First attestations. An Old Church Slavonic sampler

Corpus linguistics and computational approaches to language constitute an important trend in today’s linguistics, and Slavic historical linguistics is no exception. This chapter serves as an empirical touchstone for the entire volume. Using parallel Greek and Old Church Slavonic data from the PROIEL/ TOROT treebanks, the first attested state of the phenomena covered in the volume is explored, including their relationship to the Greek sources. The chapter covers accusatives with infinitives (Gavrančić this volume, Tomelleri this volume), absolute constructions (Mihaljević 2017), deverbal nouns (Tomelleri this volume), prepositional phrase connectors (Kisiel & Sobotka this volume), numeral syntax (Słoboda this volume), the ordering of pronominal clitics (Kosek, Čech & Navratilova this volume), tense use in performative declaratives (Dekker this volume) and relative clauses (Sonnenhauser & Eberle this volume; Podtergera 2020). The chapter presents corpus statistics on each of the phenomena, and a brief discussion of the possibility of influence from Greek. The chapters that provide their own studies of Old Church Slavonic data (Fuchsbauer this volume on “mock” articles, Pichkhadze this volume on syntactic blocking and Šimić this volume on negative concord), are not replicated, but brought into the discussion when relevant

Advantages and Limitations of Commercially Available Electrocuting Grids for Studying Mosquito Behaviour.

Mosquito feeding behaviour plays a major role in determining malaria transmission intensity and the impact of specific prevention measures. Human Landing Catch (HLC) is currently the only method that can directly and consistently measure the biting rates of anthropophagic mosquitoes, both indoors and outdoors. However, this method exposes the participant to mosquito-borne pathogens, therefore new exposure-free methods are needed to replace it. Commercially available electrocuting grids (EGs) were evaluated as an alternative to HLC using a Latin Square experimental design in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Both HLC and EGs were used to estimate the proportion of human exposure to mosquitoes occurring indoors (πi), as well as its two underlying parameters: the proportion of mosquitoes caught indoors (Pi) and the proportion of mosquitoes caught between the first and last hour when most people are indoors (Pfl). HLC and EGs methods accounted for 69% and 31% of the total number of female mosquitoes caught respectively and both methods caught more mosquitoes outdoors than indoors. Results from the gold standard HLC suggest that An. gambiae s.s. in Dar es Salaam is neither exophagic nor endophagic (Pi ≈ 0.5), whereas An. arabiensis is exophagic (Pi < < 0.5). Both species prefer to feed after 10 pm when most people are indoors (Pfl > >0.5). EGs yielded estimates of Pi for An. gambiae s.s., An. arabiensis and An. coustani, that were approximately equivalent to those with HLC but significantly underestimated Pfl for An. gambiae s.s. and An. coustani. The relative sampling sensitivity of EGs declined over the course of the night (p ≤ 0.001) for all mosquito taxa except An. arabiensis. Commercial EGs sample human-seeking mosquitoes with high sensitivity both indoors and outdoors and accurately measure the propensity of Anopheles malaria vectors to bite indoors rather than outdoors. However, further modifications are needed to stabilize sampling sensitivity over a full nocturnal cycle so that they can be used to survey patterns of human exposure to mosquitoes

Eliminating Malaria Vectors.

Malaria vectors which predominantly feed indoors upon humans have been locally eliminated from several settings with insecticide treated nets (ITNs), indoor residual spraying or larval source management. Recent dramatic declines of An. gambiae in east Africa with imperfect ITN coverage suggest mosquito populations can rapidly collapse when forced below realistically achievable, non-zero thresholds of density and supporting resource availability. Here we explain why insecticide-based mosquito elimination strategies are feasible, desirable and can be extended to a wider variety of species by expanding the vector control arsenal to cover a broader spectrum of the resources they need to survive. The greatest advantage of eliminating mosquitoes, rather than merely controlling them, is that this precludes local selection for behavioural or physiological resistance traits. The greatest challenges are therefore to achieve high biological coverage of targeted resources rapidly enough to prevent local emergence of resistance and to then continually exclude, monitor for and respond to re-invasion from external populations

Entomological Surveillance of Behavioural Resilience and Resistance in Residual Malaria Vector Populations.

The most potent malaria vectors rely heavily upon human blood so they are vulnerable to attack with insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) and indoor residual spraying (IRS) within houses. Mosquito taxa that can avoid feeding or resting indoors, or by obtaining blood from animals, mediate a growing proportion of the dwindling transmission that persists as ITNs and IRS are scaled up. Increasing frequency of behavioural evasion traits within persisting residual vector systems usually reflect the successful suppression of the most potent and vulnerable vector taxa by IRS or ITNs, rather than their failure. Many of the commonly observed changes in mosquito behavioural patterns following intervention scale-up may well be explained by modified taxonomic composition and expression of phenotypically plastic behavioural preferences, rather than altered innate preferences of individuals or populations. Detailed review of the contemporary evidence base does not yet provide any clear-cut example of true behavioural resistance and is, therefore, consistent with the hypothesis presented. Caution should be exercised before over-interpreting most existing reports of increased frequency of behavioural traits which enable mosquitoes to evade fatal contact with insecticides: this may simply be the result of suppressing the most behaviourally vulnerable of the vector taxa that constituted the original transmission system. Mosquito taxa which have always exhibited such evasive traits may be more accurately described as behaviourally resilient, rather than resistant. Ongoing national or regional entomological monitoring surveys of physiological susceptibility to insecticides should be supplemented with biologically and epidemiologically meaningfully estimates of malaria vector population dynamics and the behavioural phenotypes that determine intervention impact, in order to design, select, evaluate and optimize the implementation of vector control measures

International Consensus Statement on Rhinology and Allergy: Rhinosinusitis

Background: The 5 years since the publication of the first International Consensus Statement on Allergy and Rhinology: Rhinosinusitis (ICAR‐RS) has witnessed foundational progress in our understanding and treatment of rhinologic disease. These advances are reflected within the more than 40 new topics covered within the ICAR‐RS‐2021 as well as updates to the original 140 topics. This executive summary consolidates the evidence‐based findings of the document. Methods: ICAR‐RS presents over 180 topics in the forms of evidence‐based reviews with recommendations (EBRRs), evidence‐based reviews, and literature reviews. The highest grade structured recommendations of the EBRR sections are summarized in this executive summary. Results: ICAR‐RS‐2021 covers 22 topics regarding the medical management of RS, which are grade A/B and are presented in the executive summary. Additionally, 4 topics regarding the surgical management of RS are grade A/B and are presented in the executive summary. Finally, a comprehensive evidence‐based management algorithm is provided. Conclusion: This ICAR‐RS‐2021 executive summary provides a compilation of the evidence‐based recommendations for medical and surgical treatment of the most common forms of RS

A corpus approach to the history of Russian po delimitatives

This paper gives an example of how enriched diachronic treebank data can shed new light on an old and conflicted topic, even when that topic is primarily morphological and semantic in nature rather than syntactic. The topic is the rise of the Russian po delimitatives, a change seen as crucial in most accounts of the history of Russian aspect, since it represents a major step in generalising the derivational aspect system. Earlier accounts concur that the po delimitatives spread fairly recently, too recently for the development to be connected to the loss of the aorist tense, which also had delimitative readings with atelic verbs. Using treebank data from the Tromsø Old Russian and OCS Treebank, enriched with tags for derivational morphology and semantics, I show that the po delimitatives were not marginal even in the earliest Slavic sources, neither in terms of frequency nor semantics, and that they first complemented and then competed with the delimitative aorists. It can thus be claimed that the exotic po delimitatives grew organically out of the old Indo-European inflectional aspect system

OldSlavNet: A scalable Early Slavic dependency parser trained on modern language data

Historical languages are increasingly being modelled computationally. Syntactically annotated texts are often a sine-qua-non in their modelling, but parsing of pre-modern language varieties faces great data sparsity, intensified by high levels of orthographic variation. In this paper we present a good-quality Early Slavic dependency parser, attained via manipulation of modern Slavic data to resemble the orthography and morphosyntax of pre-modern varieties. The tool can be deployed to expand historical treebanks, which are crucial for data collection and quantification, and beneficial to downstream NLP tasks and historical text mining

Introduction: The added value of diachronic treebanks for historical linguistics research

Over the last few decades, the wide diffusion of digital technology and the growing ease of transferring information via the Internet have provided scholars with an enormous amount of textual data at hand. The vastly increased availability of primary sources has radically changed the everyday life of scholars in the humanities, who are now enabled to access, query, and process a wealth of empirical evidence like never before