The Work of Play in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

from Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50:1 (2008), 51–6

The status of phosphorus of a calcareous flush at Bakethin Reservoir, Northumberland

In order to assess the status of phosphorus of a calcareous flush at Bakethin reservoir, Northumberland, chemical analyses of the concentration of phosphorus in the water and the phosphatase activity of cyanobacteria, Nostoc and Rivularia, as well as the bryophytes, Drepanocladus revolvens and Cratoneuron commutatum, were performed. Concentrations of total filterable phosphorus ranged from 0.11 to 11.35 μg I(^1) and filtrable reactive phosphorus ranged from below detection to 10.55 μg I(^1) No statistical difference was determined in concentrations of phosphorus at different sites in the flush, but a significant difference was determined between different sampling dates, at <0.05. Phosphatase activity in the cyanobacteria, Rivularia and Nostoc, varied between different sites and different dates. Nostoc showed a consistently higher rate of phosphatase activity than Rivularia. Activity in both the cyanobacteria showed no correlation between filtrable reactive and filtrable organic content of the water. Phosphatase activity in the bryophytes, Drepanocladus revolvens and Cratoneuron commutatum, had its pH maximum in the acidic range. Activity also varied between sampling dates and between different species

Indeterminacy by underspecification

We examine the formal encoding of feature indeterminacy, focussing on case indeterminacy as an exemplar of the phenomenon. Forms that are indeterminately specified for the value of a feature can simultaneously satisfy conflicting requirements on that feature and thus are a challenge to constraint-based formalisms which model the compatibility of information carried by linguistic items by combining or integrating that information. Much previous work in constraint-based formalisms has sought to provide an analysis of feature indeterminacy by departing in some way from ‘vanilla’ assumptions either about feature representations or about how compatibility is checked by integrating information from various sources. In the present contribution we argue instead that a solution to the range of issues posed by feature indeterminacy can be provided in a ‘vanilla’ feature-based approach which is formally simple, does not postulate special structures or objects in the representation of case or other indeterminate features, and requires no special provision for the analysis of coordination. We view the value of an indeterminate feature such as case as a complex and possibly underspecified feature structure. Our approach correctly allows for incremental and monotonic refinement of case requirements in particular contexts. It uses only atomic boolean-valued features and requires no special mechanisms or additional assumptions in the treatment of coordination or other phenomena to handle indeterminacy. Our account covers the behaviour of both indeterminate arguments and indeterminate predicates, that is, predicates placing indeterminate requirements on their arguments.</jats:p

Shellfish toxicity in UK waters: a threat to human health?

The potential for poisoning of humans through their consumption of shellfish which have themselves consumed biotoxin producing marine phytoplankton exists in the UK. Toxins are bio-accumulated within the shellfish flesh allowing them to reach harmful concentrations. This threat is in most part mitigated by monitoring programmes that assess both the presence of potentially harmful phytoplankton and shellfish flesh toxicity. However, the medical profession in the UK remains relatively ignorant of the potential for biotoxin derived shellfish toxicity, preventing quantification of magnitude, frequency, and severity of health effects in the community or the medical significance of more recently discovered toxins. While the current causative species and their toxins are relatively well characterised there remains a lack of understanding of the factors governing the temporal and spatial appearance of harmful phytoplankton. Expansion of shellfish aquaculture is likely both worldwide and in the UK. Better understanding of how harmful phytoplankton interact with their environment to promote the sporadic harmful blooms that we observe is required to underpin risk assessments

What is the source of L1 attrition? The effect of recent L1 re-exposure on Spanish speakers under L1 attrition

The recent hypothesis that L1 attrition affects the ability to process interface structures but not knowledge representations (Sorace, 2011) is tested by investigating the effects of recent L1 re-exposure on antecedent preferences for Spanish pronominal subjects, using offline judgements and online eye-tracking measures. Participants included a group of native Spanish speakers experiencing L1 attrition (‘attriters’), a second group of attriters exposed exclusively to Spanish before they were tested (‘re-exposed’), and a control group of Spanish monolinguals. The judgement data shows no significant differences between the groups. Moreover, the monolingual and re-exposed groups are not significantly different from each other in the eye-tracking data. The results of this novel manipulation indicate that attrition effects decrease due to L1 re-exposure, and that bilinguals are sensitive to input changes. Taken together, the findings suggest that attrition affects online sensitivity with interface structures rather than causing a permanent change in speakers’ L1 knowledge representations

The Emergence of the Unmarked Pronoun: Chiche!a Pronominals in Optimality Theory

Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Syntax and Semantics in Africa (1997

Linguistics

Contains research objectives and reports on one research project.National Institutes of Health (Grant 1 P01 MH-13390-02

Locative Case vs. Locative Gender

Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Grammar of Event Structure (1991), pp. 53-6