A typology of northwestern Bantu gender systems

Northwestern Bantu is the most linguistically diverse area of the Bantu-speaking world. Several unusual grammatical gender systems are reported for this area, but there has been a lack of comprehensive comparative studies. This article is a typological investigation of northwestern Bantu gender systems based on a sample of 179 languages. We study the distribution of various patterns of animacy-based agreement in the languages of the sample and in relationship with the Agreement Hierarchy. We find that animacy-based agreement is widespread in northwestern Bantu. If restricted to animate nouns, it tends to coexist in stable variation with syntactic agreement. When generalized to both animate and inanimate nouns, animacy-based agreement appears to contribute to the erosion of gender marking. In line with the prediction of the Agreement Hierarchy, we find that animacy-based agreement is prevalent with verbs and pronouns. Within the noun phrase, it spreads in ways that are suggestive of a hierarchy of syntactic integration between nouns and adnominal modifiers, which had gone unnoticed in the existing literature. These results have important implications for current models of Bantu gender systems and shed new light on animacy effects in the diachrony of gender more generally

Arnold maps with noise: Differentiability and non-monotonicity of the rotation number

Arnold's standard circle maps are widely used to study the quasi-periodic route to chaos and other phenomena associated with nonlinear dynamics in the presence of two rationally unrelated periodicities. In particular, the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon is a crucial component of climate variability on interannual time scales and it is dominated by the seasonal cycle, on the one hand, and an intrinsic oscillatory instability with a period of a few years, on the other. The role of meteorological phenomena on much shorter time scales, such as westerly wind bursts, has also been recognized and modeled as additive noise. We consider herein Arnold maps with additive, uniformly distributed noise. When the map's nonlinear term, scaled by the parameter $\epsilon$, is sufficiently small, i.e. $\epsilon < 1$, the map is known to be a diffeomorphism and the rotation number $\rho_{\omega}$ is a differentiable function of the driving frequency $\omega$. We concentrate on the rotation number's behavior as the nonlinearity becomes large, and show rigorously that $\rho _{\omega }$ is a differentiable function of $\omega$, even for $\epsilon \geq 1$, at every point at which the noise-perturbed map is mixing. We also provide a formula for the derivative of the rotation number. The reasoning relies on linear-response theory and a computer-aided proof. In the diffeomorphism case of $\epsilon <1$, the rotation number $\rho_{\omega }$ behaves monotonically with respect to $\omega$. We show, using again a computer-aided proof, that this is not the case when $\epsilon \geq 1$ and the map is not a diffeomorphism.Comment: Electronic copy of final peer-reviewed manuscript accepted for publication in the Journal of Statistical Physic

A typology of northwestern Bantu gender systems

Northwestern Bantu is the most linguistically diverse area of the Bantu-speaking world. Several unusual grammatical gender systems are reported for this area, but there has been a lack of comprehensive comparative studies. This article is a typological investigation of northwestern Bantu gender systems based on a sample of 179 languages. We study the distribution of various patterns of animacy-based agreement in the languages of the sample and in relationship with the Agreement Hierarchy. We find that animacy-based agreement is widespread in northwestern Bantu. If restricted to animate nouns, it tends to coexist in stable variation with syntactic agreement. When generalized to both animate and inanimate nouns, animacy-based agreement appears to contribute to the erosion of gender marking. In line with the prediction of the Agreement Hierarchy, we find that animacy-based agreement is prevalent with verbs and pronouns. Within the noun phrase, it spreads in ways that are suggestive of a hierarchy of syntactic integration between nouns and adnominal modifiers, which had gone unnoticed in the existing literature. These results have important implications for current models of Bantu gender systems and shed new light on animacy effects in the diachrony of gender more generally.Peer reviewe

Sociogeographic correlates of typological variation in northwestern Bantu gender systems

This paper investigates the sociolinguistic factors that impact the typology and evolution of grammatical gender systems in northwestern Bantu, the most diverse area of the Bantu-speaking world. We base our analyses on a typological classification of 179 northwestern Bantu languages, focusing on various instances of semantic agreement and their role in the erosion of gender marking. In addition, we conduct in-depth analyses of the sociolinguistics and population history of the 17 languages of the sample with the most eroded gender systems. The sociohistorical factors identified to explain these highly eroded systems are then translated into a set of explanatory variables, which we use to conduct extensive quantitative analyses on the 179 language sample. These variables are population size, longitude, latitude, relationship with the Central African rainforest, and border with Ubangi/Central Sudanic languages. All these measures are relevant, with population size and bordering with Ubangi/Central Sudanic being the most robust factors in accounting for the distribution of gender restructuring. We conclude that fine-tuned variable design tailored to language and area-specific ecologies is crucial to the advancement of quantitative sociolinguistic typology.Peer reviewe

Sociogeographic correlates of typological variation in northwestern Bantu gender systems

This paper investigates the sociolinguistic factors that impact the typology and evolution of grammatical gender systems in northwestern Bantu, the most diverse area of the Bantu-speaking world. We base our analyses on a typological classification of 179 northwestern Bantu languages, focusing on various instances of semantic agreement and their role in the erosion of gender marking. In addition, we conduct in-depth analyses of the sociolinguistics and population history of the 17 languages of the sample with the most eroded gender systems. The sociohistorical factors identified to explain these highly eroded systems are then translated into a set of explanatory variables, which we use to conduct extensive quantitative analyses on the 179 language sample. These variables are population size, longitude, latitude, relationship with the Central African rainforest, and border with Ubangi/Central Sudanic languages. All these measures are relevant, with population size and bordering with Ubangi/Central Sudanic being the most robust factors in accounting for the distribution of gender restructuring. We conclude that fine-tuned variable design tailored to language and area-specific ecologies is crucial to the advancement of quantitative sociolinguistic typology

Variable renewal rate and growth properties of cell populations in colon crypts

A nonlinear mathematical model is used to investigate the time evolution of the cell populations in colon crypts (stem, semidifferentiated and fully differentiated cells). To mimic pathological alteration of the biochemical pathways leading to abnormal proliferative activity of the population of semidifferentiated cells their renewal rate is assumed to be dependent on the population size. Then, the effects of such perturbation on the population dynamics are investigated theoretically. Using both theoretical methods and numerical simulations it is shown that the increase in the renewal rate of semidifferentiated cells strongly impacts the dynamical behavior of the cell populations

Optical Nanoantennas for Energy Harvesting

In the last decade, the increasing demand for renewable energy has been leading to the development of new devices, which overcome the disadvantages of the traditional photovoltaic conversion and exploit the thermal radiation created by the Sun, that is transferred in the form of electromagnetic waves into free space and finally absorbed by the surface of the Earth [1-2]. These new devices, called nanoantennas, have only recently been considered thanks to the development of electron beam lithography and similar techniques. Nanoantennas operate at nanometers wavelengths and their dimensions range from a few hundred nanometres to a few microns. They exhibit potential advantages in terms of polarization, tunability, and rapid time response. Furthermore, the nanoscale dimensions, combined with the high electric field enhancement in the antenna gap, enable a small device footprint, making it compact enough to be monolithically integrated with electronics and auxiliary optics [3]. Similar to traditional RF antennas, nanoantennas capture the incident visible or infrared electromagnetic wave causing an AC current onto the antenna surface, such that it oscillates at the same frequency of that of the wave. The movement of the electrons produces an alternating current in the antenna circuit. A proper rectifier coupled with nanoantenna is used in order to produce a DC power [3]. This rectifier contains one or more diodes whose power loss and fast response can influence the whole device efficiency. This circuit is known as rectenna and the typical block diagram and the equivalent circuit are shown in figure 1-2 [3-4]. Infrared nanoantennas are also coupled to a metallic thermocouple. The rectification mechanism is based on the Seebeck effect, a thermoelectric voltage generation due to the infrared irradiation induced currents in the antenna. Figure 3 shows the electric equivalent circuit of the antenna-coupled thermocouples [5]. The purpose of this contribution is to critically compare advantages and disadvantages of new optical nanoantennas for energy harvesting, focusing on the state of the art and its perspectives. Nanoantennas for visible radiation reveal better upper bound limits in terms of efficiency and available power density, table 1 [4]. Infrared nanoantennas can work even in the absence of solar radiation, but the efficiency is still very low. Some technological issues have to be taken into account before these commercial devices are put on the market. They mainly regard the circuits between the antenna and the load. Nonetheless, they show a greater efficiency than traditional PV solar cells and could be an alternative to the latter in the energy harvesting process in the next future

A sampling technique for worldwide comparisons of language contact scenarios

International audienceExisting sampling methods in language typology strive to control for areal biases in typological datasets as a means to avoid contact effects in the distribution of linguistic structure. However, none of these methods provide ways to directly compare contact scenarios from a typological perspective. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a sampling procedure for worldwide comparisons of language contact scenarios. The sampling unit consists of sets of three languages. The Focus Language is the language whose structures we examine in search for contact effects; the Neighbor Language is genealogically unrelated to the Focus Language, and counts as the potential source of contact influence on the Focus Language; the Benchmark Language is a relative of the Focus Language neither in contact with the Focus nor with the Neighbor language, and is used for disentangling contact effects from genealogical inheritance in the Focus Language. Through this design, we compiled a sample of 49 three-language sets (147 languages in total), which we present here. By switching the focus of typological sampling from individual languages to contact relations between languages, our method has the potential of uncovering patterns in the diffusion of language structures, and how they vary and change

Language structures may adapt to the sociolinguistic environment, but it matters what and how you count : A typological study of verbal and nominal complexity

In this article we evaluate claims that language structure adapts to sociolinguistic environment. We present the results of two typological case studies examining the effects of the number of native (=L1) speakers and the proportion of adult second language (=L2) learners on language structure. Data from more than 300 languages suggest that testing the effect of population size and proportion of adult L2 learners on features of verbal and nominal complexity produces conflicting results on different grammatical features. The results show that verbal inflectional synthesis adapts to the sociolinguistic environment but the number of genders does not. The results also suggest that modeling population size together with proportion of L2 improves model fit compared to modeling them independently of one another. We thus argue that surveying population size alone may be insufficient to detect possible adaptation of linguistic structure to the sociolinguistic environment. Rather, other features, such as proportion of L2 speakers, prestige and social network density, should be studied, and if demographic numeric data are used, they should not be used in isolation but rather in competition with other sociolinguistic features. We also suggest that not all types of language structures within a given grammatical domain are equally sensitive to the effect of sociolinguistic variables, and that more exploratory studies are needed before we can arrive at a reliable set of grammatical features that may be potentially most (and least) adaptive to social structures.Peer reviewe

Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity II: World-wide comparative studies

The many facets of grammatical gender remain one of the most fruitful areas of linguistic research, and pose fascinating questions about the origins and development of complexity in language.&nbsp;The present work is a two-volume collection of 13 chapters on the topic of grammatical gender seen through the prism of linguistic complexity. The contributions discuss what counts as complex and/or simple in grammatical gender systems, whether the distribution of gender systems across the world’s languages relates to the language ecology and social history of speech communities. Contributors demonstrate how the complexity of gender systems can be studied synchronically, both in individual languages and over large cross-linguistic samples, and diachronically, by exploring how gender systems change over time. Volume two consists of three chapters providing diachronic and typological case studies, followed by a final chapter discussing old and new theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of the dynamics of gender complexity. This volume is preceded by volume one, which, in addition to three chapters on the theoretical foundations of gender complexity, contains six chapters on grammatical gender and complexity in individual languages and language families of Africa, New Guinea, and South Asia