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Comparing causal-noncausal alternation in three West-African families in contact: Atlantic, Mel and Mande

Submitted to Language Dynamics and Change, special issue on Valence orientation in contact: a cross-linguistic perspective. Proceedings of the Workshop on Valence orientation in contact at the 51st Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) (August 29-September 1st 2018), Tallinn, Estonia,This paper investigates the coding of causal-noncausal alternation in three families of languages spoken in West Africa, studying divergence and convergence within and between these families along with various methodological problems related to this cross-linguistic comparison. Atlantic, Mande and Mel languages belong to the same Niger-Congo phylum but display quite different typological profiles and have long lasting historical contacts in Senegal and the surrounding areas. In order to evaluate the correlation between typological profile and valence orientation and to identify contact-induced changes, the same 18 verb-pair meanings (Nichols et al. 2004) have been retrieved from the RefLex lexical database for all the documented Atlantic languages, and for the Mande and Mel languages in contact with them. After overcoming a bias in the list of pairs (favoring causativization), the first results confirm the expected correlation between the favored strategies and the typological profiles, namely lability for Mande (isolating languages with a limited set of derivational suffixes and regularly labile verb) vs. derivational strategies for Atlantic and Mel languages (displaying a large inventory of verbal extensions). In addition, the equipollent strategy shows a surprisingly significant score in Atlantic and Mel, and the suppletive one in the three families. The first one is attributed to structural features of these languages, the second one is interpreted as an areal feature. A standard pattern of distribution of the five strategies for coding valence alternation (based on optimized samples of languages for overcoming data shortage) is then calculated for each family and used for measuring the deviation of individual languages from family pattern. Thanks to a fine-grained study taking into account the structural features of individual languages and the geographical contacts, these deviations are finally attributed to internal evolution of individual languages or of sub-groups of languages and, in a few cases, to contact induced changes. The most salient result is the remarkable heterogeneity observed inside Atlantic family for valence orientation, undoubtlessly reflecting the historical depth of the family

Learning Strategies of Students Attending a “Second Chance” School

This study was conducted in Quebec with 608 students (aged 16-19) in four “second chance” schools of the greater Montreal area. The objectives were twofold: (a) to identify the strategies of these students in the context of five learning activities; and (b) to compare the strategies of students who had withdrawn from school after their mandatory attendance period (age 16-17) with those of students exceeding the age limit for high school (age 18-19). Results from a self-reported questionnaire in French show that the students lack many learning strategies, particularly for two of the five activities. The differences between the two groups always favor the older students and pertain to a specific aspect of the activity. These results argue for differentiation in research and classroom practices according to the activities presented to the students and according to the two age groups.Cette étude a été réalisée au Québec auprès de 608 élèves (âgés de 16 à 19 ans) de quatre écoles de « raccrocheurs » de la région métropolitaine de Montréal. La recherche a poursuivi deux objectifs : (a) identifier les stratégies des élèves « raccrocheurs » dans le cadre de cinq activités d’apprentissage; et (b) comparer les stratégies des élèves qui avaient abandonné l’école après la période de fréquentation obligatoire (16-17 ans) à celles des élèves qui avaient dépassé l’âge limite de fréquentation de l’école secondaire (18-19 ans). Les résultats à un questionnaire validé en français indiquent que tous les élèves, en général, disent avoir recours à un nombre restreint de stratégies d’apprentissage, notamment dans deux des cinq activités. Les différences entre les deux groupes favorisent toujours les élèves plus âgés et sont pertinentes pour un aspect spécifique de l’activité. Ces résultats militent en faveur d’une différenciation de la recherche et des pratiques pédagogiques selon les activités présentées aux élèves d’une part, et les deux groupes d’âge d’autre part

A prospective study of the factors affecting access to equitable surgical care in the Southern Province of Rwanda

Background: Access to equitable surgical care significantly reduces morbidity and mortality from traumatic injuries, abdominal, extra-abdominal, acquired and congenital conditions. In Rwanda, like many other developing countries, there are is a wide range of factors affecting access to surgical care across the different levels of health care delivery. The main objective of this study was to document the factors affecting access to surgical care in the Southern Province of Rwanda. Methods: This prospective observational study randomly selected 5 of the 11 district hospitals in the province. The other health unit included was the regional referral hospital for the province, Butare (CHUB). The variables tested included surgical capacity, timeliness, safety, and affordability, for all the included health units in the province. The lists of elective surgical patients, compared with the lists of operated patients over a period of six months, were used to indicate the performance and outputs to surgical access for the various health units in this study. In addition, 5 patient interviews were conducted at each health unit, from patients who were randomly selected, from both the surgical outpatients and the surgical wards. They were questioned regarding their views to surgical care access. Percentages were used to indicate the extent of the challenges to surgical access. Results: The lack of adequate surgical staff was the commonest challenge to surgical access (75% for the district hospitals, and10% for the regional referral hospital) identified. At the regional referral hospital (CHUB), limited operating theatre space was a challenge in 50% of the cases. This was followed by the limited number of specialists and sub-specialties rated at 10%, and limited anesthetic plus ICU facilities rated at 10%. The other challenge was the issue of affordability for the consumables required, rated at 10% The average surgical output and the pending (representing unmet need), calculated from the elective waiting lists for a period of 6 months, indicated that the number of operated patients were rated at 75 %, and an unmet need of surgical access of 25% for CHUB; while for the district hospitals it was 63% with an unmet need of 37%. The patients’ views also pointed at challenges of limited surgical services at the district hospital (70%), and affordability (30%). Conclusions: Access to surgical care in the Southern Province of Rwanda was affected by the limited number of specialists and doctors with the minimum skills to carry out non-specialized operations at the district hospitals, the limited operating theatre facilities, limited sub-specialist services, and specialized investigations. Keywords: surgical care; access; challenges; capacity; safety; affordability; timing

Opportunistic software composition: benefits and requirements

International audienceTraditional software development relies on building and assembling pieces of software in order to satisfy explicit requirements. Component-based software engineering simplifies composition and reuse, but software adaptation to the environment remains a challenge. Opportunistic composition is a new approach for building and re-building software in open and dynamic contexts. It is based on the ability to compose software components in a bottom-up manner, merely because they are available at a point and not because the construction of a specific software has been demanded. In this way, software emerges from the environment. This paper analyzes the advantages of such an approach in terms of flexibility and reuse, along with the requirements that an infrastructure supporting opportunistic composition should satisfy: it should be decentralized, autonomic, and dynamically adaptive. The state of the art of automatic software composition shows that few solutions are actually bottom-up, and that none of them fully satisfies the requirements of opportunistic composition