Habitual physical activity in patients born with oesophageal atresia: a multicenter cross-sectional study and comparison to a healthy reference cohort matched for gender and age

Oesophageal atresia (EA) is associated with life-long gastrointestinal and respiratory morbidity and other associated malformations. The aim of this study is to compare physical activity (PA) levels of children and adolescents with and without EA. A validated questionnaire (MoMo-PAQ) was used to evaluate PA in EA patients EA (4–17 years), who were randomly matched for gender and age (1:5) with a representative sample of the Motorik-Modul Longitudinal Study (n = 6233). Sports activity per week (sports index) and minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week (MVPA minutes) were calculated. Correlations between PA and medical factors were analysed. In total, 104 patients and 520 controls were included. Children with EA were significantly less active at higher intensities (mean MPVA minutes 462; 95% confidence interval (CI): 370–554) compared to controls (626; 95% CI: 576–676), although there was no statistically significant difference in the sports index (187; 95% CI: 156–220 versus 220; 95% CI: 203–237). A lower mean weight-for-age and height-for-age, additional urogenital (r =  − 0.20, p = 0.04) or anorectal malformation (r =  − 0.24, p = 0.01) were associated with fewer MVPA minutes. For other medical factors (prematurity, type of repair, congenital heart disease, skeletal malformation or symptom load), no statistically significant association with PA was found. Conclusion: EA patients participated in PA at a similar level but lower intensities compared to the reference cohort. PA in EA patients was largely independent of medical factors

The (In-)Consistency of Literary Concepts. Operationalising, Annotating and Detecting Literary Comment

This paper explores how both annotation procedures and automatic detection (i.e. classifiers) can be used to assess the consistency of textual literary concepts. We developed an annotation tagset for the ‘literary comment’ – a frequently used but rarely defined concept – and its subtypes (interpretative comment, attitude comment and metanarrative/metafictional comment) and trained a multi-output and a binary classifier. The multi-output classifier shows F-scores of 28% for attitude comment, 36% for interpretative comment and 48% for meta comment, whereas the binary classifier achieves F-scores up to 59%. Crucially, both our annotation and the automatic classification struggle with the same subtypes of comment, although annotation and classification follow completely different procedures. Our findings suggest an inconsistency in the overall literary concept ‘comment’ and most prominently the subtypes ‘attitude comment’ and ‘interpretative comment’. As a best-practice-example, our approach illustrates that the contribution of Digital Humanities to Literary Studies may go beyond the automatic recognition of literary phenomena

Round-Robin test for the histological diagnosis of acute colonic Graft-versus-Host disease validating established histological criteria and grading systems

Histomorpholgy is one of the mainstays of acute Graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) diagnosis. However, concerns about reproducibility and the most appropriate grading system question its usefulness. Our aim was to assess histomorphological parameters and previously reported grading systems for GvHD regarding reproducibility and validity. Moreover, we propose that sum scores, derived by combining separately scored morphological parameters into a total score, might provide a simplified but equally effective means to grade GvHD. A total of 123 colon biopsies were assessed across four pathologists for intestinal GvHD using a Round-Robin test and results were correlated with clinical findings. Interobserver reproducibility was high for histological parameters that were evaluated as indicators of acute GvHD. Published grading systems were moderately reproducible (ICC 0.679–0.769) while simplified sum scores, in comparison, showed better interrater reliability (ICC 0.818–0.896). All grading systems and sum scores were associated with clinical signs of GvHD and in part with therapy response and survival. However, they were not able to stratify patients according to the clinical severity of GvHD. In a hot-spot analysis 1 crypt apoptotic body (CAB) in 10 crypts was a reasonable cut-off value for minimal diagnostic criteria of GvHD. In conclusion, histology can contribute to the diagnosis of GvHD and is reproducible. Published grading systems are able to reflect clinical findings as are simplified sum scores, which showed improved reproducibility and might be easier to handle as they are based on adding up histological parameters rather than transferring histological findings into a separate grading system. Sum scores will have to be further tested in a prospective setting.Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659Wilhelm Sander-Stiftung http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100008672Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für Klinische Forschung, Universitätsklinikum ErlangenFriedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (1041

How the left-periphery of a wh-relative clause determines its syntactic and semantic relationships

This paper discusses a certain class of German relative clauses which are characterized by a wh-expression overtly realized at the left periphery of the clause. While investigating empirical and theoretical issues regarding this class of relatives, it argues that a wh-relative clause relates syntactically to a functionally complete sentential projection and semantically to entities of various kinds that are abstracted from the matrix clause. What is shown is that this grammatical behaviour clearly can be attributed to the properties of the elements positioned at the left of a wh-relative clause. Finally, a lexically-based analysis couched in the framework of HPSG is given that accounts for the data presented

Grammatik und Integration. Wie fremd ist die Argumentstruktur nicht-nativer Verben?

Ziel dieses Aufsatzes ist es, anhand der Argumentstruktur nicht-nativer Verben einen Beitrag zur Beschreibung syntaktischer und semantischer Eigenschaften fremder Einheiten zu leisten. Ich werde der Frage nachgehen, wodurch nicht-native Argumentstrukturen grammatisch gekennzeichnet sind. Dabei werde ich überprüfen, inwieweit argumentstrukturelle Unterschiede zwischen nativen und nicht-nativen Verben erkennbar sind. Schließlich werde ich diskutieren, welche Konsequenzen sich daraus für die Theoriebildung ergeben. Die zugrunde gelegten empirischen Daten basieren auf einer Pilotstudie, die von Holler/Scherer (2010) durchgeführt wurd

Zwischenräume – Phänomene, Methoden und Modellierung im Bereich zwischen Lexikon und Grammatik

Der Beitrag führt in den Sammelband „Sprachliches Wissen zwischen Lexikon und Grammatik“ ein und diskutiert zunächst den Zusammenhang zwischen den drei Dichotomien Lexikon versus Grammatik, Wort versus Phrase und Idiosynkrasie versus Regel. Im Folgenden werden Varianten des Konstruktionsbegriffs dargestellt und hinsichtlich verschiedener Dimensionen analysiert. Einer Darstellung der im Zusammenhang mit der Lexikon-Grammatik-Abgrenzung diskutierten Phänomene und angewandten empirischen Methoden schließt sich eine Übersicht über die Aufsätze des Sammelbandes an