What’s next? Sufficiency of subject-object plausibility for anticipatory eye movements

Visual-world studies have shown that listeners can combine verb restrictions and case information with world knowledge to anticipate upcoming arguments (e.g., Altmann & Kamide, 1999; Kamide, Scheepers, & Altmann, 2003). Kamide, Altmann, & Heywood (2003; Experiment 3) further demonstrated that anticipation does not depend on main verbs but can also be driven by the combination of nominative and dative-marked NPs. In their study, a dative NP2 implicated a subsequent transferable THEME object. Unlike dative NPs, nominative NPs only weakly constrain dependencies amongst remaining objects

Obstructions to combinatorial formulas for plethysm

Motivated by questions of Mulmuley and Stanley we investigate quasi-polynomials arising in formulas for plethysm. We demonstrate, on the examples of $S^3(S^k)$ and $S^k(S^3)$, that these need not be counting functions of inhomogeneous polytopes of dimension equal to the degree of the quasi-polynomial. It follows that these functions are not, in general, counting functions of lattice points in any scaled convex bodies, even when restricted to single rays. Our results also apply to special rectangular Kronecker coefficients.Comment: 7 pages; v2: Improved version with further reaching counterexamples; v3: final version as in Electronic Journal of Combinatoric

Making "fetch" happen: The influence of social and linguistic context on nonstandard word growth and decline

In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech community. But unlike other types of innovation, language change is shaped and constrained by the system in which it takes part. To investigate the links between social and structural factors in language change, we undertake a large-scale analysis of nonstandard word growth in the online community Reddit. We find that dissemination across many linguistic contexts is a sign of growth: words that appear in more linguistic contexts grow faster and survive longer. We also find that social dissemination likely plays a less important role in explaining word growth and decline than previously hypothesized