Experimental investigations on the syntax and usage of fragments

This book investigates the syntax and usage of fragments (Morgan 1973), apparently subsentential utterances like "A coffee, please!" which fulfill the same communicative function as the corresponding full sentence "I'd like to have a coffee, please!". Even though such utterances are frequently used, they challenge the central role that has been attributed to the notion of sentence in linguistic theory, particularly from a semantic perspective. The first part of the book is dedicated to the syntactic analysis of fragments, which is investigated with experimental methods. Currently there are several competing theoretical analyses of fragments, which rely almost only on introspective data. The experiments presented in this book constitute a first systematic evaluation of some of their crucial predictions and, taken together, support an in situ ellipsis account of fragments, as has been suggested by Reich (2007). The second part of the book addresses the questions of why fragments are used at all, and under which circumstances they are preferred over complete sentences. Syntactic accounts impose licensing conditions on fragments, but they do not explain, why fragments are sometimes (dis)preferred provided that their usage is licensed. This book proposes an information-theoretic account of fragments, which predicts that the usage of fragments in constrained by a general tendency to distribute processing effort uniformly across the utterance. With respect to fragments, this leads to two predictions, which are empirically confirmed: Speakers tend towards omitting predictable words and they insert additional redundancy before unpredictable words

Sentential or not? ‒ An Experimental Investigation on the Syntax of Fragments

This paper presents four experiments on the syntactic structure of fragments, i.e. nonsentential utterances with propositional meaning and illocutionary force (Morgan, 1973). The experiments evaluate the predictions of two competing theories of fragments: Merchant's (2004) movement and deletion account and Barton & Progovac's (2005) nonsentential account. Experiment 1 provides evidence for case connectivity effects, this suggests that there is indeed unarticulated linguistic structure in fragments (unlike argued by Barton & Progovac 2005). Experiments 2-4 address a central prediction of the movement and deletion account: only those constituents which may appear in the left periphery are possible fragments. Merchant et al. (2013) present two studies on preposition stranding and complement clause topicalization in favor of this. My experiments 2-4 replicate and extend these studies in German and English. Taken together, the acceptability pattern predicted by Merchant (2004) holds only for the preposition stranding data (exp. 2), but not for complement clauses (exp.3) or German multiple prefield constituents (exp.4)

Script Knowledge Constrains Ellipses in Fragments - Evidence from Production Data and Language Modeling

We investigate the effect of script-based (Schank and Abelson 1977) extralinguistic context on the omission of words in fragments. Our data elicited with a production task show that predictable words are more often omitted than unpredictable ones, as predicted by the Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis (Levy & Jaeger 2007). We take into account effects of linguistic and extralinguistic context on predictability and propose a method for estimating the surprisal of words in presence of ellipsis. Our study extends previous evidence for UID in two ways: First, we show that not only local linguistic context, but also extralinguistic context determines the likelihood of omissions. Second, we find UID effects on the omission of content words

Microwave and submillimeter wave scattering of oriented ice particles

Microwave (1-300GHz) dual-polarization measurements above 100GHz are so far sparse, but they consistently show polarized scattering signals of ice clouds. Existing scattering databases of realistically shaped ice crystals for microwaves and submillimeter waves (> 300GHz) typically assume total random orientation, which cannot explain the polarized signals. Conceptual models show that the polarization signals are caused by oriented ice particles. Only a few works that consider oriented ice crystals exist, but they are limited to microwaves only. Assuming azimuthally randomly oriented ice particles with a fixed but arbitrary tilt angle, we produced scattering data for two particle habits (51 hexagonal plates and 18 plate aggregates), 35 frequencies between 1 and 864GHz, and 3 temperatures (190, 230 and 270K). In general, the scattering data of azimuthally randomly oriented particles depend on the incidence angle and two scattering angles, in contrast to total random orientation, which depends on a single angle. The additional tilt angle further increases the complexity. The simulations are based on the discrete dipole approximation in combination with a self-developed orientation averaging approach. The scattering data are publicly available from Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3463003). This effort is also an essential part of preparing for the upcoming Ice Cloud Imager (ICI) that will perform polarized observations at 243 and 664GHz. Using our scattering data radiative transfer simulations with two liquid hydrometeor species and four frozen hydrometeor species of polarized Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Microwave Imager (GMI) observations at 166GHz were conducted. The simulations recreate the observed polarization patterns. For slightly fluttering snow and ice particles, the simulations show polarization differences up to 11K using plate aggregates for snow, hexagonal plates for cloud ice and totally randomly oriented particles for the remaining species. Simulations using strongly fluttering hexagonal plates for snow and ice show similar polarization signals. Orientation, shape and the hydrometeor composition affect the polarization. Ignoring orientation can cause a negative bias for vertically polarized observations and a positive bias for horizontally polarized observations

Can Identity Conditions on Ellipsis be Explained by Processing Principles?

Contribution to Linguistic Evidence 202

Palladium-unleashed proteins: gentle aldehyde decaging for site-selective protein modification

Protein bioconjugation frequently makes use of aldehydes as reactive handles, with methods for their installation being highly valued. Here a new, powerful strategy to unmask a reactive protein aldehyde is presented. A genetically encoded caged glyoxyl aldehyde, situated in solvent-accessible locations, can be rapidly decade through treatment with just one equivalent of allylpalladium(II) chloride dimer at physiological pH. The protein aldehyde can undergo subsequent oxime ligation for site-selective protein modification. Quick yet mild conditions, orthogonality and powerful exposed reactivity make this strategy of great potential in protein modification

Palladium-unleashed proteins: gentle aldehyde decaging for site-selective protein modification

Protein bioconjugation frequently makes use of aldehydes as reactive handles, with methods for their installation being highly valued. Here a new, powerful strategy to unmask a reactive protein aldehyde is presented. A genetically encoded caged glyoxyl aldehyde, situated in solvent-accessible locations, can be rapidly decade through treatment with just one equivalent of allylpalladium(II) chloride dimer at physiological pH. The protein aldehyde can undergo subsequent oxime ligation for site-selective protein modification. Quick yet mild conditions, orthogonality and powerful exposed reactivity make this strategy of great potential in protein modification

A general database of hydrometeor single scattering properties at microwave and sub-millimetre wavelengths

A main limitation today in simulations and inversions of microwave observations of ice hydrometeors (cloud ice, snow, hail, etc.) is the lack of data describing the interaction between electromagnetic waves and the particles. To improve the situation, the development of a comprehensive dataset of such scattering properties has been started. The database aims at giving a broad coverage in both frequency (1 to 886 GHz) and temperature (190 to 270 K), to support both passive and active current and planned measurements, and to provide data corresponding to the full Stokes vector. This first version of the database is restricted to totally random particle orientation. Data for 34 particle sets, i.e. habits, have been generated. About 17 of the habits can be classified as single crystals, three habits can be seen as heavily rimed particles, and the remaining habits are aggregates of different types, e.g. snow and hail. The particle sizes considered vary between the habits, but maximum diameters of 10 and 20 mm are typical values for the largest single crystal and aggregate particles, respectively, and the number of sizes per habit is at least 30. Particles containing liquid water are also inside the scope of the database, but this phase of water is so far only represented by a liquid sphere habit. The database is built upon the netCDF4 file format. Interfaces to browse, extract and convert data for selected radiative transfer models are provided in MATLAB and Python. The database and associated tools are publicly available from Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1175572, Ekelund et al., 2018b), and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1175588, Mendrok et al., 2018, respectively). Planned extensions include non-spherical raindrops, melting particles and a second orientation case that can be denoted as azimuthally random

Mellow yellow: An experiment in amber

Amber natron glasses were produced from at least the Hellenistic period and continued to be produced into the early second century CE. However, as with other strong colours used for Roman vessel production, this colour gradually declined in popularity as colourless and blue-green glass came to dominate. Whilst the colouring mechanisms for blue-green glasses are relatively well understood, the cause of the distinctive amber colour is more complex and can be attributed to the iron sulphur chromophore. This paper demonstrates, using analytical data and model glasses, that the amber colour develops during primary production, and that the sulphate-rich natron is key. The analytical data show that most natron amber glass was probably produced in the Levant alongside the more common blue-green glasses, however, its composition is different. Whilst many glass colours were made in a secondary stage, by adding colourants and opacifiers to a blue-green or colourless glass base, amber glass was not made this way since it required a slightly different set of raw materials and melting technologies. These findings suggest that the production of the glass required specialist knowledge, and particularly skilled furnace operation, in order to produce repeatable results. Skilled specialists would also be required to work amber glass whilst retaining the same clear amber hue, especially for complex wares, such as mosaic vessels, where the glass would be reheated more than once