Antonyms as lexical constructions: or, why paradigmatic construction is not an oxymoron

This paper argues that antonymy is a syntagmatic as well as a paradigmatic relation, and that antonym pairs constitute a particular type of construction. This position relies on three observations about antonymy in discourse: (1) antonyms tend to co-occur in sentences, (2) they tend to co-occur in particular contrastive constructions, and (3) unlike other paradigmatic relations, antonymy is lexical as well as semantic in nature. CxG offers a means to treat both the contrastive constructions and conventionalised antonym pairings as linguistic constructions, thus providing an account of how semantically paradigmatic relations come to be syntagmatically realised as well. After reviewing the relevant characteristics of CxG, it looks at some of the phrasal contexts in which antonyms tend to co-occur and argues that at least some of these constitute constructions with contrastive import. It then sketches a new type of discontinuous lexical construction that treats antonym pairs as lexical items, and raises issues for further discussion

Contrasts in American and British dictionary cultures: the view from marketing

How dictionaries are marketed gives a picture of the ways in which dictionary publishers help to create, support, and maintain the contrasting “dictionary cultures” of the UK and US. Such materials show American dictionaries promoted as a tool for people from all walks of life, able to help in social, educational, and economic advancement. British domestic dictionary promotion, on the contrary, has focused more on the accuracy of the record of the language, with some attention to enjoyment of language. This article draws on archival materials concerning Merriam-Webster and Oxford University Press one-volume dictionaries in the twentieth century and situates them within the context of the culture of the written word in the US and UK

Defining your P’s and Q’s: describing and prescribing politeness in dictionaries

The politeness markers please, thank you, and sorry provide a raft of problems for lexicographical treatment. Grammatically, they fall between categories. As pragmatic elements, they defy easy definition, and variations in their usage are subtle. Few words are prescribed so vigorously as politeness markers ("always say please and thank you"), yet they do not fit the stereotype of a prescription, in that there is no proscription. This study investigates how please, thank you, thanks, and sorry are treated in thirteen monolingual dictionaries of English, finding variation in (a) the extent to which their interactional functions are covered, (b) the types of information contained in definitions, and (c) the (sometimes very subtle) ways in which information about the potential (im)polite effects of these words is communicated. Learner dictionaries generally provide more explicit information about the polysemy of these expressions, while traditional American lexicography provides much less useful information, in part because of a tendency to define interactional word senses using similar formulae to those for denotational senses. The best definition practice emphasizes the actions the words perform and the contexts in which the actions take place

Routine politeness in American and British English requests: use and non-use of please

This paper looks at the use and non-use of please in American and British English requests. The analysis is based on request data from two comparable workplace email corpora, which have been pragmatically annotated to enable retrieval of all request speech acts regardless of formulation. 675 requests are extracted from each of the two corpora; the behaviour of please is analysed with regard to factors such as imposition level, sentence mood, and modal verb type. Differences in use of please between the two varieties of English can be accounted for by viewing this as a marker of conventional politeness rather than face-threat mitigation in British English, and of relationship asymmetry in American English

Signals of contrastiveness: but, oppositeness and formal similarity in parallel contexts

By examining contexts in which ‘emergent’ oppositions appear, we consider the relative contribution of formal parallelism, connective type and semantic relation (considered as an indicator of relative semantic parallelism) in generating contrast. The data set is composed of cases of ancillary antonymy – the use of an established antonym pair to help support and/or accentuate contrast between a less established pair. Having devised measures for formal and semantic parallelism, we find that but is less likely to appear in contexts with high levels of formal parallelism than non-contrastive connectives like and or punctuation. With respect to semantic parallelism, we find that contrastive connectives are less likely to occur with pairs that are in traditional paradigmatic relations (‘NYM relations’: antonymy, co-hyponymy, synonymy). The paper’s main hypothesis – that nonparadigmatic relations need more contextual sustenance for their opposition – was therefore supported. Indeed, pairs in NYM relations were found to be more than twice as likely to be joined by a non-contrastive connective as by a contrastive one

Acoustic Communication for Medical Nanorobots

Communication among microscopic robots (nanorobots) can coordinate their activities for biomedical tasks. The feasibility of in vivo ultrasonic communication is evaluated for micron-size robots broadcasting into various types of tissues. Frequencies between 10MHz and 300MHz give the best tradeoff between efficient acoustic generation and attenuation for communication over distances of about 100 microns. Based on these results, we find power available from ambient oxygen and glucose in the bloodstream can readily support communication rates of about 10,000 bits/second between micron-sized robots. We discuss techniques, such as directional acoustic beams, that can increase this rate. The acoustic pressure fields enabling this communication are unlikely to damage nearby tissue, and short bursts at considerably higher power could be of therapeutic use.Comment: added discussion of communication channel capacity in section

The Grizzly, February 12, 1988

Harassment Runs Rampant • Security Tips for Safe Driving • Tapping the Task Force • Schroeder for Press • Sex Still Religiously Private • Letter: Commencing the Issue • Restructuring the Ursinus Tradition: Task Force Transcends Past Goals • Speech Exam Announced • Participants Model the U.N. • Winner-Take-All in Ursinus-Moravian Showdown • Hoopsters Vastly Improved • Reckless Wrestlers Rustlin\u27 Victory • The Bigger Doesn\u27t Mean the Better • Beam Breakin\u27 Benner • \u27Mers Keep Victory Abreast • Conwell Cuts the Cake • Reflect: Success Promising • Dole Doles out Compromise • Can\u27t a Person Change His Mind? • Race for the White House: The Candidateshttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1204/thumbnail.jp

Utility of three anthropometric indices in assessing the cardiometabolic risk profile in children

Objectives: To evaluate the ability of BMI, WC and WHtR to identify increased cardiometabolic risk in pre-adolescents. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study involving 192 children (10.92 ± 0.58 years, 56% female) from the United Kingdom between 2010 and 2013. Receiver operating characteristic curves determined the discriminatory ability of BMI, WC and WHtR to identify individuals with increased cardiometabolic risk (increased clustered triglycerides, HDL-cholesterol, systolic blood pressure, cardiorespiratory fitness and glucose). Results: A WHtR ≥ 0.5 increased the odds by 5.2 (95% confidence interval 2.6, 10.3) of having increased cardiometabolic risk. Similar associations were observed for BMI and WC. Both BMI-z and WHtR were fair predictors of increased cardiometabolic risk although BMI-z demonstrated the best trade-off between sensitivity and specificity, 76.1% and 63.6%, compared to 68.1% and 65.5% for WHtR. Cross-validation analysis revealed that BMI-z and WHtR correctly classified 84% of individuals (kappa score = 0.671, 95% CI 0.55, 0.79). The sensitivity of the cut-points suggests that 89.3% of individuals were correctly classified as being at risk with only 10.7% misdiagnosed whereas the specificity of the cut-points indicated that 77.8% of individuals were correctly identified as being healthy with 22.2% of individuals incorrectly diagnosed as being at risk. Conclusions: Findings suggest that WHtR provides similar cardiometabolic risk estimates to age and sex adjusted BMI