Performatives and (im)perfective aspect

Michael Meeuwis, Astrid De Wit & Frank Brisard Performatives and (im)perfective aspect (lecture) This paper represents the first (methodological) step in a cross-linguistic study on the relation between performativity and aspect. It starts from the observation that verbs, when used as performatives, are typically inflected with (present) perfective aspect. This can be motivated on the basis of the indexical quality of performatively used verbs: the activity referred to by performatives (such as I promise to come) can be said to coincide exactly with the act of referring to it. Thus, we may say that the denoted situation (the speech act of promising) is in fact constituted by the speech event (Langacker 2001). As a result, the situation at issue is fully conceptualized at the time of speaking by definition, which would typically trigger perfective aspectual marking: perfective expressions designate situations that are treated as known and closed. Imperfective aspect, in contrast, is associated with construing situations as incomplete and open. For instance, using progressive marking (a kind of imperfective aspect) in an utterance like I’m promising to come has the effect of turning it into a mere description of an ongoing event, thereby canceling its performative character. It is possible, however, that this assumption of a correlation between performativity and perfectivity is biased by a privileging of examples from English, in which performative contexts obligatorily feature the simple present (and the simple present is commonly assumed to have a perfective value; cf. Brinton (1988), Smith (1997: 110-112, 185-186), Williams (2002: 128-166) and De Wit et al. (2013)). However, data from Slavic -- the only language family for which the relation between performativity and aspect has been examined thoroughly (cf. Israeli 2001; Dickey forthcoming) -- indicate an opposite tendency: most Slavic languages, especially from the eastern branch (such as Russian), almost exclusively allow imperfective verbs in performative contexts. Jaggar (2006) furthermore indicates that performative expressions in Hausa trigger both perfective and imperfective marking. The correlation therefore needs to be checked cross-linguistically, an endeavor that requires a suitable questionnaire offering contexts that are universally accepted as triggering performative uses. Our purpose is to present such a questionnaire and to discuss its methodological potential and limitations. A crucial element will be to elicit and identify performatives without having to resort to aspectual tests, such as in English (present simple vs progressive). By wayof a pilot study, we will also offer our first findings based on native speaker elicitations in Lingala, Turkish and Sranan

Comparative advantages in estimating markups

Vergelijking van drie modellen voor het schatten van prijs-/kostenmarges in de industrie. De prijs-/ kostenmarge geeft een indicatie van de mate van concurrentie tussen bedrijven. Die is van belang voor consumenten, omdat zij te veel betalen als er te weinig concurrentie is. Complexere leveren niet zonder meer betere resultaten. In het algemeen kan gesteld worden dat de extra middelen die nodig zijn om de complexere modellen toe te passen niet opwegen tegen de eventuele verbetering van de uitkomsten. De uitzondering op deze regel is de situatie waarin bij voorbaat al relatief veel bekend is over de te onderzoeken sector. Met name in een dergelijke situatie is de kans groot dat het gebruik van meer middelen zich vertaalt in een grotere kwaliteit van de resultaten.

Comparison of key unit costs and outcomes for mobile and fixed site screening/testing programs in Namibia

This repository item contains a single issue of the Health and Development Discussion Papers, an informal working paper series that began publishing in 2002 by the Boston University Center for Global Health and Development. It is intended to help the Center and individual authors to disseminate work that is being prepared for journal publication or that is not appropriate for journal publication but might still have value to readers

Performativity, progressive avoidance and aspect

Unlike other reports of ongoing actions, English explicit performatives do not normally take progressive form. This suggests that “there is something over and above a mere concurrent report” in utterances like I bet you I’ll win the race that is absent in utterances like I’m betting you I’ll win the race (Levinson 1983: 259). For Krifka (2014), an explicit performative describes not the utterance act being produced, but the adoption of a new commitment, which has already happened at encoding time. If this is so, however, we might expect to find preterit- or present-perfect-form performative clauses and it appears that we do not. Using cross-linguistic data from genetically and geographically unrelated languages, we establish a strong typological tendency: explicit performative utterances use the same verbal construction that is used for reporting states holding at coding time. We attribute this tendency to an epistemic commonality between explicit performatives and state reports. In addition, we offer an explanation for exceptional uses of progressive aspect in apparently performative expressions, noted by, e.g., Searle (1989). Building on Dahl (1985), we have developed a questionnaire that allows us to identify the aspectual distinctions made in individual languages and which of these categories are employed in the various performative contexts (as classified by Searle 1976). Imperfective aspect is used to encode performatives and present-time states in, e.g., Arabic, Turkish and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. In Bantu languages like Lingala and Kirundi, performative predications receive perfective encoding, and this same form is used to report states holding at present. Japanese and the Austronesian language Kilivila feature unmarked verb forms in both present state reports and performative expressions. Progressive aspect is systematically excluded in the languages of our sample. Thus, in light of these typological observations, the use of the English simple present in performative contexts is not unexpected. The fact that present-time states and performative events receive the same aspectual construal across languages suggests a semantic commonality that cannot be conceived in terms of boundedness, one of the major parameters used to describe aspectual distinctions. We argue instead that aspectual categories encode epistemic distinctions, and that states and performative events are similar at this epistemic level: the situation type expressed by a performative or state predication is verifiable at the time of speaking. States have the subinterval property, according to which every segment of a state counts as an instance of that state, including that segment that overlaps the speech event. In the case of performatives, the reporting event and the performed event (promising, etc.) are one and the same; therefore, performative events are verifiable as such at speech time. The few scholars who touch on performativity and aspect in English appear to assume that in the rare attestations of progressive perfomatives, the predication does not perform a speech act (like promising) but rather reports on one’s own performance, as in I’m not just saying, I’m promising (Langacker 1987; Verschueren 1995; Krifka 2014). However, this characterization is not evidently applicable to examples like I’m warning you, Mrs. Hinkle: one more obscenity and I’ll charge you with contempt, which does count as a warning. Analysis of COCA data reveals that one type of performative clause, the exercitive type (Austin 1962), involving verbs such as warn and order, accounts for the majority of progressive performative tokens. Following McGowan (2004), we assume that exercitive acts change the boundaries of permissible or appropriate conduct. We postulate that progressive-form exercitive acts do not change these boundaries but rather describe an effort to do so. More generally, progressive performatives are action glosses like I’m trying to repair this; they explain the purpose of ongoing actions, both linguistic and nonlinguistic. This account naturally extends to non-exercitive progressive performatives like I’m withdrawing as a candidate

Off-shell N=2 tensor supermultiplets

A multiplet calculus is presented for an arbitrary number n of N=2 tensor supermultiplets. For rigid supersymmetry the known couplings are reproduced. In the superconformal case the target spaces parametrized by the scalar fields are cones over (3n-1)-dimensional spaces encoded in homogeneous SU(2) invariant potentials, subject to certain constraints. The coupling to conformal supergravity enables the derivation of a large class of supergravity Lagrangians with vector and tensor multiplets and hypermultiplets. Dualizing the tensor fields into scalars leads to hypermultiplets with hyperkahler or quaternion-Kahler target spaces with at least n abelian isometries. It is demonstrated how to use the calculus for the construction of Lagrangians containing higher-derivative couplings of tensor multiplets. For the application of the c-map between vector and tensor supermultiplets to Lagrangians with higher-order derivatives, an off-shell version of this map is proposed. Various other implications of the results are discussed. As an example an elegant derivation of the classification of 4-dimensional quaternion-Kahler manifolds with two commuting isometries is given.Comment: 36 page

Residual resistivity due to wedge disclination dipoles in metals with rotational plasticity

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Weighted Supermembrane Toy Model

A weighted Hilbert space approach to the study of zero-energy states of supersymmetric matrix models is introduced. Applied to a related but technically simpler model, it is shown that the spectrum of the corresponding weighted Hamiltonian simplifies to become purely discrete for sufficient weights. This follows from a bound for the number of negative eigenvalues of an associated matrix-valued Schr\"odinger operator.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures; to appear in Lett. Math. Phys

Special geometry of Euclidean supersymmetry II: hypermultiplets and the c-map

We construct two new versions of the c-map which allow us to obtain the target manifolds of hypermultiplets in Euclidean theories with rigid N =2 supersymmetry. While the Minkowskian para-c-map is obtained by dimensional reduction of the Minkowskian vector multiplet lagrangian over time, the Euclidean para-c-map corresponds to the dimensional reduction of the Euclidean vector multiplet lagrangian. In both cases the resulting hypermultiplet target spaces are para-hyper-Kahler manifolds. We review and prove the relevant results of para-complex and para-hypercomplex geometry. In particular, we give a second, purely geometrical construction of both c-maps, by proving that the cotangent bundle N=T^*M of any affine special (para-)Kahler manifold M is para-hyper-Kahler.Comment: 36 pages, 1 figur

Vibration isolation with high thermal conductance for a cryogen-free dilution refrigerator

We present the design and implementation of a mechanical low-pass filter vibration isolation used to reduce the vibrational noise in a cryogen-free dilution refrigerator operated at 10 mK, intended for scanning probe techniques. We discuss the design guidelines necessary to meet the competing requirements of having a low mechanical stiffness in combination with a high thermal conductance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by measuring the vibrational noise levels of an ultrasoft mechanical resonator positioned above a SQUID. Starting from a cryostat base temperature of 8 mK, the vibration isolation can be cooled to 10.5 mK, with a cooling power of 113 $\mu$W at 100 mK. We use the low vibrations and low temperature to demonstrate an effective cantilever temperature of less than 20 mK. This results in a force sensitivity of less than 500 zN/$\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$, and an integrated frequency noise as low as 0.4 mHz in a 1 Hz measurement bandwidth

Pictorial Representation of Illness and Self Measure Revised II (PRISM-RII) – a novel method to assess perceived burden of illness in diabetes patients

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The Pictorial Representation of Illness and Self Measure (PRISM) has been introduced as a visual measure of suffering. We explored the validity of a revised version, the PRISM-RII, in diabetes patients as part of the annual review.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Participants were 308 adult outpatients with either type 1 or type 2 diabetes. Measures: (1) the PRISM-RII, yielding Self-Illness Separation (SIS) and Illness Perception Measure (IPM); (2) the Problem Areas in Diabetes (PAID) scale, a measure of diabetes-related distress; (3) the WHO-5 Well-Being Index; (4) and a validation question on suffering (SQ). In addition, patients' complication status, comorbidity and glycemic control values(HbA1c) were recorded.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Patients with complications did have marginally significant higher scores on IPM, compared to patients without complications. Type 2 patients had higher IPM scores than Type 1 patients. SIS and IPM showed low intercorrelation (<it>r </it>= -.25; <it>p </it>< .01). Convergent validity of PRISM-RII was demonstrated by significant correlations between IPM and PAID (<it>r </it>= 0.50; <it>p </it>< 0.01), WHO-5 (<it>r </it>= -.26; <it>p </it>< 0.01) and SQ (<it>r </it>= 0.36; <it>p </it>< 0.01). SIS showed only significant correlations with PAID (<it>r </it>= -0.28; <it>p </it>< 0.01) and SQ (<it>r </it>= -0.22; <it>p </it>< 0.01). Neither IPM nor SIS was significantly associated with HbA1c. The PRISM-RII appeared easy to use and facilitated discussion with care providers on coping with the burden of diabetes.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>PRISM-RII appears a promising additional tool to assess the psychological burden of diabetes.</p