Drought tolerance of land races of emmer wheat in comparison to soft wheat

As water deficiency becomes a more frequent cause of the reduction in wheat yield levels, the search for donors of drought tolerance to be bred into adapted land races becomes urgent. Drought tolerance has been evaluated by the 13 C discrimination method in six land races of emmer wheat ( Triticum dicoccum SCHRANK), compared with land races, obsolete cultivars and modern varieties of soft wheat ( Triticum aestivum L.). The results of a two-year trial show that most of the genetic resources of emmer wheat, and intermediate land races of wheat are predisposed to drought tolerance. These varieties respond to dry conditions more sensitively, as they close their pores earlier (a lower value of the discrimination of 13 C isotope). As for other land races and the top modern varieties of soft wheat, they are not thought to be predisposed to drought tolerance and their crop stands are liable to serious damage

Gather/numerous as a mass/count opposition

International audiencePredicates like gather and be numerous have both been described as 'collective predicates,' since they predicate something of a plurality. The two classes of predicates differ, however, with respect to plural quantifiers (e.g. all), which are grammatical with gather-type predicates but ungrammatical with numerous-type predicates. Here, I show that the gather/numerous opposition derives from mereological properties that are familiar from the domains of telicity and mass/count. I address problems of undergeneration and overgeneration with two technical innovations: first, I weaken the property of divisibility to Champollion's (2015) property of stratified reference; second, I provide mechanisms to rule out accidental satisfaction of the logical property. From a broader perspective, we place collective predication in a larger context by building empirical connections to mass/count and collectivity across semantic domains