Enregisterment, commodification and historical context: "Geordie" versus "Sheffieldish"

This article examines a range of texts from nineteenth-century Newcastle and Sheffield, both in the north of England, to demonstrate how the urban dialects of these cities, known respectively as "Geordie" and "Sheffieldish," became enregistered in this period. Features that were actually more widespread in the north of England and in Scotland were "claimed" as unique to each of these new urban dialects, and in each case, a repertoire of features emerged that continues to be cited and indeed used by speakers and writers today, albeit often in performative contexts. The article goes on to consider how awareness of a distinct "Geordie" accent/dialect arrived much earlier and became more widespread than that of "Sheffieldish" and how this is reflected in the commodification of the former but not the latter

Special issue on studies in Late Modern English historical phonology using the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP): introduction

Since Charles Jones referred to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the ‘Cinderellas of English historical linguistic study’ (1989: 279), there has been a great deal of progress in research on this period, but, as Beal (2012: 22) points out, much of this has been in the fields of syntax, morphology, lexis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and the normative tradition. Beal argues that the availability of corpora of Late Modern English texts has greatly facilitated research in these areas, but, since creating phonological corpora for periods antedating the invention of sound recording is a challenging proposition, the historical phonology of Late Modern English has benefited much less from the corpus revolution. To redress this imbalance, the editors of this issue, with technical support from the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield, created the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP), which is freely available at www.dhi.ac.uk/projects/ecep

Towards a corpus of eighteenth-century English phonology

This paper gives an account of plans for constructing a searchable database of eighteenth-century English phonology, an area which has hitherto received little attention from corpus linguistics. The project draws on a sample of eighteenth-century primary sources to construct a searchable database which will eventually provide visualisations of the distribution of phonological variants in time, space and social class. The project incorporates data from pronouncing dictionaries and other texts dealing with pronunciation published in the second half of the 18th century. The data will be recoded in the form of Unicode transcriptions of as many of the approximately 1,700 words used to exemplify John Wells’ (1982) Standard Lexical Sets as appear in the texts chosen, together with supplementary sets chosen to represent consonantal variants such as /hw/~/w/ in WHICH, etc. The use of these sets and their associated keywords is standard practice in studies of variation and change in English, and including the full range of example words allows for differences in lexical distribution between the eighteenth-century texts, and between these and the contemporary accents described by Wells. Although all the eighteenth-century texts purported to describe the ‘best’ English, they were compiled by authors from different parts of the English-speaking world (mainly different regions of England, Scotland and Ireland but including some from North America) and so can provide evidence for geographical diffusion of innovations. (Beal 1999, C. Jones 2006). The entries will be tagged according to the main lexical set to which they belong. Thus, a researcher interested in the distribution of words in Wells’s (1982) PRICE and CHOICE sets will be able to find how each of the example words from these sets was transcribed in each of the 18th-century sources included in the database. There will also be links to descriptive and prescriptive comments included in the primary sources. The database will also include metadata providing background information on the texts, such as place of publication, birthplace, occupation and social class of author, and bibliographical references to published work referring to these sources. This paper provides an account of the design of this database and presents the results of a pilot study demonstrating how such a database can be used to answer questions concerning the chronological, social, geographical and phonological distribution of variation between /hw/ ~/w/ ~ /h/ in WHICH, WHO, NOWHERE, etc. which is of interest to sociolinguists, dialectologists and historical phonologists

Integrating sequence and array data to create an improved 1000 Genomes Project haplotype reference panel

A major use of the 1000 Genomes Project (1000GP) data is genotype imputation in genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Here we develop a method to estimate haplotypes from low-coverage sequencing data that can take advantage of single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) microarray genotypes on the same samples. First the SNP array data are phased to build a backbone (or 'scaffold') of haplotypes across each chromosome. We then phase the sequence data 'onto' this haplotype scaffold. This approach can take advantage of relatedness between sequenced and non-sequenced samples to improve accuracy. We use this method to create a new 1000GP haplotype reference set for use by the human genetic community. Using a set of validation genotypes at SNP and bi-allelic indels we show that these haplotypes have lower genotype discordance and improved imputation performance into downstream GWAS samples, especially at low-frequency variants. © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved

On the mechanisms governing gas penetration into a tokamak plasma during a massive gas injection

A new 1D radial fluid code, IMAGINE, is used to simulate the penetration of gas into a tokamak plasma during a massive gas injection (MGI). The main result is that the gas is in general strongly braked as it reaches the plasma, due to mechanisms related to charge exchange and (to a smaller extent) recombination. As a result, only a fraction of the gas penetrates into the plasma. Also, a shock wave is created in the gas which propagates away from the plasma, braking and compressing the incoming gas. Simulation results are quantitatively consistent, at least in terms of orders of magnitude, with experimental data for a D 2 MGI into a JET Ohmic plasma. Simulations of MGI into the background plasma surrounding a runaway electron beam show that if the background electron density is too high, the gas may not penetrate, suggesting a possible explanation for the recent results of Reux et al in JET (2015 Nucl. Fusion 55 093013)

Modulating mitophagy in mitochondrial disease

Mitochondrial diseases may result from mutations in the maternally-inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) or from mutations in nuclear genes encoding mitochondrial proteins. Their bi-genomic nature makes mitochondrial diseases a very heterogeneous group of disorders that can present at any age and can affect any type of tissue. The autophagic-lysosomal degradation pathway plays an important role in clearing dysfunctional and redundant mitochondria through a specific quality control mechanism termed mitophagy. Mitochondria could be targeted for autophagic degradation for a variety of reasons including basal turnover for recycling, starvation induced degradation, and degradation due to damage. While the core autophagic machinery is highly conserved and common to most pathways, the signaling pathways leading to the selective degradation of damaged mitochondria are still not completely understood. Type 1 mitophagy due to nutrient starvation is dependent on PI3K (phosphoinositide 3-kinase) for autophagosome formation but independent of mitophagy proteins, PINK1 (PTEN-induced putative kinase 1) and Parkin. Whereas type 2 mitophagy that occurs due to damage is dependent on PINK1 and Parkin but does not require PI3K. Autophagy and mitophagy play an important role in human disease and hence could serve as therapeutic targets for the treatment of mitochondrial as well as neurodegenerative disorders. Therefore, we reviewed drugs that are known modulators of autophagy (AICAR and metformin) and may effect this by activating the AMP-activated protein kinase signaling pathways. Furthermore, we reviewed data available on supplements, such as Coenzyme Q and the quinone idebenone, that we assert rescue increased mitophagy in mitochondrial disease by benefiting mitochondrial function