A Grammar of Akajeru: Fragments of a traditional North Andamanese dialect

A Grammar of Akajeru describes aspects of the grammatical system and lexicon of Akajeru, a traditional dialect of the North Andamanese language, as it was reportedly used around the beginning of the twentieth century. It is based primarily on the fragments of this variety provided by the British anthropologist Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown and scattered among the published results of his anthropological research carried out on the islands between 1906 and 1908. These are supplemented by published lists of 46 anatomical terms and 28 toponyms collected by Edward Horace Man, Officer in Charge of the Andamanese 1875–79. The book provides a linguistic analysis of all the extant Akajeru material, plus items identified by Radcliffe-Brown as ‘North Andaman’ without further specification, his few records of Akabo and Akakhora and Man’s few records of Akakhora, which together constitute all the documentation of these other traditional North Andamanese dialects. It includes a grammatical sketch of Akajeru, a list of all the words that were recorded, together with an English-Akajeru finder list, and a comparison between Akajeru and Present-day Andamanese, an Akajeru-based variety with elements from all the other traditional dialects of North Andamanese that is today remembered by only three people

Events, processes, and the time of a killing

The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of the time of a killing (ToK), which persistently besets theories of act-individuation. The solution proposed claims to expose a crucial wrong-headed assumption in the debate, according to which ToK is essentially a problem of locating some event that corresponds to the killing. The alternative proposal put forward here turns on recognizing a separate category of dynamic occurents, viz. processes. The paper does not aim to mount a comprehensive defense of process ontology, relying instead on extant defenses. The primary aim is rather to put process ontology to work in diagnosing the current state of play over ToK, and indeed in solving it

Artificial Neural Network to predict mean monthly total ozone in Arosa, Switzerland

Present study deals with the mean monthly total ozone time series over Arosa, Switzerland. The study period is 1932-1971. First of all, the total ozone time series has been identified as a complex system and then Artificial Neural Networks models in the form of Multilayer Perceptron with back propagation learning have been developed. The models are Single-hidden-layer and Two-hidden-layer Perceptrons with sigmoid activation function. After sequential learning with learning rate 0.9 the peak total ozone period (February-May) concentrations of mean monthly total ozone have been predicted by the two neural net models. After training and validation, both of the models are found skillful. But, Two-hidden-layer Perceptron is found to be more adroit in predicting the mean monthly total ozone concentrations over the aforesaid period.Comment: 22 pages, 14 figure

Drawing Boundaries

In “On Drawing Lines on a Map” (1995), I suggested that the different ways we have of drawing lines on maps open up a new perspective on ontology, resting on a distinction between two sorts of boundaries: fiat and bona fide. “Fiat” means, roughly: human-demarcation-induced. “Bona fide” means, again roughly: a boundary constituted by some real physical discontinuity. I presented a general typology of boundaries based on this opposition and showed how it generates a corresponding typology of the different sorts of objects which boundaries determine or demarcate. In this paper, I describe how the theory of fiat boundaries has evolved since 1995, how it has been applied in areas such as property law and political geography, and how it is being used in contemporary work in formal and applied ontology, especially within the framework of Basic Formal Ontology

Animacy effects on the processing of intransitive verbs:An eye-tracking study

<p>This paper tested an assumption of the gradient model of split intransitivity put forward by Sorace (“Split Intransitivity Hierarchy” (SIH), 2000, 2004), namely that agentivity is a fundamental feature for unergatives but not for unaccusatives. According to this hypothesis, the animacy of the verb’s argument should affect the processing of unergative verbs to a greater extent than unaccusative verbs. By using eye-tracking methodology we monitored the online processing and integration costs of the animacy of the verb’s argument in intransitive verbs. We observed that inanimate subjects caused longer reading times only for unergative verbs, whereas the animacy of the verb’s argument did not influence the pattern of results for unaccusatives. In addition, the unergative verb data directly support the existence of gradient effects on the processing of the subject argument.</p

Interface reactions between Pd thin films and SiC by thermal annealing and SHI irradiation

The solid-state reactions between Pd thin films and 6H-SiC substrates induced by thermal annealing, room temperature swift heavy ion (SHI) irradiation and high temperature SHI irradiation have been investigated by in situ and real-time Rutherford backscattering spectrometry (RBS) and Grazing incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXRD). At room temperature, no silicides were detected to have formed in the Pd/SiC samples. Two reaction growth zones were observed in the samples annealed in situ and analysed by real time RBS. The initial reaction growth region led to formation of Pd3Si or (Pd2Si+Pd4Si) as the initial phase(s) to form at a temperature of about 450 °C. Thereafter, the reaction zone did not change until a temperature of 640 °C was attained where Pd2Si was observed to form in the reaction zone. Kinetic analysis of the initial reaction indicates very fast reaction rates of about 1.55×1015 at.cm-2/s and the Pd silicide formed grew linear with time. SHI irradiation of the Pd/SiC samples was performed by 167 MeV Xe26+ ions at room temperature at high fluences of 1.07×1014 and 4×1014 ions/cm2 and at 400 °C at lower fluences of 5×1013 ions/cm2. The Pd/SiC interface was analysed by RBS and no SHI induced diffusion was observed for room temperature irradiations. The sample irradiated at 400 °C, SHI induced diffusion was observed to occur accompanied with the formation of Pd4Si, Pd9Si2 and Pd5Si phases which were identified by GIXRD analysis.http://www.elsevier.com/locate/nimb2017-03-31hb2016Physic

An outline of an asymmetric two-component theory of aspect

The paper presents the bases of an asymmetric two-component model of aspect. The main theoretical conclusion of the study is that (grammatical) viewpoint aspect and situation aspect are not independent aspectual levels, since the former often modifies the input situation aspect of the phrase/sentence. As it is shown, besides the arguments and adjuncts of the predicate, viewpoint aspect is also an important factor in compositionally marking situation aspect. The aspectual framework put forward in the paper is verified and illustrated on the basis of the aspectual system of Hungarian and some examples taken from English linguistic data