Variation in motion events: Theory and applications

This chapter analyses the role of intratypological and dialectal variation in the lexicalisation of motion events (Talmy 1991, 2000) and its application to second language acquisition. The first part discusses intratypological variation with respect to the semantic component of Path and proposes a cline of Path salience on the basis of twenty-one languages. Then, it describes dialectal variation in Spanish and Aragonese. Results show that dialects within these two Romance languages differ in the type of linguistic resources they use as well as in their quality and quantity. The second part briefly reviews some L2 problematic areas that can benefit from these approaches such as conceptual transfer, deixis, and idiomaticity. Examples are drawn from L2 Spanish and L2 Basque

Early life conditions and financial risk–taking in older age

Using life-history survey data from eleven European countries, we investigate whether childhood conditions, such as socioeconomic status, cognitive abilities and health problems influence portfolio choice and risk attitudes later in life. After controlling for the corresponding conditions in adulthood, we find that superior cognitive skills in childhood (especially mathematical abilities) are positively associated with stock and mutual fund ownership. Childhood socioeconomic status, as indicated by the number of rooms and by having at least some books in the house during childhood, is also positively associated with the ownership of stocks, mutual funds and individual retirement accounts, as well as with the willingness to take financial risks. On the other hand, less risky assets like bonds are not affected by early childhood conditions. We find only weak effects of childhood health problems on portfolio choice in adulthood. Finally, favorable childhood conditions affect the transition in and out of risky asset ownership, both by making divesting less likely and by facilitating investing (i.e., transitioning from non-ownership to ownership)

Temporal Landscapes: A Graphical Temporal Logic for Reasoning

We present an elementary introduction to a new logic for reasoning about behaviors that occur over time. This logic is based on temporal type theory. The syntax of the logic is similar to the usual first-order logic; what differs is the notion of truth value. Instead of reasoning about whether formulas are true or false, our logic reasons about temporal landscapes. A temporal landscape may be thought of as representing the set of durations over which a statement is true. To help understand the practical implications of this approach, we give a wide variety of examples where this logic is used to reason about autonomous systems.Comment: 20 pages, lots of figure

A sharp interpolation between the H\"older and Gaussian Young inequalities

We prove a very general sharp inequality of the H\"older--Young--type for functions defined on infinite dimensional Gaussian spaces. We begin by considering a family of commutative products for functions which interpolates between the point--wise and Wick products; this family arises naturally in the context of stochastic differential equations, through Wong--Zakai--type approximation theorems, and plays a key role in some generalizations of the Beckner--type Poincar\'e inequality. We then obtain a crucial integral representation for that family of products which is employed, together with a generalization of the classic Young inequality due to Lieb, to prove our main theorem. We stress that our main inequality contains as particular cases the H\"older inequality and Nelson's hyper-contractive estimate, thus providing a unified framework for two fundamental results of the Gaussian analysis

The impact of North-South and South-South trade agreements on bilateral trade.

Free trade agreements (FTAs) lead to a rise in bilateral trade even if the signatories include developing countries. Furthermore, the percentage increase in bilateral trade is higher for South-South agreements than for North-South agreements. the results are robust across a number of gravity model specifications in which we contrl for the endogenity of FTAs (with bilateral fixed effects) and also take account of multilateral resistance in both estimation (with country-fixed effects) and compartive statics (analytically). Our analystical model shows that multilateral resitance dampens the imapct of FTAs on trade by less in South-South agreements than in North-South agreements, which accentuates the difference implied by our gravity model coefficients, and that this difference gets larger as the number of signatories rises. For example, allowing for lags and multilateral resistance, a four-country North-South agreement rasies bilateral trade by 53% while the analogous South-South impact is 107%