The Morality of Orality: Grace Paley's Stories

The late Grace Paley was one of the great writers of the twentieth century, loved for her humanity and humor and admired for her brilliant, witty, deeply provocative prose fiction. Her literary voice is sui generis – pungent, familiar, and utterly recognizable – yet few know how to place her fiction. It could be categorized in the vernacular tradition of American literature because the speech of her narrators is not the elevated voice of the belles lettres establishment, but the regionally specific colloquial speech of ordinary people. According to Leo Marx, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain were the earliest practitioners of the American vernacular; their narrators spoke not English but American, affirming their particular regionality against the faceless gentility of the east coast or of Europe, and the democratic equality of all men against the hierarchies of race and class. Grace Paley's narrators, ordinary middle-aged women, push this radical equality further. Their colloquial speech and daily concerns challenge conventional literary notions of the subject matter of fiction as well as the class, gender, and racial identities of its speakers

Acoustic emphasis in four year olds

Acoustic emphasis may convey a range of subtle discourse distinctions, yet little is known about how this complex ability develops in children. This paper presents a first investigation of the factors which influence the production of acoustic prominence in young children’s spontaneous speech. In a production experiment, SVO sentences were elicited from 4 year olds who were asked to describe events in a video. Children were found to place more acoustic prominence both on ‘new’ words and on words that were ‘given’ but had shifted to a more accessible position within the discourse. This effect of accessibility concurs with recent studies of adult speech. We conclude that, by age four, children show appropriate, adult-like use of acoustic prominence, suggesting sensitivity to a variety of discourse distinctions

Figures of speech : figurative expressions and the management of topic transition in conversation

In conversation, speakers occasionally use figurative expressions such as “had a good innings,” “take with a pinch of salt,” or “come to the end of her tether.” This article investigates WHERE in conversation such expressions are used, in terms of their sequential distribution. One clear distributional pattern is found: Figurative expressions occur regularly in topic transition sequences, and specifically in the turn where a topic is summarized, thereby initiating the closing of a topic. The paper discusses some of the distinctive features of the topic termination/transition sequences with which figurative closings are associated, particularly participants' orientation to their moving to new topics. Finally, the interactional use of figurative expressions is considered in the context of instances where their use fails to secure topical closure, manifesting some conflict (disaffiliation, etc.) between the participants

A comparison of imagery evoked by silent reading with imagery evoked by listening in grades three, five and six,

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University N.B.: pages 123 and 124 appear to be missing from the manuscript. We believe that this is a page numbering error on the part of the author, and no content is actually missing

Increased Salt-Sensitivity in Endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase-Knockout Mice

Background: Although impaired nitric oxide production contributes importantly to salt-sensitivity, the role of the endothelial isoform of nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) has received little attention. In the present study we compared the effects of a high-salt diet on the blood pressure response of eNOS knockout (eNOS−/−) and control (eNOS+/+) mice. Methods: Mean arterial pressure (MAP), heart rate, pulse pressure, and activity levels were recorded by telemetry in mice fed a regular-salt diet (0.7% NaCl) followed by 6 weeks on either a high-salt (8% NaCl) or regular-salt diet. Results: The eNOS−/− mice exhibited a 15% increase in MAP and a 2- to 2.5-fold increase in salt-sensitivity relative to the control strain. Salt-induced increases in MAP were well sustained in eNOS−/−, whereas in eNOS+/+ the initial increase was biphasic. The effects of salt on MAP were particularly pronounced during locomotor activity, during the dark phase, and at the peak levels of MAP recorded over the course of the day. The high-salt diet also led to a transient increase in the proportion of time spent active. Levels of heart rate and pulse pressure were relatively unaffected by the high-salt diet. Conclusion: The eNOS−/− mice exhibit an increased blood pressure response to a high-salt diet. This finding suggests that eNOS normally provides an important contribution to the body's adaptation to a salt load and that reduced production of NO by eNOS may promote salt-sensitivity and salt-induced hypertensio

Dielectric properties of colossal permittivity materials: An update

During the last 10 years, a lot of interests have been devoted to the so-called CDC (colossal dielectric constant) materials. The first materials exhibiting this behavior were the perovskite-based ceramics on the CCTO (CaCu3Ti4O12) composition. Relative dielectric permittivity can attain values up to (or even larger than) 105. Nevertheless, their dielectric losses are too high, the lower values ranging 10%, in a narrow frequency range, thus limiting their applications. The underlying physical mechanisms at the origin of the CDC are still under study. The analysis of broadband impedance spectroscopy measurements leads most of the authors to propose an interfacial polarization mechanism (at the electrodes or at internal barriers), there is a limited number of complementary electrical characterization techniques, which, up to now, comfort the proposed interfacial polarization mechanisms. In the present work, I-V and time-domain polarization are used to characterize these materials. One of the main results is the observation of a non-symmetrical response of these materials related to the direction of the polarization. These results are observed for both macroscopic level on bulk polycrystalline material and within individual grains of the same samples. These results do not fit current accepted models for polarization for CDC materials

Singular perception, multiple perspectives through we: constructing intersubjective meaning in English and German

This paper presents the results of a corpus-based investigation of the role of the first-person plural pronoun in the construction of intersubjective meaning among evidential perception verbs in written and spoken English and German (mainly written). Whereas the first-person singular pronoun only signifies that the evidence rests solely with the speaker/writer, the first-person plural pronoun allows a much wider range of intersubjective meanings concerning the nature of the evidence. It is also shown how English and German perception verbs express intersubjective evidential meaning in a number of different complementation patterns, how the type of this meaning is often linked to these patterns, and how the use of the first-person plural pronoun can vary among and within these constructions

Household Cooking with Solid Fuels Contributes to Ambient PM2.5 Air Pollution and the Burden of Disease

Approximately 2.8 billion people cook with solid fuels, and research has focused on the health impacts of household exposures to fine particulate (PM2.5). Here, as part of the 2010 Global Burden of Disease project, we evaluate the impact of household cooking with solid fuels on regional ambient PM2.5 pollution. We estimated the proportion of ambient PM2.5 (APM2.5) from PM2.5-cooking for the years 1990, 2005, and 2010 in 176 countries, and use these to estimate ambient concentrations of PM2.5 attributable to household cooking with solid fuels (PM2.5-cooking). We used an energy supply-driven emissions model (GAINS) to calculate the fraction of total household PM2.5 emissions produced by cooking with solid fuels, by country. These findings were multiplied by the proportion of total APM2.5 attributable to household emissions, as calculated with the source-receptor model TM5-FASST, to obtain the proportion of total APM2.5 from PM2.5-cooking. In 2010, the proportion of APM2.5 from PM2.5-cooking ranged from 0% of total APM2.5 in six higher-income regions, to 44% (8 µg/m3 of 18 µg/m3 16 total) in Southern sub-Saharan Africa. PM2.5-cooking constituted >10% of APM2.5 in eight regions with 4 billion people, with a global mean of 14%. Globally, the mean population-weighted outdoor air pollution contribution of household cooking was 4 µg/m3 , with the highest contribution of 10 µg/m3 in South Asia. We conclude that PM2.5 emissions from household cooking constitute an important portion of APM2.5 concentrations in many regions, including India and China. Efforts to improve ambient air quality will be hindered if household cooking conditions are not addressed.JRC.H.2-Air and Climat

Foreigner talk through word reduction in native/non-native spoken interactions

We explore the properties of foreigner talk through word reduction. Word reduction signals that the speaker is referring to the same entity as previously and should be preserved for foreigner talk. However, it leads to intelligibility loss, which works against foreigner talk. Pairs of speakers engaged in a task where native speakers talked either to a native or non-native listener. Natives talking to non-natives performed foreigner talk for duration and intensity. Duration and intensity were reduced for native and non-native listeners equally. These results suggest that word reduction is insensitive to communicative adjustments in the context of foreign talk.This work was supported by grants from the Spanish Government (PSI2011-23033, Consolider Ingenio 2010 CSD2007-00012) and the Catalan government (Consolidat SGR 2009-1521). Sara RodríguezCuadrado was supported by a predoctoral fellowship from the Spanish Government (FPU 2008–2012). Cristina Baus was supported by the People Program (Marie Curie Actions, FP7- PEOPLE 2014–2016) under REA agreement n° 623845.We would like to thank Sumeer Chadha, Joanna Corey and Carlos Romero-Rivas for their assistance during data recruitment and manuscript elaboration