Expressing Inflection Tonally

In Limburg Dutch, the difference between neuter and feminine agreement on adjectives is expressed by a difference in lexical tone. This paper argues that this distinction is due to a difference in underlying representations and not to a paradigmatic antifaithfulness effect. In particular, it argues for a specific version of REALIZE-MORPHEME, the constraint demanding every underlying morpheme to be present in phonological surface representations. The key argument is that a schwa suffix turns up whenever the tonal change from neuter to feminine is not possible

‘Een mooie mengelmoes’

The linguistic relality in the Netherlands during the Golden Age was in fact one of multilingualism: so many languages and dialects were used. Nicoline van der Sijs and Marc van Oostendorp show how the emergence of the Dutch language can only be understood against this multilinguistic background

Albumin determined by bromocresol green leads to erroneous results in routine evaluation of patients with chronic kidney disease

Objectives: Measurement of plasma albumin is pivotal for clinical decision-making in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). Routinely used methods as bromocresol green (BCG) and bromocresol purple (BCP) can suffer from aselectivity, but the impact of aselectivity on the accuracy of plasma albumin results of CKD-patients is still unknown. Therefore, we evaluated the performance of BCG-, BCP- and JCTLM-endorsed immunological methods in patients with various stages of CKD. Methods:We evaluated the performance of commonly used albumin methods in patients with CKD stages G1 through G5, the latter divided in two groups based on whether they received hemodialysis treatment. In total, 163 patient plasma samples were measured at 14 laboratories, on six different BCG and BCP-platforms, and four different immunological platforms. The results were compared with an ERM-DA-470k-corrected nephelometric assay. The implications on outcome is evaluated by the proportion of patient results &lt;38g/L for the diagnosis of protein energy wasting. Results:Albumin results determined with BCP- and immunological methods showed the best agreement with the target value (92.7 and 86.2%, respectively vs. 66.7% for BCG, namely due to overestimation). The relative agreement of each method with the target value was platform-dependent, with larger variability in agreement between platforms noted for BCG and immunological methods (3.2-4.6 and 2.6-5.3%) as opposed to BCP (0.7-1.5%). The stage of CKD had similar effects on the variability in agreement for the three method-groups (0.6-1.8% vs. 0.7-1.5% vs. 0.4-1.6%). The differences between methods cause discrepancies in clinical decision-making, as structurally fewer patients were diagnosed with protein energy wasting upon using BCG-based albumin results. Conclusions: Our study shows that BCP is fit for the intended use to measure plasma albumin levels in CKD patients from all stages, including patients on hemodialysis. In contrast, most BCG-based platforms falsely overestimate the plasma albumin concentration.</p

Relationship between phonological and geographical distance: Persian, Sarawani Balochi and Sistani dialect

This article focuses on the study of geographical variations among the phonological systems of Standard Persian (SP) language, Central Sarawani Balochi (CSB), a dialect of Balochi language and the Sistani dialect (SD) of Persian, based on Optimality Theory (OT) and van Oostendorp‟s (2008) approach. SP and SD are linguistically closely related, but SP and CSB are very farther apart. While these language varieties share some similarities in their phonological system, they also have some peculiarities and are spoken in different geographical locations in Iran. Following OT and van Oostendorp‟s (2008) approach, the study of syllable structure of SP, CSB and SD supports the fact that the linguistic distance between two dialects is the minimal number of minimal reranking needed to get from one grammar to another. The findings of the present research show the fact that reranking DEP-IO and *COMPLEXONS constraints supports how the initial clusters are realized in the syllable structure of CSB and SD, but not in SP. In addition, the analysis of the status of [] in the onset position of the syllable structure of SP and SD based on the constraints: DEP-IO, ONSET and MAX-IO indicates that all these language varieties are among languages which typologically do not permit onset-less syllables. Moreover, the data suggests that the linguistic distance between two languages or dialects equals to the geographical distance between them. Further, as to syllable structure, historical considerations should be taken into account. Accordingly, the syllable structure of SD corresponds to the syllable structure of CSB rather than SP, although linguistically SD is closer to SP not CSB

On the Diversity of Linguistic Data and the Integration of the Language Sciences

An integrated science of language is usually advocated as a step forward for linguistic research. In this paper, we maintain that integration of this sort is premature, and cannot take place before we identify a common object of study. We advocate instead a science of language that is inherently multi-faceted, and takes into account the different viewpoints as well as the different definitions of the object of study. We also advocate the use of different data sources, which, if non-contradictory, can provide more solid evidence for linguistic analysis. Last, we argue that generative grammar is an important tile in the puzzle