scholarly journals Revisiting the configurationality issue in Old Icelandic

Author(s):  
Hannah Booth

The status of Old Icelandic with respect to (argument) configurationality was subject to debate in the early 1990s (e.g. Faarlund 1990; Rögnvaldsson 1995) and remains unresolved. Since this work, further research on a wide range of languages has enhanced our understanding of configurationality, in particular within Lexical Functional Grammar (e.g. Austin & Bresnan 1996; Nordlinger 1998) and syntactically annotated Old Icelandic data are now available (Wallenberg et al. 2011). It is thus fitting to revisit the matter. In this paper, I show that allowing for argument configurationality as a gradient property, and also taking into account discourse configurationality (Kiss 1995) as a further gradient property, can neatly account for word order patterns in this early stage of Icelandic. Specifically, I show that corpus data supports part of the original claim in Faarlund (1990), that Old Icelandic lacks a VP-constituent, thus being somewhat less argument-configurational than the modern language. Furthermore, the observed word order patterns indicate a designated topic position in the postfinite domain, thus reflecting some degree of discourse configurationality at this early stage of the language.

2004 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betty J. Birner

Speakers have a wide range of noncanonical syntactic options that allow them to mark the information status of the various elements within a proposition. The correlation between a construction and constraints on information status, however, is not arbitrary; there are broad, consistent, and predictive generalizations that can be made about the information-packaging functions served by preposing, postposing, and argument-reversing constructions. Specifically, preposed constituents are constrained to represent discourse-old information, postposed constituents are constrained to represent information that is either discourse-new or hearer-new, and argument-reversing constructions require that the information represented by the preposed constituent be at least as familiar as that represented by the postposed constituent (Birner & Ward 1998). The status of inferable information (Clark 1977; Prince 1981), however, is problematic; a study of corpus data shows that such information can be preposed in an inversion or a preposing (hence must be discourse-old), yet can also be postposed in constructions requiring hearer-new information (hence must be hearer-new). This information status – discourse-old yet hearer-new – is assumed by Prince (1992) to be non-occurring on the grounds that what has been evoked in the discourse should be known to the hearer. I resolve this difficulty by arguing for a reinterpretation of the term 'discourse-old' as applying not only to information that has been explicitly evoked in the prior discourse, but rather to any information that provides a salient inferential link to the prior discourse. Extending Prince’s notion in this manner allows us to account for the distribution of noncanonically positioned peripheral constituents in a principled and unified way.  


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 20160132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine Szunerits ◽  
Rabah Boukherroub

Reliable data obtained from analysis of DNA, proteins, bacteria and other disease-related molecules or organisms in biological samples have become a fundamental and crucial part of human health diagnostics and therapy. The development of non-invasive tests that are rapid, sensitive, specific and simple would allow patient discomfort to be prevented, delays in diagnosis to be avoided and the status of a disease to be followed up. Bioanalysis is thus a progressive discipline for which the future holds many exciting opportunities. The use of biosensors for the early diagnosis of diseases has become widely accepted as a point-of-care diagnosis with appropriate specificity in a short time. To allow a reliable diagnosis of a disease at an early stage, highly sensitive biosensors are required as the corresponding biomarkers are generally expressed at very low concentrations. In the past 50 years, various biosensors have been researched and developed encompassing a wide range of applications. This contrasts the limited number of commercially available biosensors. When it comes to sensing of biomarkers with the required picomolar (pM) sensitivity for real-time sensing of biological samples, only a handful of sensing systems have been proposed, and these are often rather complex and costly. Lately, graphene-based materials have been considered as superior over other nanomaterials for the development of sensitive biosensors. The advantages of graphene-based sensor interfaces are numerous, including enhanced surface loading of the desired ligand due to the high surface-to-volume ratio, excellent conductivity and a small band gap that is beneficial for sensitive electrical and electrochemical read-outs, as well as tunable optical properties for optical read-outs such as fluorescence and plasmonics. In this paper, we review the advances made in recent years on graphene-based biosensors in the field of medical diagnosis.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takashi Nakano ◽  
Yoichi Ikeda

BACKGROUND In the fight against the pandemic of COVID-19, it is important to ascertain the status and trend of the infection spread quickly and accurately. OBJECTIVE The purpose of our study is to formulate a new and simple indicator that represents the COVID-19 spread rate by using publicly available data. METHODS The new indicator <i>K</i> is a backward difference approximation of the logarithmic derivative of the cumulative number of cases with a time interval of 7 days. It is calculated as a ratio of the number of newly confirmed cases in a week to the total number of cases. RESULTS The analysis of the current status of COVID-19 spreading over countries showed an approximate linear decrease in the time evolution of the <i>K</i> value. The slope of the linear decrease differed from country to country. In addition, it was steeper for East and Southeast Asian countries than for European countries. The regional difference in the slope seems to reflect both social and immunological circumstances for each country. CONCLUSIONS The approximate linear decrease of the <i>K</i> value indicates that the COVID-19 spread does not grow exponentially but starts to attenuate from the early stage. The <i>K</i> trajectory in a wide range was successfully reproduced by a phenomenological model with the constant attenuation assumption, indicating that the total number of the infected people follows the Gompertz curve. Focusing on the change in the value of <i>K</i> will help to improve and refine epidemiological models of COVID-19.


Author(s):  
Leonel Figueiredo de Alencar ◽  
Christoph Schwarze

ABSTRACT The French clitic pro-form en represents a wide range of heterogeneous constituents: de-PP complements and adjuncts, partitive objects, and prepositionless objects of cardinals. The main goal of this paper is to formalize this relationship computationally in terms of genitive case. This is apparently the first non-transformational counterpart to Kayne (1975)’s unified analysis, which derives en from a deep structure with de by means of syntactic transformations. Transformational grammars are problematic from the parsing perspective. In order to test our analysis automatically on a large amount of data, we implemented it in a computational grammar of French in the Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) formalism using the XLE system. This non-transformational framework is particularly fit for expressing systematic relationships between heterogeneous structures and has successfully been used for the implementation of natural language grammars since the 1980s. We tested the implementation on 320 grammatical sentences and on an equal number of ungrammatical examples. It analyzed all grammatical examples and blocked almost 95% of the ungrammatical ones, showing a high empirical adequacy of the grammar.


10.2196/20144 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (11) ◽  
pp. e20144
Author(s):  
Takashi Nakano ◽  
Yoichi Ikeda

Background In the fight against the pandemic of COVID-19, it is important to ascertain the status and trend of the infection spread quickly and accurately. Objective The purpose of our study is to formulate a new and simple indicator that represents the COVID-19 spread rate by using publicly available data. Methods The new indicator K is a backward difference approximation of the logarithmic derivative of the cumulative number of cases with a time interval of 7 days. It is calculated as a ratio of the number of newly confirmed cases in a week to the total number of cases. Results The analysis of the current status of COVID-19 spreading over countries showed an approximate linear decrease in the time evolution of the K value. The slope of the linear decrease differed from country to country. In addition, it was steeper for East and Southeast Asian countries than for European countries. The regional difference in the slope seems to reflect both social and immunological circumstances for each country. Conclusions The approximate linear decrease of the K value indicates that the COVID-19 spread does not grow exponentially but starts to attenuate from the early stage. The K trajectory in a wide range was successfully reproduced by a phenomenological model with the constant attenuation assumption, indicating that the total number of the infected people follows the Gompertz curve. Focusing on the change in the value of K will help to improve and refine epidemiological models of COVID-19.


Author(s):  
Kamrun Nahar Fatema ◽  
Won-Chun Oh

Reliable data obtained from analysis of DNA, proteins, bacteria and other disease-related molecules or organisms in biological samples have become a fundamental and crucial part of human health diagnostics and therapy. After a brief summary of the implication of template based ordered mesoporous materials in electrochemical science, the various types of inorganic and organic-inorganic hybrid mesostructured used to date in electroanalysis and the corresponding electrode configurations are described. The development of non-invasive tests that are rapid, sensitive, specific and simple would allow patient discomfort to be prevented, delays in diagnosis to be avoided and the status of a disease to be followed up. The use of biosensors for the early diagnosis of diseases has become widely accepted as a point-of-care diagnosis with appropriate specificity in a short time. To allow a reliable diagnosis of a disease at an early stage, highly sensitive biosensors are required as the corresponding biomarkers are generally expressed at very low concentrations. In past 50 years, various biosensors have been researched and developed encompassing a wide range of applications. This contrasts the limited number of commercially available biosensors. Lately, graphene-based materials have been considered as superior over other nanomaterials for the development of sensitive biosensors. The advantages of graphenebased sensor interfaces are numerous, including enhanced surface loading of desired ligand due to the high surface-to-volume ratio, excellent conductivity and a small band gap that is beneficial for sensitive electrical and electrochemical read-outs, as well as tunable optical properties for optical read-outs such as fluorescence and plasmonics. In this paper, we review the advances made in recent years on graphenebased biosensors in the field of medical diagnosis.


Author(s):  
Г. Кульбаева

Аннотация. В статье рассматривается вопрос о функционировании русского языка в образовательном пространстве КГМА. Большое место в работе занимает роль русского языка в учебной деятельности студентов-медиков. Мотивацией к изучению именно, русского языка являются следующие факторы: статус официального языка; возможность привлечь внимание широкого круга специалистов к своим исследованиям; понимание престижности русского языка. В статье нашли отражение различные формы работы по расширению сферы использования русского языка в медицинской академии. В работе уделено внимание и профильным учебным пособиям, разработанным автором статьи. Анализ некоторых заданий позволяет констатировать тот факт, что содержание пособии определено через компетенции, одной из которых является языковая. Ключевые слова:язык обучения, фундаментальные науки, соматические ФЕ, компетентностная основа, профессиональная направленность, жаргонная лексика. Аннотация. Макалада КММАнын билим берүү мейкиндеги орус тилин өздөштүү маселеси каралат. Орус тили студент-медиктердин окуу ишмердигинде чоң роль ойнойт. Расмий тил статусу, өз изилдөөлөрүнө көпчүлүк адистердин көңүлүн буруу мүмкүнчүлүгү, орус тилинин баркын түшүнүү, өзгөчөлөп билүүгө далил болуп эсептелет. Макалада медициналык академияда орус тили колдонуу чөйрөсүн кеңейтүү боюнча иштөөнү ар кандай формалары көрсөтүлгөн. Эмгекте макаланын автору иштеп чыккан адистик окуу колдонмолорго да көңул бурулган. Кээ бир тапшырмалардын анализи колдонмонун мазмуну компетенция, анын бирөөсү тил аркылуу аныкталганын факт катары көрсөтүүгө мүмкүндүк түзөт. Түйүндүү сөздөр: фундаменталдык илимдер, соматикалык фразеологизмдер, компетенттик негиз, профессионалдык багытталыш, жаргондук лексика. Summary. The article discusses the Russian language functioning in the of the KSMA’s educational space. Russian language plays a big role in the educational activity of the medical students. The main motivation of learning the Russian language has the following points: the status of the official language; the opportunity to attract the attention of a wide range of specialists to their research; understanding of the prestige of the Russian language. The article reflected various forms of work to expand the scope of the use of the Russian language at the medical academy. The work focuses on specialized textbooks developed by the author of the article. An analysis of some tasks allows us to state the fact that the content of the manual is determined through competencies, one of which is the language. Key words: teaching language, fundamental sciences, somatic phraseological unit, slang vocabulary.


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