Grammatical relations, agreement, and genetic stability

Languages vary in whether or not primary grammatical relations (PGRs) are sensitive to information from clause-level case or phrase structures. This variation correlates with a difference between verb agreement systems based on feature unification and systems based on feature composition. The choice between different PGR and agreement principles is found to be highly stable genetically and to characterize Indo-European as systematically different from Sino-Tibetan. Although the choice is partially similar to the Configurationality Parameter, it is shown that Indo-European languages of South Asia are nonconfigurational due to areal pressure but follow their European relatives in PGR and agreement principles

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Inverted Spectrum

It is possible for a person and their environment to be physically identical each day and yet the representational content of their beliefs about color are inverted. Each day they utter the same words, ‘Wow! The colors of everything have switched again today.’ In uttering these words, they express a different proposition each day. This supports the view held by Reichenbach and Carnap that when it comes to representations of colored objects, relations of similarity and difference are fundamental. There are no such things as colors like ‘redness’ and ‘greenness’ apart from the particular things we call red and green

Solving Our Bread Problem: Gnostic Trends in Environmentalist Thought and Janisse Ray as Solution

[First paragraph] One would be hard pressed to find a book more significant to the modern American environmentalist movement than John Muir’s seminal My First Summer in the Sierra. It gathered support for Muir’s fledgling Sierra Club and raised Muir’s national profile as he influenced Teddy Roosevelt on the creation of the National Park Service, thus serving a key role in perhaps the two most influential environmental organizations in the 20th century. Muir’s work is interesting, though, for another reason, as well: the way that Muir deals with the reality of his own physical body. Muir’s body is almost completely absent from the rhetoric of My First Summer in the Sierra, and when it does make an appearance, it does so only long enough for Muir to make a brief complaint about the necessity of feeding it. Moreover, the absence of Muir’s body is in stark contrast to the remarkable presence of the shepherd Billy’s body. This dichotomy, I think, is indicative of a broader gnostic trend in Muir’s work, in which he casts the pure, the divine, the natural, as a spiritual presence, and the impure, the profane, the human, as a purely physical presence

A logic for application level QoS

Service Oriented Computing (SOC) has been proposed as a paradigm to describe computations of applications on wide area distributed systems. Awareness of Quality of Service (QoS) is emerging as a new exigency in both design and implementation of SOC applications. We do not refer to QoS aspects related to low-level performance and focus on those high-level non-functional features perceived by end-users as application dependent requirements, e.g., the price of a given service, or the payment mode, or else the availability of a resource (e.g., a file in a given format). In this paper we present a logic which includes mechanisms to consider the three main dimensions of systems, namely their structure, behaviour and QoS aspects. The evaluation of a formula is a value of a constraint-semiring and not just a boolean value expressing whether or not the formula holds. This permits to express not only topological and temporal properties but also QoS properties of systems. The logic is interpreted on SHReQ, a formal framework for specifying systems that handles abstract high-level QoS aspects combining Synchronised Hyperedge Replacement with constraint-semirings

Local Plant Treasures and Functions of Pantun Batobo

Pantun Batobo is a type of pantun in the Kampar area, Riau Province. This pantun is hummed when doing batobo activities. Batobo is a mutual cooperation activity in working on the fields, starting from the process of planting to harvesting. This study examines the pantun batobo by focusing on two aspects, namely the treasures of local plants found in the pantun and the function of the pantun. Data collection methods used are interview methods and recording techniques. The data analysis method uses descriptive analysis method. The theory used is Alan Dundes' Function Theory and Ecocritical Theory. The results obtained from this study are that from an eco-critic perspective, the batobo pantun is rich in knowledge of local plant treasures stored in the rhyme sampirans. This shows the close kinship between the people who own the pantun and the nature around it. In terms of function, this pantun has a function as a fun escape from reality and turns boring work into a game. The pantun batobo is not only a pantun muda-mudi filled with feelings, but it contains the perspective of the people who own the pantun about macrocosm and microcosm

Turbo codes: the phase transition

Turbo codes are a very efficient method for communicating reliably through a noisy channel. There is no theoretical understanding of their effectiveness. In [1] they are mapped onto a class of disordered spin models. The analytical calculations concerning these models are reported here. We prove the existence of a no-error phase and compute its local stability threshold. As a byproduct, we gain some insight into the dynamics of the decoding algorithm.Comment: 26 pages, 3 eps figure