It's not what you expected! The surprising nature of cleft alternatives in French and English

While much prior literature on the meaning of clefts—such as the English form “it is X who Z-ed”—concentrates on the nature and status of the exhaustivity inference (“nobody/nothing other than X Z”), we report on experiments examining the role of the doxastic status of alternatives on the naturalness of c'est-clefts in French and it-clefts in English. Specifically, we study the hypothesis that clefts indicate a conflict with a doxastic commitment held by some discourse participant. Results from naturalness tasks suggest that clefts are improved by a property we term “contrariness” (along the lines of Zimmermann, 2008). This property has a gradient effect on felicity judgments: the more strongly interlocutors appear committed to an apparently false notion, the better it is to repudiate them with a cleft.Published versio

Clefts: Quite the contrary!

Much of the previous literature on English it-clefts – sentences of the form ‘It is X that Z’ – concentrates on the nature and status of the exhaustivity inference (‘nobody/nothing other than X Z’). This paper concerns the way in which it-clefts signal contrast. We argue that it-clefts signal a type of contrast that does not merely involve a salient antecedent, as on more traditional characterizations of contrast such as those of e.g. Kiss (1998) and Rooth (1992), but also involves a conflict between the speaker’s and the hearer’s beliefs, as under the characterization of contrast given by Zimmermann (2008, 2011), which we term contrariness. Results of a felicity judgment experiment suggest that clefts do have a preference for contrariness, and one which has a gradient effect on felicity judgments: the more strongly interlocutors appear committed to an apparently false notion, the better it is to repudiate them with a cleft.https://4f669968-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/sinnundbedeutung21/proceedings-preprints/Destruel-Beaver-Coppock-SuB2016-FINAL.pdf?attachauth=ANoY7cpfzckWBy6psH6QCmbOCeXWS2nlL4bGgHHud2GpjKB1YQolksB00UtYzuvPRANOzWvWgfHdLZ7BP8zDYcT5wYIwr-1dBjw2g0-TC0Bic1ByVfjgj68pPdE9novwXm427ehkZI1E59JmiIvJnBKGxzYpI_AxMcKc-gEQuzu6DHXwJoLtzwm1FzFaHEX1LBq_yFSDgBzZajW2AHEFSiqmz1OVPTICm4zLB30AaHUxrtTBhWI1r0pmmX42IwVk9DtYfp0m6uvrsJLxJuvDhBPe-l3sJmHPcH2qhAtt6wqVMT7b-H6wX08=&attredirects=0Published versio

Évaluation de l’intégration des élevages en polyculture-polyélevage en agriculture biologique

Face aux enjeux de la transition agricole et écologique, l’agriculture biologique appréciée des consommateurs, peut être une solution pour rendre les fermes plus durables. Malgré ses avantages, elle présente cependant des limites qui peuvent être comblées par une diversification du système au niveau du sol et du troupeau. Dans ce dernier cas cela passe par la mise en place d’un second atelier d’élevage. Ainsi, ces systèmes sont qualifiés d’exploitations de polyculture-polyélevage et présentent d’autres avantages théoriques qui dépendent de l’intensité et de la fréquence des interactions entre les composantes de la ferme (cultures, prairies et ateliers d’élevages) : c’est l’intégration. Ce stage s’inscrit dans le cadre du projet européen MIX-ENABLE, et a pour objectif d’identifier des profils d’intégration des exploitations de polyculture-polyélevage tout en appliquant la méthode exploratoire définie par ce projet. Cette dernière consiste à calculer, pour les fermes françaises enquêtées dans le cadre du projet, des indicateurs évaluant l’intégration. Pour cela, une analyse multivariée et une classification des fermes a été réalisée. Ces analyses statistiques mettent en évidence 8 indicateurs permettant de qualifier l’intégration de ces fermes. Ils traduisent les pratiques au sein de la ferme, la gestion des ventes et l’organisation du travail. Étant donné le manque de connaissances criant sur ces systèmes, cette étude pose les bases des futurs axes de recherches, tant dans ses résultats que dans sa méthodologie

Reality in Fantasy: linguistic analysis of fictional languages

Thesis advisor: Margaret ThomasThis research paper aims to compare fictional languages, in particular those created in works of science fiction, to natural languages. After an introduction to conlangs in general, and to Quenya, Klingon, Dothraki and Na’vi specifically, Greenberg’s linguistic universals will be used to test their resemblance to natural languages, and suggest a taxonomy of fictional languages.Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2016.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Linguistics

Urinalysis Screening for Rural Communities

Access to medical care and health screenings is a necessity for patients around the globe, but it can be difficult to provide this without screenings becoming costly or convoluted. In rural and underdeveloped areas, patients are often disadvantaged when it comes to finding reliable and affordable healthcare. The isolation provided by their location and the rising costs of physicians makes it impossible for most impoverished communities to attain personalized care. Because of this, treatable diseases often go unaddressed, allowing diseases to progress to a critical condition. Mortality rates have shown to be higher in communities located in rural areas and among destitute economies. Telemedicine is one solution to improve rural health care by allowing patients to have remote access to health services. Our goal for this project would be to provide simple and fast diagnosis to detect urine albumin levels, urobilinogen, nitrite, as well as pH and glucose levels combined with telemedicine to provide reliable results. Thus far, we have completed tests for the previously mentioned parameters and have reached out to the World Health Partners in order to propose collaboration on the project. We have also reached out to the Computer Engineering team in order to normalize the images captured by the diagnostic device. Once the project reaches its conclusion, we believe that the introduction of this device into rural areas would effectively monitor patient health as well as improve the overall quality of life for those in impoverished conditions

Intonational encoding of focus in Toulousian French

Previous studies on focus marking in French have shown that post-focus deaccentuation, phrasing and phonetic cues like peak height and duration are employed to encode narrow focus but tonal patterns appear to be irrelevant. These studies either examined Standard French or did not control for the regional varieties spoken by the speakers. The present study investigated the use of all these cues in expressing narrow focus in naturally spoken declarative sentences in Toulousian French. It was found that similar to Standard French, Toulousian French uses post-focus deaccentuation and phrasing to mark focus. Different from Standard French, Toulousian French does not use the phonetic cues but use tonal patterns to encode focus. Tonal patterns ending with H\% occur more frequently in the VPs when the subject is in focus but tonal patterns ending with L\% occur more frequently in the VPs when the object is in focus. Our study thus provides a first insight into the similarities and differences in focus marking between Toulousian French and Standard French

Potential of multi-species livestock farming to improve the sustainability of livestock farms: A review.

Diversified farming systems are proposed as a major mechanism to address the many sustainability issues of today's agriculture. Multi-species livestock farming, i.e. keeping two or more animal species simultaneously on the same farm, is an option that has received little attention to date. Moreover, most studies of multi-species livestock farming are limited, usually focusing on selected dimensions of farm sustainability and addressing lower organizational levels (i.e. within the farm) and rather limited time horizons (e.g. a few weeks in a grazing season). Thus, a comprehensive assessment of multi-species livestock farming in terms of farm sustainability is lacking. In this context, we outline and discuss potential benefits and limitations of multi-species livestock farming for livestock farm sustainability from existing literature and list issues on multi-species livestock farming requiring further research. We show that multi-species livestock farming has the potential to improve the three dimensions of sustainability reviewed - economic viability for farmers, environmental soundness and social acceptability by being respectful of animals and humans - as long as locally relevant farming practices are implemented, especially an appropriate stocking rate during grazing. If relevant practices are not observed, multi-species livestock farming may produce undesirable effects, such as competition for resource acquisition during grazing, parasitic cross-infection and more intense work peaks. Therefore, we identify four focal research areas for multi-species livestock farming. First, characterizing the management of multi-species livestock farms. To do this, we suggest considering the integration of production enterprises (e.g. cattle and sheep enterprises) within the farm from three perspectives: farming practices (e.g. grazing management), work organization and sales. Second, exploring the complementarity of livestock species on multi-species livestock farms. This is especially true for species combinations that have been largely ignored (e.g. ruminants and monogastrics), even though they may have potential due to complementary diet compositions and resource-acquisition strategies. Third, assessing the sustainability of multi-species livestock farm scenarios (current or alternative) according to the management practices and production conditions, which requires adapting existing methods/models or developing new ones. Fourth, characterizing conditions for success and obstacles for multi-species livestock farming along the value chain from production to consumption, considering stakeholders' objectives, work habits and constraints. Increasing understanding should help prioritize actions and organize them to scale up multi-species livestock farming