The University of Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh

Professor Ewen A Cameron, Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography delivers his inaugural lecture entitled "The Political Histories of Modern Scotland".

Recorded on Tuesday 7 May 2013, at the University of Edinburgh's Business School.

Professor Charlotte Clarke, Professor of Health in Social Science delivered her inaugural lecture entitled "Phew! For a minute there I lost myself - the experience of living with dementia"

Recorded on Tuesday 23 April 2013, at the University of Edinburgh's Business School.

Josephine (Tonks) Fawcett, Professor of Student Learning in Nurse Education delivered her inaugural lecture entitled "A career for nursing: passions, privileges, pains and purpose".

Recorded on Tuesday 30 April 2013 at the University of Edinburgh's Business School.

Professor Philipp Koehn: Personal Chair in Machine Translation delivered his inaugural lecture, entitled "Open Problems in Machine Translation".

Recorded on Thursday 21 March 2013 at the University of Edinburgh's Informatics Forum.

Professor Lydia Plowman: Chair in Education and Technology, delivered her inaugural lecture entitled "Seven myths about young children and technology".

Recorded on Tuesday 19 March 2013 at the University of Edinburgh's Appleton Tower.

Professor Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies, delivered her inaugural lecture entitled "Love and Law in Christianity and Islam".

Recorded on Monday 4 March 2013 at the University of Edinburgh's St Cecilia's Hall.

Professor J Douglas Armstrong, Deputy Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Bioinformatics and Personal Chair of Systems Neurobiology, delivered his inaugural lecture entitled "Systems Neuroscience".

Recorded on Tuesday 5 February 2013 at the University of Edinburgh's Informatics Forum.

Professor Catharine Ward Thompson, Professor of Landscape Architecture, delivered her inaugural lecture entitled "You really should get out more! Landscape quality and quality of life".

Abstract:

We all know that an active lifestyle is a healthy one, and that getting away from the stresses of everyday life can be good for us, but do we live in the kinds of environments that make these easy?

There is evidence to suggest that access to certain kinds of landscapes can make a real difference to our wellbeing, throughout the course of our lives. But, if the design of local landscapes can make a difference to our health and quality of life, do current policies reflect this in the way that our environments are planned and managed?

In this presentation I will share my interest in understanding the ways that different groups of people respond to green or natural landscapes in their local environment. In particular, I will consider what factors influence the ways people engage with, and benefit from, such natural environments, and how good landscape planning and design might make a difference. I will share some exciting recent findings that show a deeply rooted need for good quality landscapes around where we live and spend our days.

Recorded on Tuesday 11 December 2012 at the University of Edinburgh's Business School.

Professor Niamh Nic Shuibhne, Chair of European Union Law, presented her inaugural lecture entitled "The Lawless Science of EU Law: Constitutional Responsibility and the Court of Justice".

Abstract

When constitutional courts interpret the law, they make law. But they also influence the direction of policy-making and are frequently called upon to determine questions that seem to have very little to do with legal reasoning at all. This lecture will position the Court of Justice of the European Union as a transnational constitutional court and evaluate its performance using the conceptual benchmark of constitutional responsibility. It will be shown that the values of fairness, coherence and integrity are central to that assessment; and that the verdict is mixed. The absence of more prescriptive guidance or signposts in the EU's primary legal documents - its Treaties - will be explored as a considerable challenge for the Court to manage. More pragmatically, it will be argued that the current structure of the Court hinders it from fulfilling the responsibilities it owes, especially to the national courts of the EU Member States. But the notion of responsibility also demands that the Court demonstrate greater awareness of its constitutional purpose and shape its own judicial behaviour accordingly.

Recorded on Friday 9 November 2012 at Old College, the University of Edinburgh.

Professor Ronnie Cann, Personal Chair in Linguistic Semantics, delivered his inaugural lecture entitled "Doing Language".

Abstract:

One of the features of human language that distinguishes it from the call systems of other species is that the former can be used to refer to situations, objects and other things that are not in the immediate context of an utterance. It is, on the other hand, also well recognised that certain aspects of an utterance, written or spoken, depend for their interpretation on the context in which the utterance occurs. Expressions like "here", "now", "she", "that person" depend on the context to identify what is meant while the import of clauses like "it’s hot in here" or "I’ve got a headache" depend on the social situation of the speakers and the situations they are engaged in for their precise interpretation.

Less often considered, at least within linguistic theories, is the extent to which contextual dependence pervades natural human languages that are notoriously vague, with expressions used often only being partially expressive of a concept that we can nevertheless readily use and understand. Indeed, it is abundantly clear from any cursory look at "real" natural language data, spoken or written, that languages display an endemic sensitivity to context so that meanings, intentions, and other information that they can convey may never be fully fixed. Indeed, it appears that languages are inherently dynamic in use and structure and that is this notion of language as a practice or process that allows us to exploit inherent context sensitivity for effective and generally efficient use of linguistic resources in acts of communication, even with ourselves. Notoriously, however, neither of these properties, context dependence and dynamicity, are typically addressed by current theories of grammar.

In this talk, I argue, to the contrary, that they are central to understanding natural language in general and the grammatical properties of particular languages and that the current view that languages are analysable as context independent objects is untenable and that a radical rethink of current approaches to grammatical theory is necessary if we are ever to understand the nature of human language.

Recorded on Tuesday 27 November 2012 at the University of Edinburgh's Appleton Tower lecture theatre.