On the semantics and logic of declaratives and interrogatives

In many natural languages, there are clear syntactic and/or intonational differences between declarative sentences, which are primarily used to provide information, and interrogative sentences, which are primarily used to request information. Most logical frameworks restrict their attention to the former. Those that are concerned with both usually assume a logical language that makes a clear syntactic distinction between declaratives and interrogatives, and usually assign different types of semantic values to these two types of sentences. A different approach has been taken in recent work on inquisitive semantics. This approach does not take the basic syntactic distinction between declaratives and interrogatives as its starting point, but rather a new notion of meaning that captures both informative and inquisitive content in an integrated way. The standard way to treat the logical connectives in this approach is to associate them with the basic algebraic operations on these new types of meanings. For instance, conjunction and disjunction are treated as meet and join operators, just as in classical logic. This gives rise to a hybrid system, where sentences can be both informative and inquisitive at the same time, and there is no clearcut division between declaratives and interrogatives. It may seem that these two general approaches in the existing literature are quite incompatible. The main aim of this paper is to show that this is not the case. We develop an inquisitive semantics for a logical language that has a clearcut division between declaratives and interrogatives. We show that this language coincides in expressive power with the hybrid language that is standardly assumed in inquisitive semantics, we establish a sound and complete axiomatization for the associated logic, and we consider a natural enrichment of the system with presuppositional interrogatives

Proteomics profiling of urine with surface enhanced laser desorption/ionization time of flight mass spectrometry

BACKGROUND: Urine consists of a complex mixture of peptides and proteins and therefore is an interesting source of biomarkers. Because of its high throughput capacity SELDI-TOF-MS is a proteomics technology frequently used in biomarker studies. We compared the performance of seven SELDI protein chip types for profiling of urine using standard chip protocols. RESULTS: Performance was assessed by determining the number of detectable peaks and spot to spot variation for the seven array types and two different matrices: SPA and CHCA. A urine sample taken from one healthy volunteer was applied in eight-fold for each chip type/matrix combination. Data were analyzed for total number of detected peaks (S/N > 5). Spot to spot variation was determined by calculating the average CV of peak intensities. In addition, an inventory was made of detectable peaks with each chip and matrix type. Also the redundancy in peaks detected with the different chip/matrix combinations was determined. A total of 425 peaks (136 non-redundant peaks) could be detected when combining the data from the seven chip types and the two matrices. Most peaks were detected with the CM10 chip with CHCA (57 peaks). The Q10 with CHCA (51 peaks), SEND (48 peaks) and CM10 with SPA (48 peaks) also performed well. The CM10 chip with CHCA also has the best reproducibility with an average CV for peak intensity of 13%. CONCLUSION: The combination of SEND, CM10 with CHCA, CM10 with SPA, IMAC-Cu with SPA and H50 with CHCA provides the optimal information from the urine sample with good reproducibility. With this combination a total of 217 peaks (71 non-redundant peaks) can be detected with CV's ranging from 13 to 26%, depending on the chip and matrix type. Overall, CM10 with CHCA is the best performing chip type