Beware Occam’s Syntactic Razor: Morphotactic Analysis and Spanish Mesoclisis

Harris and Halle (2005) present a framework (hereafter, Generalized Reduplication) that unites the treatment of phonological reduplication and metathesis with similar phenomena in morphology, thereby accounting for the apparently spurious placement of the imperative plural -n in mesoclitic Spanish forms such as hága-lo-n ‘Do it!’, in which clitic lo is sandwiched between the verbal stem and the plural suffix. Subsequently, Kayne (2010) has challenged their analysis, arguing that such cases should be treated purely within the syntax. In this paper, we reassess some of Kayne’s arguments, agreeing with his conclusion that the most important desiderata of any general analysis of these sorts of phenomena is restrictiveness. However, we contend that greater restrictiveness can be achieved through morphotactic constraints and repairs in the Generalized Reduplication formalism, triggered by a Noninitiality condition on the positioning of the plural affix, and develop a set of conditions on these operations that situate the locus of interspeaker variation within the postsyntactic component

A monoradical approach to some cases of disuppletion

This paper, a commentary on Harley 2014, explores cases of disuppletive roots, such as destroy/destruct, persons/people, and worse/badder, the predominant approach to which is to assume that these come from different roots. We adopt a monoradical approach to such cases, claiming that they always involve the same root, but that the suppletive allomorphy is conditioned by the presence or absence of additional functional heads in the structure. We also posit that defective verbs in Spanish, an extreme case of disuppletion (whereby one of the exponents of this root is ineffable), receive a straightforward analysis as a case of contextually limited allomorphy, following Harley's postulate that certain formatives may have no elsewhere item on either the LF or the PF side (the Encyclopedic List and the Exponent List, respectively)

Apical Control of Conidiation in Aspergillus nidulans

21 p.-2 fig.The infection cycle of filamentous fungi consists of two main stages: invasion (growth) and dispersion (development). After the deposition of a spore on a host, germination, polar extension and branching of vegetative cells called hyphae allow a fast and efficient invasion. Under suboptimal conditions, genetic reprogramming of hyphae results in the generation of asexual spores, allowing dissemination to new hosts and the beginning of a new infection cycle. In the model filamentous fungus Aspergillus nidulans, asexual development or conidiation is induced by the upstream developmental activation (UDA) pathway. UDA proteins transduce signals from the tip, the polarity site of hyphae, to nuclei, where developmental programs are transcriptionally activated. The present review summarizes the current knowledge on this tip-to-nucleus communication mechanism, emphasizing its dependence on hyphal polarity. Future approaches to the topic will also be suggested, as stimulating elements contributing to the understanding of how apical signals are coupled with the transcriptional control of development and pathogenesis in filamentous fungi.Work at the UPV/EHU was funded by the UPV/EHU (Grant EHUA15/08) and the Basque Government (Grant IT599-13). Work at CIB-CSIC was funded by MINECO (BFU2012-33142).Peer reviewe

Promoting Interpersonal Relationships through Elbow Tag, a Traditional Sporting Game. A Multidimensional Approach

The aim of this research was to study from a multidimensional point of view (decisional, relational and energetic) the interpersonal relationships established by girls and boys in the traditional sport game of Elbow Tag. Scientific evidence has shown that Traditional Sport Games (TSG) trigger different effects on male and female genders in relation to emotional experiences, decision-making, conflicts and motor relationships. Despite the fact that these dimensions are intertwined, there are hardly any studies that interpret motor behaviors holistically, i.e., taking a multidimensional (360◦ ) view of these dimensions. For this study, a quasi-experimental design was used and a type III design was applied, inspired by the observational methodology N/P/M. A total of 147 university students participated (M = 19.6, SD = 2.3): 47 girls (31.97%) and 100 boys (68.02%). A mixed ‘ad hoc’ registration system was designed with acceptable margins of data quality. Cross-tabulations, classification trees and T-patterns analysis were applied. The results indicated that social interactions between girls and boys in a mixed group were unequal. This difference was mainly due to decisionmaking (sub-role variable), which has much greater predictive power than the energetic variables (MV and steps).This research was funded by the Institut Nacional d’Educació Física de Catalunya (INEFC), Universitat de Lleida (UdL), through the 2016 PINEF 00016 project

The fine structure of the comparative

The paper provides evidence for a more articulated structure of the comparative as compared with the one in Bobaljik (2012). We propose to split up Bobaljik's cmpr head into two distinct heads, C1 and C2. Looking at Czech, Old Church Slavonic and English, we show that this proposal explains a range of facts about suppletion and allomorphy. A crucial ingredient of our analysis is the claim that adjectival roots are not a-categorial, but spell out adjectival functional structure. Specifically, we argue that adjectival roots come in various types, differing in the amount of functional structure they spell out. In order to correctly model the competition between roots, we further introduce a Faithfulness Restriction on Cyclic Override, which allows us to dispense with the Elsewhere Principle