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    Language shift and maintenance in the Korean community in Australia
    Shin, S-C ; Jung, SJ (International Journal of Korean Language Education, 2016)
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    The political economy of teacher management reform in Indonesia
    Rosser, A ; Fahmi, M (Elsevier, 2018-07-01)
    Indonesia faces serious problems in the number, cost, quality and distribution of teachers. In recent years, its central government has introduced a range of reforms to address these problems but they have produced modest results. This paper suggests that this outcome reflects the way in which predatory political and bureaucratic elites have used the school system for decades to accumulate resources, distribute patronage, mobilize political support, and exercise political control rather than promote improved learning outcomes. Efforts to reduce teacher numbers, enhance teacher quality, and improve teacher distribution have accordingly constituted an assault on the interests of these elites, provoking powerful, if often subterranean, resistance. Broadly, reform has only occurred where the central government has employed policy instruments that have disciplined local governments and maintained a commitment to these instruments in the face of resistance. The paper concludes by assessing the implications for Indonesian education.
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    Transnational linkages, political dynamics, and the migration-development nexus: Towards a political settlements approach
    Rosser, A (Elsevier, 2020-10-01)
    This paper examines how transnational researchers have incorporated political dynamics into their analyses of transnational linkages and their impacts. It argues that they have done so in ways that have focused on conflict and contestation between migrant/diasporic communities and homeland states/communities rather than within them. At the same time, in construing transnational linkages as instruments of particular actors, they have presented a narrow conception of how transnational linkages interact with political dynamics. As an alternative, the paper proposes a political settlements approach which views transnational linkages as institutions embedded in power relationships between competing groups defined in class, racial, ethnic, religious and gender terms. This approach, it is argued, overcomes these two problems by presenting a more disaggregated view of the actors, interests and agendas involved and construing transnational linkages as simultaneously instruments and arenas of contestation.
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    Measuring economic transformation: what to make of constant price sectoral GDP: evidence from Vietnam
    Fforde, A (World Economics Association, 2021)
    The paper discusses the analysis of economic growth and transformation and the concept of constant price sectoral GDP, usually understood to measure real factor rewards, linked to actual factor inputs. It reviews criticisms of such statistics and statistical conventions underlying GDP data, their focus upon current price factor incomes and implications of the practice of constructing constant price sectoral GDP from revalued net output (gross output less non-factor inputs). Innovatively, it shows how recalculations at constant prices of actual sectoral factor inputs at a year away from the base-year will not necessarily equal revalued gross output less non-factor inputs, the usual basis for such data. The accounting identity that requires their equality only holds for current prices. Therefore, constant price sectoral GDP data does not measure actual factor inputs. Despite this, the analytical frameworks of economists analysing structural transformation often assumes that they have, in constant price sectoral GDP, a measure of actual factor inputs (when they do not). This inhibits analyses from engaging properly with incentives, often disregarding the possibility of disequilibria by adopting a production function approach that, encouraged by the belief that constant price sectoral data measures changes in actual factor inputs, expects technical conditions to determine incentives (factor rewards). The paper shows this risk of confirmation bias by examining work on Vietnam.1
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    Plus ça Change: Three Decades of Fiscal Policy and Central–Local Relations in China
    Wong, C (NUS Press on behalf of East Asia Institute, 2021-11-01)
    In China’s decentralised system, vital public services such as health, education and social welfare are provided by local governments. The intergovernmental fiscal system is critical to ensuring local governments are adequately financed. Since 1994, China has overhauled its public finances to create a system able to finance government operations, support economic growth and fund industrial policies and international initiatives. Its Achilles’ heel remains a weak intergovernmental fiscal system that is unable to fund local governments efficiently and equitably. This article analyses local finance through three decades of reform. Despite a promise early in the Xi Jinping administration to realign central–local fiscal relations, local finances have deteriorated since 2015 due to slowing growth, tax cuts and pressures from tightened budget management. Local fiscal difficulties have caused a decline in social spending as a share of gross domestic product. If continued, this trend threatens to reverse recent gains in improving services and undermine other national policy goals.
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    South Borneo as an ancient Sprachbund area
    Adelaar, A (UNIV INDONESIA, FAC HUMANITIES, 2021)
    In South and Central Kalimantan (southern Borneo) there are some unusual linguistic features shared among languages which are adjacent but do not belong to the same genetic linguistic subgroups. These languages are predominantly Banjar Malay (a Malayic language), Ngaju (a West Barito language), and Ma’anyan (a Southeast Barito language). The same features also appear to some degree in Malagasy, a Southeast Barito language in East Africa. The shared linguistic features are the following ones: a grammaticalized form of the originally Malay noun buah ‘fruit’ expressing affectedness, nasal spreading in which N- not only nasalizes the onset of the first syllable but also a *y in the next syllable, a non-volitional marker derived from the Banjar Malay prefix combination ta-pa- (related to Indonesian tr- + pr-), and the change from Proto Malayo-Polynesian *s to h (or Malagasy Ø). These features have their origins in the various members of the language configuration outlined above and form a Sprachbund or “Linguistic Area”. The concept of Linguistic Area is weak and difficult to define. Lyle Campbell (2002) considers it little else than borrowing or diffusion and writes it off as “no more than [a] post hoc attempt [...] to impose geographical order on varied conglomerations of [...] borrowings”. While mindful of its shortcomings, the current author still uses the concept as a useful tool to distinguish between
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    Regular sound change: the evidence of a single example
    Adelaar, A (Faculty of Humanities. University of Indonesi, 2018-01-01)
    The Neogrammarians of the Leipzig School introduced the principle that sound changes are regular and that this regularity is without exceptions. At least as a working hypothesis, this principle has remained the basis of the comparative method up to this day. In the first part of this paper, I give a short account of how historical linguists have defended this principle and have dealt with apparent counter evidence. In the second part, I explore if a sound change can be regular if it is attested in one instance only. I conclude that it is, provided that the concomitant phonetic (and phonotactic) evidence supporting it is also based on regularity. If the single instance of a sound change is the result of developments which are all regular in themselves, it is still in line with the regularity principle.
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    The Lisbon book of pantuns
    Castro, I ; Cardoso, HC ; Koster, G ; Adelaar, A ; Baxter, A ; Castro, I (Imprensa Nacional, 2019)
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    Grammar notes on Siraya, an extinct Formosan language
    Adelaar, KA (University of Hawaii Press, 1997-12-01)
    This is an attempt to unravel the grammar of a gospel text in Siraya, an extinct West Formosan language. It includes a discussion of the historical setting, the spelling, phonological features, function words, relation markers, morphosyntax of the verb, and the use of deictic verbs as prepositions. Regarding verbal morphosyntax, special attention is given to case marking suffixes, verbal classifiers, compound verbs, and anticipating sequences. Verbal classifiers are lexical elements prefixed to a root (a verb, adverb, or noun) with which they constitute the overall meaning of the resulting verb (mattäy- ‘talking, saying’ + vli ‘reciprocating, doing in return’  mattäy-vli ‘to answer’; mattäy- + rĭx ‘mind’  mattäy- rĭx ‘talk to oneself’). Compound verb constructions are constructions in which auxiliaries assume the functions of adverbs in English. These auxiliaries form an open class and are in fact the head of the verb phrase, as they carry most of the marking. An anticipating sequence is an element of a verb that is prefixed to the preceding auxiliary.
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    [Review of the Book Histoire et voyages des plantes cultivées à Madagascar, by Philippe Beaujard]
    Adelaar, S (University of Hawaii Press, 2019-06-01)
    This book is written by one of the most prolific and versatile scholars of Malagasy culture and language of our era. Its French title translates as “the history and travels of the cultivated plants in Madagascar”, which is an understatement of the wealth of information it provides.