let's call this rule context the "macro-context" – and the context of the actual utterance which puts the rule into effect – let's call this utterance context the "micro-context". In specialised language, these two contexts have to coincide so that discourse can make sense. In theory, the macro-context may embrace an infinity of likely spatial and temporal components such as place, social circumstances, historical events, weather conditions, etc.; but in specialised language, an overriding contextual environment is the specialisedness itself or subparts of it. For example, in the macro-context of stock market English, subcontexts may include the 1929 Great Crash, stock market indices, share analysis, trading regulations, chartism, etc. Example (2) above makes sense in the subcontext of market evolutions within the macro-context of stock market English. Still, macro-contexts always contain, explicitly or implicitly, a temporal dimension which derives from the fact that men's lives develop in space and time.
39As far as the utterance micro-context is concerned, it also includes, explicitly or implicitly, a temporal dimension, since men's sayings occur in space and time. In specialised contexts, these space and time conditions generally have specialised characteristics deriving from the fact that specialised speech acts ordinarily serve domain purposes where and when needed.
40Because the ultimate purpose of studying SLs is to teach them, the following section examines two useful tools that help to master SL contextual constraints: specialised dictionaries and specialised encyclopaedic knowledge.
41In previous publications, I proposed that same-language specialised dictionaries are helpful indicators of the emergence and evolution of SLs (Van der Yeught 2012: 18–19, 42–44; 2016: 54). Even very old dictionaries feature data indicating publication dates which are precious for the historical knowledge of SLs. Moreover, in the context of this paper, I can give an additional reason for the usefulness of specialised dictionaries. They are in fact compendia of the constitutive rules that produce SLs. Each entry can be deciphered as an underlying X-counts-as-Y-in-C rule, with C standing as the specialised domain itself, or subparts of it. As such, specialised dictionaries achieve the codification process of constitutive rules (Searle 1995: 87–90) and give them a durable written form. Thus, they contribute to the creation and maintenance of specialised meaning in language over long periods of time (Searle 2010: 115–116; Charpy 2011; Van der Yeught 2012: 19, 42–44).
42Still, following explanations given in section 2.5.2., specialised dictionaries only offer rule-related macro-context information. For example, geographic or national contexts of use may be specified, as well as historical remarks about the emergence or obsolescence of terms. In order to make sense of specialised discourse, a connecting mechanism between macro- and micro-contexts has to be put into action. The specific knowledge competence that helps to achieve that connection is now examined.
43Mastering SLs means using them successfully to serve domain purposes. This generally implies the smooth application of their constitutive rules. Learners are taught to achieve this competence as naturally as possible, i.e. as casually as when people use money while being unaware of the rules that make money a social reality (Searle 1995: 47; 2010: 107). However, SL teachers need to know much more than their students. Besides being competent users of the language, they have to master as many of its constitutive rules as they can in order to interpret messages and teach them properly. In earlier research (Van der Yeught 2016: 56–57), I suggested that this knowledge could be called "specialised encyclopaedic knowledge", following Umberto Eco's general definition of encyclopaedic knowledge:
In the interpretive process, encyclopaedic knowledge operates as a set of instructions that properly insert textual elements in their relevant contexts and achieve the correct disambiguation of terms. (1986: 68)
44In the case of SLs, the appropriate set of instructions technically consists in relating the relevant constitutive rule triggered by the utterance and, in particular, in making sure that the rule macro-context and the utterance micro-context coincide. For example, in sentence (2), the specialised encyclopaedia (SE) of stock market English identifies "stock market downturns" as a micro-contextual subpart of the stock market domain and inserts "bear" in the constitutive rule "'bear' (X) counts as 'pessimistic investor' (Y) in stock market English (macro-context C)". It observes that both "bears" and the micro- and macro-contexts coincide in a felicitous way to make sense of the word "bear" in both contexts. So, SE instructions eliminate the general meaning "bear-plantigrade" from the sentence and applies the Y specialising function to "bear" so as to interpret the utterance correctly as: "In stock market downturns, pessimistic investors (and likely short-sellers; see section 2.2.) are dangerous animals". In imaginary sentence (2b) "In stock market downturns, lions are dangerous animals", the SE can find no constitutive rule assigning specialised meaning to "lion" in financial English. So "lion" in the micro-context finds no matching "lion" in the macro-context and the mechanism of instructions does not operate. Sentence (2b) makes no sense in stock market English, nor in general English for that matter.
45According to Eco, encyclopaedic knowledge is not a systematic accumulation of knowledge as can be found in ordinary encyclopaedias. It is the potential and infinite capacity to interpret messages by disambiguating terms according to their relevant contexts. The same applies to SEs. It is therefore impossible to build exhaustive compendia of specialised interpretive processes, but attempts to chart some SL fields have been undertaken in financial English (Van der Yeught 2012) and English for economics (Resche 2013). Naturally, since encyclopaedic knowledge consists in matching specialised macro- and micro-contexts, they greatly benefit from specialised dictionaries. In particular, the aptly named "encyclopaedic" dictionaries offer valuable support to SEs since their purpose is to be mass providers of macro-contexts and subcontexts. Obviously, SL learners have to acquire as much specialised encyclopaedic knowledge as they can to achieve a good grasp of the language; the following section explains why mastering that key competence is primarily the mission of SL teachers.
46Depending on domains, SEs may variously overlap with specialised cultures and the two notions may easily be confused. Nevertheless, I would argue that, although they definitely cross-fertilise each other, they are analytically fairly distinct. Even in specialised contexts, culture embraces wider components than SEs, such as behaviour, attitude, mindset, norms, values, heroes, rituals, especially if one retains Hofstede's proposition that "culture is collective programming of the mind" (2001: 1). On the other hand, SEs are essentially linguistic and interpretive, and because interpretation involves context, SEs are largely diachrony-based. This point has major consequences for SL pedagogy.
47Several ESP authors have highlighted the loss of pedagogical authority when teachers are faced with specialist knowledge that is better mastered by their students.
One of the most important features of ESP in relation to General English is that the status of English changes from being a subject in its own right to a service industry for other specialisms. In many cases this leads to a lowering of status for the teacher. (Hutchinson & Waters 1987: 164. See also Strevens 1988: 9; Dudley-Evans & St John 1998: 4, 188)
48They conclude that teachers have to accept being corrected by learners ("Allow students to put you right" [Strevens 1988: 9]) and that domain specialists (also called subject specialists, field specialists, content specialists, subject teachers…) should be called in case of difficulty. I think they have little faith in the added value that properly SE-trained teachers can bring into SL learning. Admittedly, students may successfully correct teachers on domain knowledge, and domain specialists like lawyers and engineers can make wonderful teachers. Still, most of them are not linguists and show more interest in the present and in the future than in the past. Their jobs do not make them aware of the constitutive rules that create SLs and they do not necessarily have a deep knowledge of the history of their domains, communities and languages.
49On the other hand, SE knowledge is the competence par excellence of SL teachers. In essence, it is the capacity to connect the macro-contexts of SL constitutive rules to the micro-contexts of specialised discourse to make sense of the latter. Under the simplicity of this programme lies an infinity of interpretive situations, strategies and outcomes. They require an equal infinity of linguistic and contextual domain knowledge which constitute SEs. SE knowledge is the capacity to disentangle the complex contextual mix of language, domains and social reality. It provides teachers with historical insight into the thickness and subtleties of SLs, but it does not necessarily turn them into ivory tower erudites as is sometimes feared. On the contrary, it offers depths of experience from which they can draw to meet their students' needs. Finally, even if SE knowledge has no limits, large swathes of it may be accumulated, published in SL descriptions and passed on to new generations of teachers as a form of Popperian World 3 objective knowledge. SE competence is no lowering factor of teacher status; quite the contrary.
50To illustrate this point, I give the final word to John Swales in a 1985 quotation which still rings particularly true today, especially in the context of this paper:
[D]espite 20 years' work in ESP and despite the large number of description and discussions of its theory and practice, ESP practitioners in my experience tend to ignore the past. ESP practitioners are concerned with the 'here and now' of their own working situation […] At this point, it may be objected that such historical information is of little value to the hard-pressed ESP practitioner. However, I would answer this objection by suggesting that background knowledge is useful, perhaps even necessary, if we are to distinguish local solutions from general conceptual developments. (1985 : 2-3)
51In a prescient way, Swales expressed genuine diachronic sensitivity. He realised that ESP and historical information are not enemies, and that, on the contrary, the past may be useful to ESP practitioners. In the context of this paper, I would simply replace his "background knowledge" by "specialised encyclopaedic knowledge", and his "general conceptual developments" by the intentional approach to SLs.
52While reading these lines, some colleagues may have the feeling they have seen some of these explanations before. Several authors have already highlighted the institutional and conventional nature of specialised languages and analysed them as social constructs. For example, Vijay K. Bhatia (2004) elaborates on the subject, notably in chapter 7 (185–188).
All discourse forms, especially those used in institutionalized contexts, are socially constructed and negotiated. At the very heart of most frameworks for the analysis of discourse, especially as genre, is the belief that there is nothing like a universal form of discourse for structuring knowledge. There can only be a 'consensus or an agreement' (Bruffee 1986: 777) among the members of specific disciplinary communities to express their concerns in specific discursive forms. (ibid.: 185)
Genres are products of an understanding or a prior knowledge of disciplinary or institutional conventions, which are responsible for regulating generic constructs, giving them an identity and internal ordering (ibid.: 186–187)
53Bhatia's conceptual apparatus (institution, social construct, convention, agreement…) is strikingly similar to the one deployed in this paper. Am I merely repeating what Bhatia has argued before? Not quite, and for two reasons.
54The first comes from the fact that Bhatia's main focus is on language (here, professional and academic genres) whereas my primary concern is to account for the SL phenomenon by relating specialisedness to language. In Bhatia's developments, specialisedness only appears in the background of argumentation, as a means to qualify genres and under a large variety of differing descriptions: "discipline", "professional conversations and practices", "community's body of knowledge", "disciplinary cultures", "disciplinary knowledge", etc. (ibid.: 185–204). These features suggest that in Bhatia's genre theory, "specialisedness" has not been theorised as a central operative concept, namely as the essential originator of the specialisation of language (or of genres). Specialisedness is merely presented in descriptive and contextual terms while language occupies centre stage. I think that this position is flawed from a theoretical point of view because it misplaces cause and effect. In my view, specialisedness occupies centre stage and operates as the causal factor that generates SLs.
55The reason for this is that language is not intentional in itself; it is part of the skills and abilities that form the "background" of intentional states presented above in section 1.3. (Searle 1995: 129–130). Medicine generated medical English because SLs serve domains' purposes just like accounting serves banking or physics serves astronomy. These purposes derive from the domains' intentionalities, not from language. Yet, just like Bhatia, most ESP authors see things the other way around. They believe that the function of SLs is to enable communication. As Ken Hyland puts it: "ESP itself steadfastly concerns itself with communication" (Hyland 2013: 96). In my view, SLs cannot have purely communicative functions because specialised constitutive rules create new meaning in discourse that is beyond general communication. In other words, I think it is impossible to propose a theory of SLs without developing a theory of specialisedness first.
56The epistemological error of giving priority to language and downplaying specialisedness largely explains why the relationships between disciplinary knowledge and language remain an unresolved issue for Bhatia and ESP colleagues:
[…] we still have little understanding of the relationships between language as communication and language as vehicle for the expression of disciplinary knowldege. ESP practitioners still get nervous about having to deal with disciplinary knowldege as part of their language training. Although there is some awareness of the need to integrate language training with the communication of disciplinary knowledge, in practice it is still considered a difficult task. (ibid.: 204)
57Unsurprisingly, he then continues by suggesting calling all sorts of "domain specialists" to the rescue of language teachers:
In order to move in that direction, the first step will be to bring several stakeholders together, which include not only language teachers and learners, and subject teachers from the academy, but also professionals, employers and practitioners from the workplace. (ibid.: 204)
58Some ten years later, the Handbook admitted that the same subject still poses problems to ESP practitioners: "[o]ne of the most vexing issues for ESP praxis is the need for at least some specialist knowledge". (Belcher 2013: 545) The enduring character of the problem does not result from some mysterious conundrum lying beneath the relationship between specialisedness and language. It comes from the bias of ESP linguists that prevents them from analysing SL ontology correctly: namely by putting language considerations in second place and acknowledging that language specialisation derives from specialisedness. In theoretical terms, they assign some intentionality to the background capacities of language while ignoring the causal power of specialised intentionality. They reverse the real order of priorities and so cannot account for the relationships between language and specialisedness. Searle helps us to get our priorities right:
[T]he philosophy of language is a branch of the philosophy of the mind. (1983: vii)
Language is derived from Intentionality and not conversely.The direction of pedagogy is to explain Intentionality in terms of language; the direction of logical analysis is to explain language in terms of Intentionality. (1983: 5)
The intentionality of language has to be explained in terms of the intentionality of the mind and not conversely. [...] The meaning of language is derived intentionality and it has to be derived from the original intentionality of the mind. (2004: 113)
59The second reason lies in the fact that in Bhatia's presentation, the institutional character of genres is isolated from other institutional facts. So, we do not know exactly what sort of institutions genres are if compared with other ones, and which characteristics they share with those. While I broadly agree with Bhatia's views, I find in Searle's constitutive rule an explanatory mechanism that fully clarifies the conventional nature of all institutions. The intentional approach to SLs puts specialised phenomena (intentionality, communities, symbols, language…) into perspective alongside myriads of other institutions that constitute social reality. In that holistic perception, the relationship between specialisedness and language is not mysterious at all. It is similar to millions of other relationships that connect elements of human life in an ascending order of complexity: from elementary mental states to speech acts, to communities, to basic institutional facts, to sophisticated institutions, and finally to "the structure of human civilization", the subtitle of Searle's 2010 book. The theory of intentionality seamlessly explains how brute facts can be endowed with symbolic functions and evolve into complex social constructions. It enables us to make sense of specialised phenomena as parts of the ontology of social reality.
60For these two reasons, this paper offers an epistemological programme which is very different from Bhatia's although both apparently resort to broadly similar notional tools. I do not disagree with Bhatia's views, notably on the institutional character of SLs, but my key assumptions are diametrically opposed and their outcomes are very different.
61This paper examines the diachronic dimension of SLs as part of their social ontology. It has recourse to Searle's theory of intentionality to account for the nature of SLs as enduring social phenomena. The application of the intentional framework to SL studies progresses through gradual stages of analysis. The process of specialising is first identified as an individual intentional state of the mind made of beliefs and desires looking for their conditions of satisfaction. Specialised individual intentionality may turn collective and form specialised communities that act to serve their professional and/or disciplinary purposes. To that effect, they use accepted "X-counts-as-Y-in-C" constitutive rules to create conventional forms of social reality that Searle calls institutions: professional bodies, research units, statuses, titles, symbols… These also include SLs that are created by rules that assign new meaning to general words, that coin new terms or assign a particular status to types of discourse such as genres. In the process, the C variable indicates context which always contains diachrony due to the temporal nature of human lives and activities. Differing types of contextual information are then distinguished depending on their positions in the rules (macro-context) or in the utterances or discourse (micro-context). Two tools are recommended to make the most of contextual information in SL use. Specialised dictionaries list the constitutive rules that are accepted by specialised communities and provide macro-contexts; and specialised encyclopaedic knowledge implements the disambiguation and interpretation of specialised discourse. The discussion section insists on the order of priorities in analysing SLs, namely that language specialisation results from specialisedness and not the other way around. It also underlines that the intentional approach proposes a thoroughly holistic analytical perspective since it is built on connections involving the mind, language, institutions, history and communities as components of social ontology. In essence, this holistic perspective is probably similar to the views expressed by Jean-Jacques Lecercle in his 2001 plenary lecture on SLs when he remarked:
1 My translation
[…] specialised languages imply the mediation of history and society, as any external point of view on language also implies […]. If specialised languages exist together with a specific field of study, it is because linguistic phenomena have never been cut off from historical, cultural and social mediation. In other words, they cannot possibly be isolated from institutions, rituals and practices; taking this risk would be extremely simplistic and hazardous. (Lecercle 2001: 7)1
62More than fifteen years on, this position is still uncommon. This paper is also meant as a tentative support to its pioneering relevance in SL studies.
Bhatia, Vijay K. 2004. Worlds of Written Discourse. London: Continuum.
Belcher, Diane. 2013. "The future of ESP Research: Resources for access and choice". In Paltridge, B. & S. Starfield (Eds.), The Handbook of English for Specific Purposes (pp. 535–554). Boston: Wiley-Blackwell.
Charpy, Jean-Pierre. 2011. "Les premiers dictionnaires médicaux en langue anglaise : glissements diachroniques du spécialisé au non spécialisé". ASp 59, pp. 25–42.
Dudley-Evans, Tony et Maggie Jo St John. 1998. Developments in English for Specific Purposes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eco, Umberto. 1986. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press/Midland Book.
Hofstede, Geert. 2001. Culture's Consequences. Thousand Oaks, CA/London: Sage Publications.
Hutchinson, T. & Waters, A. 1987. English for Specific Purposes: A learning-centred approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hyland, Ken. 2013. "ESP and writing". In Paltridge, B. & S. Starfield (Eds.), The Handbook of English for Specific Purposes (95-113). Boston: Wiley-Blackwell.
Lacaze, Grégoire. 2013. "Variations lexicologiques dans les traductions de l'expression cloud computing dans le journal Le Monde : vers une recherche de transparence". ASp 63, pp. 55–73.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. 1999. Interpretation as Pragmatics. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan/Palgrave.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. 2001. "Médiation et agencement : une poétique de la langue de spécialité". ASp 31-33, pp. 1–17.
Paltridge, Brian & Sue Starfield (eds.). 2013. The Handbook of English for Specific Purposes. Boston: Wiley-Blackwell.
Petit, Michel. 2010. "Le discours spécialisé et le spécialisé du discours : repères pour l'analyse du discours en anglais de spécialité". E-rea. Retrieved from <http://erea.revues.org/1400> on 18th September 2017.
Popper, Karl R. 1994 [1972]. Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
Popper, Karl R. 1978. Three Worlds: The Tanner Lecture on Human Values. University of Michigan, 7th April. Retrieved from <http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/p/popper80.pdf> on 18th September 2017.
Resche, Catherine. 2013. Economic Terms and Beyond: Capitalising on the Wealth of Notions. Bern: Peter Lang, Linguistic Insights 176.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 2012 [1916]. Cours de linguistique générale.
https://www.fichier-pdf.fr/2012/12/16/saussure-ferdinand-cours-de-linguistique-generale/
Searle, John R. 1983. Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of the mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, John. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. London: Allen Lane Penguin.
Searle, John R. 2004. Mind: A Brief Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Searle, John. 2010. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Strevens, Peter. 1988. "ESP after twenty years: A reappraisal". In M. L. Tickoo (ed.), ESP: State of the art (pp. 1–13). Anthology, Series 21. Singapore: SEAMEO Regional Language Centre.
Swales, John M. 1985. "ESP comes of age? – 21 years after 'Some measurable characteristics of modern scientific prose". In Perrin, Michel (ed.), Pratiques d'aujourd'hui et besoins de demain, Porceedings of the 4th European symposium on specialised languages, Université Bordeaux II, 29 August-2 September 1983, pp. 1–19.
Van der Yeught, Michel. 2012. L'anglais de la bourse et de la finance : description et recherche. Paris: Ophrys.
Van der Yeught, Michel. 2016. "A proposal to establish epistemological foundations for the study of specialised languages". ASp 69, pp. 41–63.
Williams, Christopher. 2014. "The future of ESP studies: building on success, exploring new paths, avoiding pitfalls". ASp 66, pp. 137–150.
Michel VAN DER YEUGHT, « Studying the diachronic dimension of specialised languages through an intentional approach to their social ontology », Textes et contextes [Online], 13.2 | 2018, Online since 19 June 2019, connection on 31 January 2023. URL : http://preo.u-bourgogne.fr/textesetcontextes/index.php?id=2329
Aix-Marseille Université, LERMA, Aix-en-Provence – michel.vanderyeught [at] univ-amu.fr


text:
New Zealand: Will the Kiwi fly?
New Zealand is a well-balanced side and it all hinges on how it acclimatises to Indian conditions.
Praveen Sudevan
Martin Guptill... exciting batsman. - GETTY IMAGES
Colin Munro will be one of the key explosives in the Black Caps' arsenal. - Getty Images
With New Zealand needing 45 runs off one ball, Glenn McGrath and his skipper Ricky Ponting were curiously in the middle of a discussion with umpire Billy Bowden. Seconds later, McGrath, instead of his customary long run-up, took just two-three steps away from the crease and pretended to bowl an underarm delivery, making a snarky reference to the infamous Trevor Chappell incident. The wicketkeeper, Adam Gilchrist, couldn't stop laughing. Neither could the 30,000 (approx) gathered at Eden Park, Auckland. Umpire Bowden promptly showed a red card to McGrath.
It was that kind of a cricket match.
"I think it is difficult to play seriously," said Ponting after his team's win. But he added: "If it does become an international game then I'm sure the novelty won't be there all the time."
With that, the first Twenty20 International was born in New Zealand.
As Punter betted, a decade and five T20 World Cups later, T20, indeed, has lost its novelty. But New Zealand would want to claim the biggest prize of the format that was born in its backyard.
New Zealand's 2016 World T20 campaign begins in Nagpur with a battle against the host, India. With Australia and former champion Pakistan also in the same group, along with a qualifier (yet to be announced), the Kiwis will have to be at their best from the beginning to get to the semis, a stage where they last reached in 2007.
New Zealand last met India in a World T20 match in 2007, which it won. Ever since, the sides have played three T20I matches with New Zealand winning every time. However, India seems to get a performance boost when it plays a global event cheered by its countryfolk. Also, the team has won seven of its last eight T20Is (as on February 29).
Against its trans-Tasman neighbour, Australia, New Zealand has a lone win against four losses. But the last time the two sides met in a T20I was in 2010. Hence, it is tough to gauge how the match will play out when the sides meet in Dharamsala.
The Black Caps beat Pakistan 2-1 in a three-match T20I series at home in January. But the conditions will be vastly different in this part of the world and New Zealand's prospects in the tournament will also hinge on how well it acclimatises.
"With the Indian conditions in mind, the plan has always been to take three front-line spinners and all three bring something different," said New Zealand coach Mike Hesson while unveiling the squad.
Out of the three spinners — Ish Sodhi, Nathan McCullum and Mitchell Santner — Sodhi and Santner have a combined experience of 10 T20Is and both have never played in the sub-continent. The 35-year-old McCullum, meanwhile, has played in the IPL and will have a tip or two for his juniors in the spin department.
"It's great to have Nathan available again and his experience in the foreign conditions will be invaluable. Both he and Mitch Santner have the ability to bowl in the first six overs, which gives Kane (Williamson) a number of options to work with," said Hesson.
Tim Southee, Trent Boult, Adam Milne and Mitchell McClenaghan make a formidable pace quartet, but none has been particularly impressive in Indian conditions.
The batting department has skipper Kane Williamson, Ross Taylor and Martin Guptill, who has scored the most in T20Is after Brendon McCullum (who New Zealand will miss the most). Henry Nicholls, Grant Elliott, Corey Anderson and Colin Munro are also not known to treat the cricket ball with gentle care while they bat.
Fielding is a skill that's inherent in New Zealand's cricketers and all the 'ones' and 'twos' they save will sum up to a big difference in tight games.
The team:
Kane Williamson (captain), Martin Guptill, Ross Taylor, Henry Nicholls, Grant Elliott, Corey Anderson, Colin Munro, Luke Ronchi (wicketkeeper), Mitchell Santner, Nathan McCullum, Tim Southee, Trent Boult, Mitchell McClenaghan, Adam Milne and Ish Sodhi.
Players with punch:
Martin Guptill: His last five T20I scores: 42, 87 (not out), 2, 63, 58. His highest T20I score: 101. He is T20I's highest run-getter among active players. He has scored a fifty off 15 balls in T20s. Oh, also, he hit 237 in an ODI last year. The numbers say that Martin Guptill will be one of the key players to watch out across all teams; not just New Zealand.
Colin Munro: The 28-year-old Durban-born Munro will be one of the key explosives in the Black Caps' arsenal. Munro finished as the highest run-getter in New Zealand's domestic T20 tournament, scoring 366 in 10 innings with a strike rate of over 175. Afterwards, he smashed a 14-ball fifty against Sri Lanka in Auckland.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Why Courts Should Repeal EPA's 'Carbon Pollution' Standard (and why you should care)
by Marlo Lewis on November 19, 2012
Note: A nearly identical version of this column appeared last week in Forbes Online. I am reposting it here with many additional hyperlinks so that readers may more easily access the evidence supporting my conclusions.
The November 2012 elections ensure that President Obama's war on coal will continue for at least two more years. The administration's preferred M.O. has been for the EPA to 'enact' anti-coal policies that Congress would reject if such measures were introduced as legislation and put to a vote. Had Gov. Romney won the presidential race and the GOP gained control of the Senate, affordable energy advocates could now go on offense and pursue a legislative strategy to roll back various EPA global warming regulations, air pollution regulations, and restrictions on mountaintop mining. But Romney lost and Democrats gained two Senate seats.
Consequently, defenders of free-market energy are stuck playing defense and their main weapon now is litigation. This is a hard slog because courts usually defer to agency interpretations of the statutes they administer. But sometimes petitioners win. In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals struck down the EPA's Cross State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR), a regulation chiefly targeting coal-fired power plants. The Court found that the CSAPR exceeded the agency's statutory authority. Similarly, in March, the Court ruled that the EPA exceeded its authority when it revoked a Clean Water Act permit for Arch Coal's Spruce Mine No. 1 in Logan County, West Virginia.
A key litigation target in 2013 is EPA's proposal to establish greenhouse gas (GHG) "new source performance standards" (NSPS) for power plants. This so-called carbon pollution standard is not based on policy-neutral health or scientific criteria. Rather, the EPA contrived the standard so that commercially-viable coal plants cannot meet it. The rule effectively bans investment in new coal generation.
We Can Win This One
Prospects for overturning the rule are good for three main reasons. [click to continue…]
EPA's Carbon Pollution Standard — One Step Closer to Policy Disaster
Today (June 25th) is the deadline for submitting comments on the EPA's proposed Carbon Pollution Standard Rule, which will establish first-ever New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil-fuel electric generating units.
The proposed standard is 1,000 lbs of CO2 per megawatt hour (MWh). The EPA claims that 95% of all new natural gas combined cycle power plants can meet the standard — maybe, maybe not. One thing is clear — no conventional coal power plant can meet the standard. Even today's most efficient coal power plants emit 1,800 lbs CO2/MWh on average.
A coal power plant equipped with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology could meet the standard, but the EPA acknowledges that CCS is prohibitive, raising the cost of generating electricity by as much as 80%.
So what the proposal is really telling the electric utility industry is this: If you want to build a new coal-fired power plant, you'll have to build a natural gas combined cycle plant instead. Not surprising given President Obama's longstanding ambition to "bankrupt" anyone who builds a new coal power plant.
In a comment letter submitted today on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, I recommend that the EPA withdraw the proposed regulation for the following reasons: [click to continue…]
EPA's "Carbon Pollution" Standard for Power Plants: Four Ways Weird
by Marlo Lewis on March 28, 2012
Yesterday, EPA proposed its first-ever "carbon pollution standard rule" for power plants. The rule would establish a new source performance standard (NSPS) for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil-fuel electric generating units (EGUs). The proposed standard is an emission rate of 1,000 lbs CO2 per megawatt hour. About 95% of all natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) power plants already meet the standard (p. 115). No existing coal power plants do. Even today's most efficient coal plants emit, on average, 1,800 lbs CO2/MWh (p. 134). EPA is effectively banning investment in new coal electric generation.
Like the rest of EPA's greenhouse agenda, the proposed rule is an affront to the Constitution's separation of powers. Congress never voted to prohibit the construction of new coal power plants. Indeed, Congress declined to pass less restrictive limits on coal electric generation when Senate leaders pulled the plug on cap-and-trade. Congress should reassert its constitutional authority, overturn the rule, and rein in this rogue agency. [click to continue…]
Fantasizing about a low-carbon future
by Myron Ebell on September 15, 2009
I attended an excellent briefing today on "Creating a low-carbon future" by Michael Howard of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). The event was hosted by the U. S. Energy Association and its executive director, Barry Worthington. EPRI has done a lot of work on how the electricity sector could meet the greenhouse gas emissions target in the Waxman-Markey energy-rationing bill. That target is economy-wide emissions 83% below 2005 levels by 2050.
Howard said that EPRI wanted to identify a strategy by which the electric sector could be de-carbonized affordably. Here's the background and how EPRI would do it:
The decisions made today and in the next few years will shape electric generation in 2050, so we have to make the right decisions starting now. Electricity generation accounts for about one-third of the 2005 U. S. total of six billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Electric rates in constant dollars have been remarkably flat for the past forty years.
EPRI has identified two paths to meeting the 83% reduction target. The first is by deploying a full portfolio of energy sources. A full portfolio would most notably include expanded nuclear power and widespread carbon capture and storage for coal and natural gas. The second is by deploying a limited portfolio of sources that would exclude nuclear and carbon capture and storage.
What is most apparent in EPRI's modeling is that the limited portfolio approach would end the use of coal completely by 2030. Renewables would go up, but the biggest increases would be in the use of natural gas. The result is that electricity would become very expensive, with rates tripling by 2050 in constant dollars. In addition, we would be forced to use much less electricity in order to meet the emissions reduction targets.
The full portfolio scenario projects that most of the cuts would be made by building new nuclear power plants and new coal plants that capture and store 90% of the carbon dioxide emissions produced. Natural gas use would go down considerably. EPRI projects that electric rates would not quite double by 2050 were the full portfolio approach pursued. Enforced reductions in use would only be about half as severe under the full portfolio compared to the limited portfolio.
The full portfolio scenario sounds very nice, but it's fantasy. It has almost nothing to do with the real world. What EPRI (understandably) does not include in their models are the increasing political, regulatory, and legal obstacles to building new power plants. Even if carbon capture and storage technology becomes commercially viable by 2020 (which is highly unlikely), it will take decades to permit and build more than a handful of coal plants that capture the carbon dioxide, the pipelines to transport it, and the underground pockets to store it. Permitting delays will put pipeline siting and construction years behind schedule. Lawsuits will be filed claiming that pressurized CO2 is too dangerous to be allowed. Similarly, a few new nuclear power plants may be built in the next twenty years, but building a lot of new plants will take decades to overcome the permitting obstructions.
These obstacles do not apply only to coal and nuclear plants. Proposed wind and solar energy projects are being blocked and delayed all around the country. Bobby Kennedy, jnr., is leading the campaign to block a big wind farm off Cape Cod, where his family own valuable, scenic vacation property. At the same time, Kennedy has lashed out at local environmental pressure groups at the other end of the country that are trying to block a big solar energy development in the Mojave Desert that he has invested in. Even if both projects eventually get built, they are being delayed for years. This is a problem that the environmental pressure groups have helped to create and don't want to admit exists. It means that the limited portfolio approach modeled by EPRI is fantasy, too.
One of the problems with relying on EPRI's or any of the economic models to predict the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions is that they assume that political decisions will be made in a rational, orderly way that will allow economic decisions to be made in an efficient way. The Waxman-Markey energy rationing bill (H. R. 2454) is just the latest disproof of this assumption. The bill creates a cap-and-trade program to reduce emissions and then adds several hundred other programs to pay off individual special interests. Nearly all these programs get in the way of the efficient working of cap-and-trade. They will raise the costs of making mandatory reductions beyond what any model can predict.


Sony Interactive Entertainment, has recently an updated classic miniature version of the first PlayStation console, This console is a modern take on the classic retro gaming system. This version will include 20 retro video games such as the epic 3D fighting game Tekken 3, and the extrodinary Japanese Role-Playing Game, Final Fantasy VII and many more exciting games in the near future. The PlayStation Classic will be released on December 3rd, The day that the original PlayStation launched in 1994.
This new modern smaller version will be 45% smaller than the first PlayStation gaming system, and as you can see in the video, it captures the look of the system is based on, including its controllers.
The mini version will come with 20 retro titles, including Final Fantasy VII and Tekken 3.
The PlayStation Classic is around half the size of the original and is due to launch on 3 December.
One expert said nostalgia was driving interest in retro consoles, which offer a means of making historical video games more accessible.
The console is the first of Sony's video game machines to be given this kind of compact makeover. Nintendo has previously made mini versions of its NES and SNES consoles, which also included a set of pre-loaded classic games.
Among other titles to be featured on Sony's new system are Ridge Racer Type 4, the role-playing game Wild Arms and first-person platformer Jumping Flash.
The device will retail for £89.99. As well as the mini console, a HDMI cable for connecting to a TV and two wired controllers will be included.
The design of the console is faithful to the original – even featuring a disk eject button, despite the lack of an actual disk reader. Instead, pressing the button will swap the game being played for another.
The release date will mark exactly 24 years since the launch of the first PlayStation, which went on sale in Japan on 3 December 1994. It was launched in the UK the following September.
Sony Interactive Entertainment, re-introducing the PlayStation to the global market is a game changer, in this modern technological world we are living in, gaming has truly become revolutionary with the use of social media integration, Interactive live streaming services such as Twitch,we are seventh generation, PS VR, Nintendo Switch. This retro smaller version can be compared with the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and SEGA Genesis.


Although the host team has the advantage of his own home, Düsseldorf is starting with second chance at the bookmakers, as expected, following a stronger but more experienced opponent.
The hosts of this defeat do not have a great start to the championship, given that in the two stages so far they have accumulated only two points, in the first stage losing with Augsburg on their own ground, in a game ended 1-2 , followed by a draw with RB Leipzig, away.
Fink, Hoffman and Contento will be missing from Fortuna Dusseldorf, coach Friedhelm Funkel can not count on the injuries.
It is one of Germany's top teams, which is seen as the favorite of bookmakers, which does not surprise anyone, being a better team, having the necessary resources to get a positive result, even if it plays on the move.
The guests of this fight started their left in the new edition of the championship, in the first stage losing 3-1 on the field of the Bayern Munich champion, but managed to impose the same score on their own in front of the Freiburg.
Julian Nagelsmann's band prepares for their debut in the Champions League, on Wednesday to make their trip to Ukraine, with Sahtior Donetsk as its opponent.
Guests have batch problems, not having Hubner, Amiri, Geiger, Rupp, Demirbay, Bicakcic, Adams and Akpoguma, all being injured.


text:
Follow LOVEBSCOTT
B. Scott
Tiffany Haddish Hints She Could Get Pregnant While Quarantining with Common
April 07, 2020 6:33 PM PST
Tiffany Haddish and Common are no longer hiding their relationship while being holed up in their home amid the coronavirus crisis. Confirming the dating rumors and that they are quarantining together, the comedienne appeared during her boyfriend's video call with Cedric The Entertainer.
The Grammy Award-winning artist was catching up with the comedian/actor when the "Girls' Trip" star, who appeared to hold the camera for Common, popped up in the screen. Cedric jokingly exclaimed, "This is the exclusive! I got the exclusive!"
Tiffany later revealed that she couldn't get her birth control shot during the self-isolation. "And because we've been on quarantine I can't get my depo shot, so let's see what happens!" she told Cedric, hinting that a quarantine baby is possibly on the way.
The 40-year-old actress/comedienne, who went makeup free in the video, then jokingly made a shush gesture before twerking for the camera, prompting Cedric to burst into laughter.
Tiffany previously let it slip that she and Common are living together when she joined in DJ D-Nice's dance party on Instagram Live in March. Jumping in the comments, she wrote, "Oh s**t Common about to be put to sleep. With next Auntie move I got."
Tiffany and Common have been rumored dating since last December, following the latter's split from Angela Rye. The two reportedly hung out in New York City on multiple occasions. Common was also seen among the attendees at the "Night School" star's intimate birthday celebration with her family and friends. Fueling the romance rumors, the alleged pair reportedly went on a vacation in Maui, Hawaii for last year's Christmas holidays.
Tiffany sparked speculation that there's a problem in her relationship with Common after she shared a cryptic post on March 12. "After yesterday I realized today is to show All that hated, 'Good' you tried today and I learned that you are a lying peace of s**t & that you never cared about me you used me," she wrote on Twitter. She additionally warned, "but what you failed to forget about me is I tell IT. Dust off your skeletons! She Ready!"
While it's unclear whom her message was directed to, Beyonce Knowles' mother Tina Lawson appeared to confirm that Tiffany and Common are an item with her comment on the comedienne's birthday tribute to the Chicago-born rapper. While Tiffany referred to Common as her friend in the Instagram post, Tina said the opposite as gushing about the two, "Beautiful couple."
[via AceShowbiz]
Tags:CommonTiffany Haddish
© LOVEBSCOTT 2020


text:
Burnley teacher among the half-a-million 'heroes' stepping up to support the NHS during the pandemic
Dominic Raab says AstraZeneca jab is 'safe' and urges people to get vaccine as several countries halt its use
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has urged people to continue to get their Covid vaccinations, after a number of European countries have halted the rollout of the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab.
Updated 16th Mar 2021, 1:06pm
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has urged people to continue to get their Covid vaccinations (Photo: YE AUNG THU/AFP via Getty Images)
Numerous countries, including the Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, have stopped administering the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine due to concerns over blood clots.
However, the UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), as well as the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) have said the vaccine is safe to use.
'There is no extra risk on the evidence that we've seen'
The number of those developing blood clots after the vaccine is below those that would be expected in the general population, and the Foreign Secretary has urged people to still get the jab.
Mr Raab told BBC Breakfast: "Different countries have different approaches but I can tell you crystal clear that the UK regulator, the European EU regulator and the WHO all say that the AstraZeneca vaccine is safe and people should continue to take it."
He added: "It is safe, people should get the vaccine and I think it has been very clear, both from the MHRA, the UK regulator, that the risks of taking the vaccine are no more than, in terms of for example blood clots, than the population at large.
"There is no extra risk on the evidence that we've seen, which is why they have authorised the vaccine and haven't taken any further action.
"We respect the process and procedures that some other countries may need to go through but the vaccine is safe and people should certainly continue to take it and to protect themselves and their friends and family," Mr Raab added.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that the MRHA was "one of toughest and most experienced regulators in the world".
"They see no reason at all to discontinue the vaccination programme… for either of the vaccines that we're currently using," he added.
Joao Vale de Almeida, EU ambassador to the UK, also said it was not an EU decision to suspend the rollout of the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, but the decision of individual governments.
He told BBC Radio 4's Today: "It is not an EU decision, these are decisions taken by individual governments.
"Like the British Government, all our governments are worried, concerned and focused on the safety of citizens, when doubts appear for whatever reason I think the principle of caution prevails."
Dominic RaabAstraZenecaOxford


Home » Blogs » Who is a Jamaican?
Thursday gone was not the brightest of Thursday's.
Calls to the company were followed by the programmed "we are trying our best" to solve the problem.
As I sat listening to everyone's favorite DJ, Barry G, on Mello FM, I was entertained by his conversation with one caller , who like myself, is a returning resident visiting the country, lamenting the same realities every Jamaican face each day.
Blocked by rubbish, garbage and clutter.
Barry G sounded surprised but in reality I personally thought that was his radio performance.
You usually see them In performance after a heavy down pour.
A mixture of Rain , Mud and Car tires produced a veritable Mud Bath!.
This has been like this for over 10 years !
It is important to note that this municipality of Lucea had some interesting history with the last Mayor. Under the previous government the Mayor was allegedly doing more for their pocket than for the parish.
For my readers not familiar with that acronym , the NWA is the National Works Agency, another listless government agency that defines the word impotent.
Eventually an official from the NWA came on the program and his version of "trying their best" was typical of a governmental agency prone to doing nothing.
*The citizens do not dispose their garbage properly.
*The technical issues are bigger than they think .
BEFORE THE HURRICANE SEASON !
That's it , ladies and gents.
The four hour rant by Barry G accomplished only one thing.
And I guess his wife , who is only 5 minutes aŵay, will continue to get home late when it rains.
There is this disconnect with what type of a nation we can be against the type of nation we seem to be.
That nation building vision was missing from August 6, 1962.
We start , then stop.
We excel , then we falter.


Lead South Dakota best wireless home alarm systems reviews - contact: "ADT Monitored Alarm Service"
Are you looking for the finest provider, the most knowledgeable best home security alarm system team, or long-lasting outcomes? We take terrific pride in the outcomes we create for our customers. Many business offer similar solutions for their clients, however ADT Monitored Alarm Service is the most experienced, ingenious, trustworthy, cost effective Lead South Dakota best wireless home alarm systems reviews today. It doesn't matter if your demand is large or small, the remarkable support team at ADT Monitored Alarm Service is committed to helping you make your sincere security alarm systems undertaking form, every time. We will respond to all your concerns, walk you through the process at whatever pace is most comfortable for you, and deal with any type of issues you might have. You'll enjoy doing business here. We are ADT Monitored Alarm Service, and we look forward to providing for your best home security alarm system wants both now as well as over the years to come.
Familiarity, Technique, and Empathy. After years of functioning as a group, we've hit the point where every thing we provide for our customers is certain and thorough. Though our offerings normally grow over time with advancement of modernizations in the field, our services are always right on cue. We think that application makes both best and long-term. We keep ourselves upgraded on the most recent and greatest developments in our field, and since we do, we remain in the distinct position of having the ability to give our customers the specialist technological advice and input they want for specific ventures, along with having accessibility to the larger innovative fill-in of the rest of our knowledgeable personnel. Our standard is utmost best wireless home alarm systems reviews soundness - stretching costs and skimping is definitely not how we work at ADT Monitored Alarm Service. So enable us to do exactly what we do best for you: get the greatest results at a lesser rate than you would have thought.
Arrangement, Elements, and Pattern. We provide an fabulous selection of experience and adeptness to you. Over the years, our group has generated a widespread scope of proficiency, and unbroken excellence is our wish. We are arguably the most seasoned service provider afloat these days -- constantly aiming to be mindful of our clients' demands, and we do everything in our control to obtain the utmost customer support. Everyone we outsource to, work with, as well as get information from displays a solid performance history, attained the degree of worth and merit we expect, and is incredibly trustworthy. So take us on: allow us to lead you ahead. At ADT Monitored Alarm Service, we are committed to our customers' absolute support. Whether your budget for our options is great or small, recognize that you'll be handled as you ought to be treated -- a paying customer who puts your trust in us to supply what you need.
Some providers declare they will stay there for you, however seem to disappear soon after you pay. Here at ADT Monitored Alarm Service, it's more than merely words thrown around -- our caring, supportive team works honestly with you to supply concepts, proactive solutions as well as help every time. And the partnership exceeds simply dealing with your best wireless home alarm systems reviews job. We make every effort to be available when you need us, and give a variety of methods and resources to help you from every angle. What's even more, we make everything stress-free and a lot more clear, so you consistently feel safe purchasing from us.
Our personnel is comprised of passionate leaders who take a singular interest with the projects we provide for the individuals and businesses we serve. Your results aren't only for you -- they're helpful to us! Pleased Lead South Dakota best wireless home alarm systems reviews customers cause references, and that's a significant help. We don't simply satisfy the demand you require... we are serious about actually pleasing you. We welcome the best wireless home alarm systems reviews suggestions delivered to us, and are reminded of why we do the work we do with each referral. Please tell us about anyone who is looking for a skilled, competent home security monitoring systems provider.
We're backed with winning best wireless home alarm systems reviews technology, and we operate with considerate experts. From the moment you first contact us, you'll see just what we mean: Individuals make all the difference -- our people are rigorously qualified, competent as well as totally devoted to your needs. Our services will certainly prove to you why we outdo even our most tough competitors. And considering that we do care about your results, your help does not end "just after you make an investment" ... we're accessible to ensure you continue to take pleasure in the benefits as long as possible, so don't be reluctant to send us questions whenever you need.


text:
Now Playing loading...
Ruben Studdard Details His Career in Documentary Airing Tonight
March 16th, 2014 by KRNB
Verve Music GroupFormer American Idol champion Ruben Studdard rose to fame, fell from fame, and now he's making a comeback which he describes in the new episode of the BET/Centric documentary series Being, which airs Saturday at 9 p.m. ET.
"I had a lot of nay-sayers," Studdard says in a teaser for the episode posted to Centric's website. "I didn't know how I was going to get there but I knew I had to make it happen."
As previously reported, the "Velvet Teddy Bear" will kick off his Meant to Be Tour featuring Lalah Hathaway April 5 at Detroit's Garden Theatre and it will include stops in Austin, Houston, Memphis, Chattanooga, Washington D.C., New York and New Haven, CT where the tour will conclude on June 14.
Copyright 2014 ABC News Radio
airing career details documentary Ruben studdard tonight
New Kanye West documentary, 'jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy,' debuting February 16 on Netflix Read More
Janet Jackson Lifetime documentary gets Jan. 28 release date; watch extended trailer now Read More
50 Cent and Snoop Dogg to produce 'Murder Was the Case', Issa Rae produces 'Insecure' documentary, and more Read More
Halle Berry receives Celebration of Black Cinema and Television Career Achievement Award, Kenan Thompson producing Mike Tyson live, and more Read More


The Anne Klein Fall 2014 collection redefines classic. Iconic prints, archival plaids and 60s and 70s influences are re-imagined through a modern lens. The result is head to toe looks in sumptuous materials like flannel, tweed and velvet in unexpected color combinations such as cobalt-red-black-white, blush-chocolate-berry and navy-hunter green-grey-aubergine. New statement pieces to desire include the mid length accordion skirt, the cape, the slim pant and the tailored tee.


Each student used what they now know about gridding and blocking to draw themselves in Conte Crayon. Each drawing was drawn upside-down for accuracy. This was in preparation for painting themselves.
Each student uses what they already know about blocking an image into shapes, gridding an image, and mixing the grays for the value scale to create a self-portrait of themselves in acrylic paint on Masonite board.
Students use what they now know about color to create tints and shades of all the primary and secondary colors. This will prepare them for creating value with color on their still life paintings.
Student learn how to set up and draw their own still life using what they know about value and forms.