The purpose of this study was to examine music preferences across a wide range of cultures in Finland, Slovenia, South Africa and Texas to get a better sense of cultural and demographic moderators of preferences across a wide variety of musical genres. At the same time, this study is confined to a rather specific sample of listeners: especially students, but also faculty and staff at universities. The musical listening habits analyzed here address not only the differences, but are also trying to sharpen the focus on the similarities between the geographically as well as culturally distinct...

The challenges of an ageing population and workforce are increasingly recognised by policy makers, managers and workers in many countries. In this book, prominent researchers address these challenges. It deals with health and workability, and gives data and viewpoints on competitive advantages and disadvantages of older workers. The study includes data on attitudes, specific measures and policies from many parts of the world: Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and Singapore. The authors present a variety of interesting examples of measures used in workplaces, to motivate and enable...

More than 50 years after Canada played an instrumental role in its inception, peacekeeping has once again returned to the center of the national foreign policy debate. Having participated in every peacekeeping operation set up during the Cold War and lived through the fundamental changes the activity has undergone in the 1990s, Ottawa is currently struggling to define a viable approach to peacekeeping for the 21st century. As a timely contribution to this effort, the study reveals the overt and subtle ways in which Canada s commitment to peacekeeping has contributed to the promotion of vital...

Knowing how expectations are formed in the financial markets is crucial to understanding how financial markets work. Although the market price itself reflects to some extent expectations, market expectations cannot be observed directly. Nonetheless, different strategies remain to investigate expectations in financial markets in more detail. This book uses survey data which allow a detailed analysis of market s expectations since it provides information of expectations of individual economic agents. This book focuses on the two major financial markets in terms of trading volume, namely the...

This book approaches parody as a literary form that has assumed diverse forms and functions throughout history. The author handles this diversity by classifying parody according to its objects of imitation and specifying three major parodic kinds: parody directed at texts and personal styles, parody directed at genre, and parody directed at discourse. The book argues that different literary-historical periods in Britain have witnessed the prevalence of different kinds of parody and investigates the reasons underlying this phenomenon. All periods from the Middle Ages to the present are...

The book is devoted to conceptual metaphors in English according to the level of abstraction in their target domains. The findings reveal a striking difference between mappings onto concrete domains and mappings onto abstract ones. In metaphors with concrete target domains, a preexisting similarity between the source and target concepts can be revealed or highlighted. In contrast, when the target domain is abstract, the similarity between the source and target concepts is created rather than merely revealed or highlighted. To some degree, creation of similarity is possible even with concrete...

This volume presents three interviews with Paul Ricoeur with the purpose to scrutinize the complex philosophical evolution of his thought. The main question which arises, therefore, and on which are centered the two volumes is how to -think together- the difference between the issues of Ricoeur s first works and those of his later ones, concerning the problems of the self and its relation to being, transcendence and language. Other discussed subjects are: Why philosophy today? If philosophy and religion are two autonomous fields, is there a possibility of elaborating a religious philosophy...

This book offers an analysis model providing a descriptive selection of linguistic features from a stylistic aspect, as well as an interpretation from a semantic aspect, i.e. the system of decoding a poetic text of the unique discourse, like tasawwuf poetry. It enables researchers in literary criticism of texts in Divan poetry to evaluate stylistic values of its linguistic forms. The book provides the basis for evaluative description of the literary-aesthetic forms of Khatem s poetry in Persian language and its literary and historical position in the frame of time and space in which that poet...

Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the International Council for Canadian Studies (ICCS) this collection offers an overview of the state of the art in various disciplines in Canadian Studies, such as political science, history, geography, sociology, public policy, linguistics, literature, as well as media studies and cultural studies.
A l occasion du 30e anniversaire du Conseil international d etudes canadiennes (CIEC), nous offrons un panorama de la recherche et de ses questions dans les differentes disciplines en etudes canadiennes, telles que les sciences politiques, l histoire, la...

This study explores the somewhat neglected area of dramatic genres of early English religious lyric and illuminates the functions of dialogue as an instrument of devotion and cognition in the context of medieval culture. The book focuses on short poems in dialogue form, semi-dialogic prayers and dramatic monologues, and alleged dialogic configurations of the lyrics, stressing their potential for performance. Devotional dialogues, as between Jesus and Mary, are shown to have the form of mutual begging, in accordance with the central medieval ritual of supplication. Dialogue as heteroglossia...