Why Computer Go Is Hard

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EAP vocabulary in native and learner corpora: from extraction to analysis

Most studies of vocabulary in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) have emphasized the importance of a 'sub-technical' or 'academic' vocabulary alongside core words and technical terms in academic discourse. The 'Academic Word List' (Coxhead 2000) was compiled to complement the 'General Service List of English Words' (West 1953) and domain-specific items so as to approach the critical 95% coverage threshold needed for reasonable reading comprehension (Nation 2001:197) in higher education settings. While the 'Academic Word List' is undoubtedly a good supplement to the 'General Service List' for receptive purposes, it is questionable whether it is ideally suited for productive activities in EAP classes. Learners' needs for academic writing are clearly not the same as for academic reading. The aim of my presentation is to describe an alternative method, which uses a range of quantitative measures (keyness, frequency, range and evenness of distribution) to identify potential candidates for the development of a productively oriented academic word list. The resulting list contains a large number of words which are absent from the 'Academic Word List'. These findings highlight the fact that Coxhead’s criterion of non-appearance in the 'General Service List' is not really appropriate when it comes to productive purposes as lexical items may be included in the 2,000 most frequent words but used quite differently in EAP. A few examples extracted from the 'International Corpus of Learner English' (Granger et al.: 2002) will also show that these words need to be focused on in EAP materials as learners either significantly over- or underuse them, or use them in a limited number of phraseological patterns or in non-nativelike combinations. The potential influence of the mother tongue on learner use of EAP phraseological units will also be addressed

Directness vs. indirectness: A contrastive pragmatic analysis of request formulation in Spanish and in French

Though Spanish and French are two Romance languages and therefore share numerous linguistic characteristics, there are some notable differences between those two languages. Spanish is a pro-drop language while French is not. However, both languages have many features in common, such as the fact that they are T/V languages. Blum-Kulka (1989) differentiates various types of strategies in order to formulate a request: direct strategies, conventionally indirect strategies and unconventionally indirect strategies. Those categories are subdivided into: mood derivables, explicit performatives, hedged performatives, obligation statements, want statements, suggestory formulas, query preparatories, strong hints and mild hints. Starting from this subdivision and taking into account Hassall’s proposition (2003), I will offer a more detailed categorisation of Spanish and French requests via a corpus-driven method. To do so, I will retrieve requests in the Spanish corpus CORLEC and the French corpus VALIBEL and classify them into categories. This will allow me to compare the most frequent formulations in Spanish and in French. My hypothesis is that more direct strategies prevail in Spanish while French uses more conventionally indirect ones or, at least, that Spanish makes more often use of imperatives whereas French uses more the conditional mode. Indeed, various studies have demonstrated that Spanish is a direct language (Bataller 2013). As such, it has been pointed out that the conditional mode in Spanish is used only in formal requests, that the imperative is more used than the conditional mode, that there is an increase in the use of tú vs. usted, especially in the young generation (Bataller 2013) and that the Spanish culture is oriented towards a positive politeness (Haverkate 2006). The second hypothesis is that French uses the conditional mode more often than Spanish and that French utilizes more frequently formal address. In this study, I expect that Spanish uses more different types of categories. Furthermore, I will show that Spanish uses requests strategies that are not used in French, such as infinitive imperatives

The safety of Sonovue® in abdominal applications: Retrospective analysis of 23188 investigations

The aim of the present retrospective study was to assess the incidence of adverse events (AE) of a second-generation ultrasound contrast agent in real clinical practice. A total of 28 Italian Centres provided data on the postmarketing use of SonoVue® (Bracco Spa, Milan, Italy) in abdominal examination performed between December 2001 and December 2004. A total of 23 188 investigations were reported. No fatal event occurred. AEs were reported in 29 cases, of which only two were graded as serious; the rest, 27, were nonserious (23 mild, three moderate and one severe). The overall reporting rate of serious AE was 0.0086%. Overall, only four AEs required treatment (two serious, two nonserious including one moderate and one severe AEs). In conclusion, the present large-scale retrospective analysis showed that SonoVue has a good safety profile in abdominal applications, with an AE reporting rate lower than or similar to that reported for radiologic and magnetic resonance contrast agents. (E-mail: [email protected]

Paradoxical embolization: a potential cause of cerebral damage in Alzheimer's disease?

Item does not contain fulltextBACKGROUND: There are considerable overlaps between vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease (AD), with a suggestion that cerebrovascular disease (CVD) contributes to the neurodegenerative pathology of AD. Paradoxical embolization of venous emboli into the systemic circulation through a venous to arterial circulation shunt (v-aCS), the most commonly a patent foramen ovale (PFO), is known to cause cryptogenic stroke in younger people. We reviewed the potential role of paradoxical embolization in AD. METHODS: A review of the literature on paradoxical embolization in neurological disorders and techniques to detect v-aCS and PFO, supplemented by data from our own studies. RESULTS: Before our research, the role of paradoxical embolism in dementia had not been studied. The potential role of embolization in cerebral damage was highlighted by studies in patients undergoing coronary artery bypass or carotid surgery. Paradoxical embolization was found to occur in patients with cryptogenic stroke, migraine, decompression sickles and during hip surgery. The methods for detecting v-aCS or PFO had not been standardized. We found 'significant' v-aCS (equivalent to PFO) in 32% of AD patients compared with 22% of controls, but the study was not sufficiently powered to test the statistic significance of this difference. In AD, there was evidence of an association between 'significant' v-aCS and the severity of white matter hyperintensities on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). CONCLUSION: Paradoxical embolization through a v-aCS may be a potentially preventable or treatable cause of CVD in AD