Dative alternation in Indian English: a corpus-based study

The dative alternation refers to the alternation between two constructions that denote some type of transfer: the double object construction (I give my sister a book) vs. the to-dative construction (I give a book to my sister). We examined the motivations behind the dative alternation in Indian English. A corpus study was performed based on a sample of N = 943 sentences that were drawn from the Kolhapur corpus. Using a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis, we evaluated the effect of 14 predictors that are known to influence the dative alternation in other macro-regional varieties of English. Three predictors were found to be significant: the verb (modeled as a random intercept), the pronominality of the Recipient and the difference in length between the Recipient and the Theme. Our results further corroborate earlier findings that the to-dative construction is more frequently used in Indian English than in other varieties. We argue that the latter tendency may be associated with a transfer from Hindi

The impact of production interruptions on kitting, an analytical study

Nowadays, customers request more variation in a company's product assortment leading to an increased amount of parts moving around on the shop floor. To cope with this tendency, a kitting process can be implemented. As it gathers the necessary parts into a container prior to assembly, kitting enables a more cost-efficient and qualitative production. However, the performance of this preparation technique in an assembly process has merely been investigated. Therefore, we study a kitting process with two parts as a continuous-time Markovian queueing model. In particular, our study assess the impact of production interruptions on kitting

The rise of ergativity in Hindi: assessing the role of grammaticalization

This article investigates the origins and development of the ergative patterning in Hindi. Following traditional Indo-Aryan scholarship, two evolutions are discerned: (i) the reanalysis of a passive as an ergative construction, and (ii) the development of an ergative case marker ne. Three different hypotheses have been postulated in the literature to account for the latter change, two of which suggest a grammaticalization path: the first argues for a case marker as a possible source, the second points towards a lexical source. The third hypothesis maintains that language contact is involved in the change. We scrutinize all three hypotheses and conclude that the ne-clitic is borrowed from Old Rajasthani and introduced in analogy to other clitics, which were already in use as reinforcers of existing case functions. We argue furthermore that the rise of the ergative marker can only be adequately explained in relation to the constructional change in (i). Drawing on the traditional account which traces the origins of the ergative construction back to a former passive construction through reanalysis, we argue that it was actually this constructional reanalysis that allowed the introduction of an ergative marker in the language

Stochastic modelling of energy harvesting for low power sensor nodes

Battery lifetime is a key impediment to long-lasting low power sensor nodes. Energy or power harvesting mitigates the ependency on battery power, by converting ambient energy into electrical energy. This energy can then be used by the device for data collection and transmission. This paper proposes and analyses a queueing model to assess performance of such an energy harvesting sensor node. Accounting for energy harvesting, data collection and data transmission opportunities, the sensor node is modelled as a paired queueing system. The system has two queues, one representing accumulated energy and the other being the data queue. By means of some numerical examples, we investigate the energy-information trade-off

The acquisition of the English dative alternation by Russian foreign language learners

Ditransitive verbs include a “recipient” and a “theme” argument (in addition to the subject). The choice of putting one argument before the other (i.e., either recipient-theme, or theme-recipient) is associated with multiple discourse-pragmatic factors. Language have different options to code the ditransitive construction. In English, a ditransitive verb can take two alternating patterns (“the dative alternation”): the Double Object Construction (DOC) (John gives Mary a book) and the to-dative construction (to-dative) (John gives a book to Mary). In Russian, theme and recipient are marked by accusative and dative, respectively. In addition, word order is flexible and either the accusative-marked theme (Pjotr dal knigu Marii), or the dative-marked recipient (Pjotr dal Marii knigu) can come first. This article reports on two sentence rating experiments (acceptability judgments) to test whether Russian learners of English transfer their preferences about the theme-recipient order in Russian to the ditransitive construction in English. A total of 284 Russian students were tested. Results for both tests showed a great variability in the ratings. A comparison of the ratings seems to suggest a small positive correlation, but no statistically significant relation was found between the order preferences in both languages. However, we found a small preference for the use of the to-dative, which we relate to the language acquisition process as proposed by Processability Theory