Hebrew stress: Back to the future

The paper addresses historical changes in the stress system of Hebrew, attending to the difference between Biblical Hebrew (script-based) and contemporary Hebrew (attested), and predicting the system of post-Hebrew; on the basis of experimental evidence and words from the periphery of the lexicon, it is predicted that the stress system of post-Hebrew will be similar to that of Biblical Hebrew. The predicted change from contemporary Hebrew to post-Hebrew is attributed to a combination of two factors: the inconsistency of the present system, and its incompliance with universal principles. The changes are addressed in terms of constraint reranking within the framework of Optimality Theory

Complete characterization of spin chains with two Ising symmetries

Spin chains with two Ising symmetries are the Jordan-Wigner duals of one-dimensional interacting fermions with particle-hole and time-reversal symmetry. From earlier works on Majorana chains, it is known that this class of models has 10 distinct topological phases. In this paper, we analyze the physical properties of the correspondent 10 phases of the spin model. In particular, thanks to a set of two non-commuting dualities, we determine the local and non-local order parameters of the phases. We find that 4 phases are topologically protected by the Ising symmetries, while the other 6 break at least one symmetry. Our study highlights the non-trivial relation between the topological classifications of interacting bosons and fermions.Comment: 7 page

Emergent clustering due to informatic interactions in active matter

Many organisms in nature use local interactions to generate global cooperative phenomena. To unravel how the behavior of individuals generates effective interactions within a group, we introduce a simple model, wherein each agent senses the presence of others nearby and changes its physical motion accordingly. This generates between agents interactions that are not physical but rather virtual. We study the radial distribution function to quantify the emergent interactions for both social and anti-social behavior; We identify social behavior as when an agent exhibits a tendency to remain in the vicinity of other agents, whereas anti-social behavior as when it displays a tendency to escape from the vicinity of others. Using Langevin dynamics simulations, we discover that under certain conditions, positive correlations, which indicate attraction can emerge even in the case of anti-social behavior. Our results are potentially useful for designing robotic swimmers that can swim collectively only based on sensing the distance to their neighbors, without measuring any orientational information

The Fate of the Consonantal Root and the Binyan in Optimality Theory

Cet article propose une analyse de la morphologie non-concaténative en hébreu moderne dans le cadre de la Théorie de l'Optimalité. Il est soutenu que le mot est la base de la dérivation, modifiée par des contraintes assignant une structure prosodique, une mélodie vocalique et des affixes, le cas échéant. La notion de gabarit est vue comme une configuration des structures assignées par ces contraintes. La racine consonantique est entièrement éliminée de la grammaire. Ce dernier point est défendu sur la base d'arguments provenant du changement diachronique et de l'apprentissage.The paper provides an Optimality Theoretic account to Modern Hebrew non-concatenative morphology. It argues that the base of derivation is the word/stem, modified by constraints assigning the prosodic structure, the vocalic pattern, and the affixes (if any). The notion of the binyan is viewed as a configuration of the structures assigned by these constraints. The consonantal root is entirely eliminated from the grammar, a result supported by arguments from historical change and learnability