The acquisition of determiners in child L2 German

The object of this study is to test Meisel's (2009) hypothesis that there is a sensitive phase in language acquisition that ends around age 4. Early L2 acquisition may therefore already show differences from L1 acquisition. To test this hypothesis, determiner production in the naturalistic speech of four successive bilingual Turkish-German children recorded during free-play situations was compared to that of monolingual German children discussed in the literature. The successive bilinguals had an age of onset of German between 3 and 4 years and were studied over a period of 20 months. Determiner production was examined because Turkish, as opposed to German, does not have an article system. Determiner omission and incorrect article use were considered. A clear difference emerged in determiner omission, but not in article misuse. After some initial variability in determiner production, determiner omission by the monolingual children was found to gradually fall below 10 per cent, while a plateau effect could be observed in the bilingual children. There was no clear evidence for article misuse in either the L1 or the child L2 data. Our findings about determiner omission suggest that early L2 acquisition differs from L1 acquisition. It is unclear, however, whether the child L2 learners will persist in omitting determiners from obligatory contexts, since data collection was ended while the children were still in the process of acquiring Germa

Studie zur Sprachvariation im Schweizerdeutschen: Erste Ergebnisse

Dieser Beitrag stellt ein vor Kurzem angelaufenes Projekt vor, das sich mit Spontansprachdaten eines schweizerdeutschen Dialekts befasst. Nachdem einige Vor- und Nachteile dieser Art von Datenerhebung Erwähnung finden, werden erste Ergebnisse präsentiert - zu folgenden syntaktischen Phänomenen: Verbprojektionsanhebung, Verbstellung in Sätzen mit wil "weil", doubly-filled COMPs und Artikelverdoppelung. Anhand dieser Daten wird erörtert, ob es gewisse Unterschiede zwischen den Sprechern gibt und falls ja, ob eventuell ein Altersunterschied eine Rolle spielen könnte

CAMELS-CH: hydro-meteorological time series and landscape attributes for 331 catchments in hydrologic Switzerland

We present CAMELS-CH (Catchment Attributes and MEteorology for Large-sample Studies – Switzerland), a large-sample hydro-meteorological data set for hydrologic Switzerland in central Europe. This domain covers 331 basins within Switzerland and neighboring countries. About one-third of the catchments are located in Austria, France, Germany and Italy. As an Alpine country, Switzerland covers a vast diversity of landscapes, including mountainous environments, karstic regions, and several strongly cultivated regions, along with a wide range of hydrological regimes, i.e., catchments that are glacier-, snow- or rain dominated. Similar to existing data sets, CAMELS-CH comprises dynamic hydro-meteorological variables and static catchment attributes. CAMELS-CH (Höge et al., 2023; available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7784632) encompasses 40 years of data between 1 January 1981 and 31 December 2020, including daily time series of stream flow and water levels, and of meteorological data such as precipitation and air temperature. It also includes daily snow water equivalent data for each catchment starting from 2 September 1998. Additionally, we provide annual time series of land cover change and glacier evolution per catchment. The static catchment attributes cover location and topography, climate, hydrology, soil, hydrogeology, geology, land use, human impact and glaciers. This Swiss data set complements comparable publicly accessible data sets, providing data from the “water tower of Europe”

Study protocol for a two-site clinical trial to validate a smartphone-based artificial intelligence classifier identifying cervical precancer and cancer in HPV-positive women in Cameroon.

INTRODUCTION: Cervical cancer remains a major public health challenge in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) due to financial and logistical issues. WHO recommendation for cervical cancer screening in LMICs includes HPV testing as primary screening followed by visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) and treatment. However, VIA is a subjective procedure dependent on the healthcare provider's experience. Its accuracy can be improved by computer-aided detection techniques. Our aim is to assess the performance of a smartphone-based Automated VIA Classifier (AVC) relying on Artificial Intelligence to discriminate precancerous and cancerous lesions from normal cervical tissue. METHODS: The AVC study will be nested in an ongoing cervical cancer screening program called "3T-study" (for Test, Triage and Treat), including HPV self-sampling followed by VIA triage and treatment if needed. After application of acetic acid on the cervix, precancerous and cancerous cells whiten more rapidly than non-cancerous ones and their whiteness persists stronger overtime. The AVC relies on this key feature to determine whether the cervix is suspect for precancer or cancer. In order to train and validate the AVC, 6000 women aged 30 to 49 years meeting the inclusion criteria will be recruited on a voluntary basis, with an estimated 100 CIN2+, calculated using a confidence level of 95% and an estimated sensitivity of 90% +/-7% precision on either side. Diagnostic test performance of AVC test and two current standard tests (VIA and cytology) used routinely for triage will be evaluated and compared. Histopathological examination will serve as reference standard. Participants' and providers' acceptability of the technology will also be assessed. The study protocol was registered under ClinicalTrials.gov (number NCT04859530). EXPECTED RESULTS: The study will determine whether AVC test can be an effective method for cervical cancer screening in LMICs

The fundamental left-right asymmetry in the Germanic verb cluster

Cinque (2005, 2009, 2014a) observes that there is an asymmetry in the possible ordering of dependents of a lexical head before versus after the head. A reflection on some of the concepts needed to develop Cinque’s ideas into a theory of neutral word order reveals that dependents need to be treated separately by class. The resulting system is applied to the problem of word order in the Germanic verb cluster. It is shown that there is an extremely close match between theoretically derived expectations for clusters made up of auxiliaries, modals, causative ‘let’, a main verb, and verbal particles. The facts point to the action of Cinque’s fundamental left-right asymmetry in language in the realm of the verb cluster. At the same time, not all verb clusters fall under Cinque’s generalization, which, therefore, argues against treating all cases of restructuring uniformly

Au-delà de la reproduction: un nouveau foyer communautaire à Bâle

Plus qu’un simple refuge, la maison a toujours eu pour but de créer un espace de cohabitation dans lequel les gens peuvent se reproduire. Dans la société actuelle, l’état capitaliste a pour intérêt de promouvoir la propriété privée afin de contrôler la famille. Le travail domestique et la reproduction de la vie sont dits naturels, dépolitisés et donc réalisés dans la sphère privée. Comme la question du logement est motivée par la nécessité de contenir la famille, une nouvelle solution peut être proposée en redéfinissant les limites physiques et économiques de la maison. Comment vivre ensemble dans une société où le travail domestique est partagé par tous et donc réduit au minimum? Comment questionner le rôle paternaliste de la famille nucléaire et développer des formes de vie allant au-delà des schémas traditionnels? A Bâle, le projet transforme une friche industrielle en nouveau foyer communautaire. Il reprend le langage industriel du site en proposant un socle de logements à patio qui assume son indépendance, mais reste en relation étroite avec le tissu urbain. Au lieu d'être structuré comme une unité familiale autonome, le logement est composé de cellules privées, organisées autour d'espaces collectifs partagés. Suivant le Rhin, le projet se développe horizontalement en créant une structure d'habitation égalitaire qui cherche une nouvelle forme de domesticité, dans laquelle le partage est avant tout un acte de solidarité et de nécessité

The external syntax of conditional clauses

The chapter looks at the typology of conditional clauses against the background of the wider typology of adverbial clauses, focusing on their external syntax. Clauses introduced by the conjunction if display (at least) three readings: (i) an event conditional (1a) expresses a condition on the realization of the eventuality encoded in the associated clause, (ii) a factual conditional (Iatridou in Topics in Conditionals. MIT, 1991: 58–96) (1b) introduces a background assumption which serves as the basis for the contextualization of the proposition encoded in the associated clause, (iii) a speech-event conditional (1c) encodes a condition on the realization of the speech event

Ein geparstes und grammatisch annotiertes Korpus schweizerdeutscher Spontansprachdaten

The goal of the project „Studying variation in syntax: a parsed corpus of Swiss German“ is the compilation of a parsed and grammatically annotated corpus of about one million words. Spontaneous speech data are collected during informal interviews with speakers of different age groups who speak the local variety of St. Galler German that is spoken in Wil. After transcribing the interviews, all words are grammatically annotated, disfluency marking is added,and the strings of words are split into tokens before being parsed. Based on this corpus we try to uncover intra-speaker variation as well as inter-speaker variation in order to investigate the relation between syntactic variation and language change. In this paper we focus on the corpus compilation

Chapter 5. English rationale since and a reassessment of the typology of adverbial clauses

This chapter examines the syntactic and semantic properties of English causal adverbial clauses, starting from the fact that the conjunctions since and as can both introduce either a temporal clause or a rationale clause. Where relevant, the material is supplemented with data from Dutch causal adverbial clauses, focusing on the interaction with the syntax of Verb Second. It is shown that the bipartite distinction between ‘central’ adverbial clauses and ‘peripheral’ adverbial clauses (Haegeman 1984a, 1991/2009, a.o.) should be reconsidered. Frey’s (2016, 2018) ternary distinction is adopted, which differentiates between central adverbial clauses (CACs) and peripheral adverbial clauses (PACs), both regarded as syntactically integrated, and non-integrated clauses. Evidence is provided for Frey’s hypothesis that PACs are related to JudgementP (Krifka 2017). </jats:p