Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction: (Book Review)

Contemporary Linguistics was initially (First Edition 1989) composed to present an introductory textbook on linguistics to enlighten the students about different areas of linguistics (morphology, phonology, psycholinguistics, semantics, syntax, and sociolinguistics) with the aims to provide up-to-date coverage of the subject areas, and provide a clear and direct presentation of materials for the students of linguistics. In this regard, editors of the book strived to: incorporate up-to-date and comprehensive text; present the knowledge of the subject from working experts on a particular topic; adopt a modular approach to explain complicated concepts in an engaging and digesting style; and offer extensive support to instructors and students to teach and understand the book. The book was warmly welcomed by the students, and well appreciated by the experts in the field of linguistics. As a result, the editors have been charting various developments in the subject through different editions (1-6). The current edition (7th 2017) of Contemporary Linguistics comprises of 14 chapters. Chapter one previews language and its features. Chapter two discusses the sounds of speech focusing the part of articulators to produce sounds, symbols representing sounds, grouping of sounds into classes, and features of sound. Chapter three reviews the distinctiveness of sounds, and the use of transcription to describe the variation of sounds. Chapter four throws light on word structures explaining different concepts on morphology. Chapter five presents the analysis of sentence structures explaining how words: are categorized; and combined to form phrases and sentences; and how sentence structures are diagrammed. Chapter six describes different concepts of semantics e.g., derivation of meaning, contribution of speaker’s attitude and belief, context, and setting toward meaning. Chapter seven explains how different languages are classified based on morphological, phonological, and syntactic similarities. Chapter eight discusses: how and why a language and its sounds change over time; and what syntactic and morphological changes are noticed in a language. Chapters nine and 10 explain how children acquire first and second language by developing vocabulary in different stages of acquisition, and what factors influence the acquisition process. Chapter 11 answers the questions related to the: methods employed by psycholinguists to study language processing; linguistic principles involved in language production and comprehension; and psycholinguistic models applied to explain language processing. Entitled ‘Brain and Language’ chapter 12 describes the structure of human brain and its relation with language, and neurolinguistic investigations on language and brain. Chapter 13 explains the use of language in social contexts focusing on how: class, ethnicity, gender and place influence language variation; dialect variation takes place over time; language contact influences development and use of language; social interaction influences the use of language; and people deal with language. Chapter 14 explains the development of writing systems, the emergence of alphabetical systems, the development of writing systems in non-European languages, the development of modern English spelling system, and the relation between reading and writing. Each chapter of the textbook starts with a quote from world-famous literary works followed by the chapter objectives, a detailed overview of the topic, and ends in a chapter summary, key terms, recommended reading, and exercises. Quotes (at the start of every chapter) are very concise and exciting, and present a very appealing introduction of the topic. Chapter objectives comprise of short statements that present an easily understandable aim of the particular topic. A detailed overview of the topic provides a comprehensive discussion of different aspects of the specific topic. Chapter summary (titled ‘Summing Up’) presents a precise summary of the discussion on a specific topic, and makes it easy for the reader the digest the essence of the discussion. ‘Recommended Reading’ section provides references to the materials for further reading on the topic. Exercises, at the end of every chapter, are also very interesting and help to assess readers’ comprehension of the topic. The current edition is very advantageous for several reasons such as it: presents revised content on four chapters (2, 3, 4, and 5) on phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax; updates two additional chapters ‘Second Language Acquisition’, and ‘Language in Social Contexts’ with the aim to incorporate the recent scholarship in the field; provides LaunchPad Solo that offers features (interactive exercises, advanced questions, interactive IPA audio charts, additional reviews on core topics, further exploration of four chapters); provides study guide of the book; presents ‘Instructor’s Resource Manual’ as a teaching guide for the teachers of the textbook; gives detailed and advanced information on the subject; provides online exercises to support multimedia technology in the classroom; and reflects recent research on linguistics. Important boxes like ‘Language Matters’ (present general knowledge on specific topics) and ‘For the Student Linguist’ are the plus of the textbook that is rarely found in any other textbook of linguistics. To be brief, Contemporary Linguistics is a wonderful textbook that features valuable and unique things that further make it a ‘springboard to the realm of scientific analysis’, and ‘a greater appreciation for the wonder of human language, the variety and complexity of its structure, and the subtlety of its use’ (Preface, p. xiv). About Book Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction (7th Edition). Edited by William O’Grady, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff and Janie Rees-Miller. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Macmillan Learning, 2017, pp. 674, 35.99$ (Paperback), ISBN: 978-1-319-03977-6

Study of Multi-Classification of Advanced Daily Life Activities on SHIMMER Sensor Dataset

Today the field of wireless sensors have the dominance in almost every person’s daily life. Therefore researchers are exasperating to make these sensors more dynamic, accurate and high performance computational devices as well as small in size, and also in the application area of these small sensors. The wearable sensors are the one type which are used to acquire a person’s behavioral characteristics. The applications of wearable sensors are healthcare, entertainment, fitness, security and military etc. Human activity recognition (HAR) is the one example, where data received from wearable sensors are further processed to identify the activities executed by the individuals. The HAR system can be used in fall detection, fall prevention and also in posture recognition. The recognition of activities is further divided into two categories, the un-supervised learning and the supervised learning. In this paper we first discussed some existing wearable sensors based HAR systems, then briefly described some classifiers (supervised learning) and then the methodology of how we applied the multiple classification techniques using a benchmark data set of the shimmer sensors placed on human body, to recognize the human activity. Our results shows that the methods are exceptionally accurate and efficient in comparison with other classification methods. We also compare the results and analyzed the accuracy of different classifiers

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN METROLOGICAL PARAMETERS AND VECTOR BORNE DENGUE DISEASE USING ONCOLOGICAL FRACTAL TREATMENT

Dengue is the most vital arboviral disease in humans, which is occurring in tropical and subtropical areas around the world. Dengue fever is itemized as an urban human disease as it spreads easily to urban environmental/ morphological contexts because of the uneven increase of urban population and infectious diseases as a result of climate change. Dengue epidemic cases related to climatic parameters are helpful to monitor and prevent the transmission of dengue fever. Many studies have focused on describing the clinical aspects of dengue outbreak. We bring out the epidemiological study to investigate the dengue fever development and prediction in the Karachi city. This study described the oncological treatment by statistical analysis and fractal rescaled range (R/S) method of the dengue epidemics from January 2001 to December 2020, based on the urban morphological patterns, and climatic variables including temperature and ENSO respectively. The R/S method in oncologists has been carried in two ways, basic oncological/statistical analysis and Fractal dimension adapt to the study the nature of the subtleties of dengue epidemic data, another showing the dynamics of oncological process. Climate parameters are shown that the fractal dimension value revealed a persistency behavior i.e. time series is an increasing, Fractal analysis also confirmed the anti-persistent behavior of dengue for months of September to November and the normality tests specified the robust indication of the intricacy of data. This study will be useful for future researchers working on epidemiology and urban environmental oncological fields to improve and rectify the urban infectious diseases

Expected value of first Zagreb connection index in random cyclooctatetraene chain, random polyphenyls chain, and random chain network

The Zagreb connection indices are the known topological descriptors of the graphs that are constructed from the connection cardinality (degree of given nodes lying at a distance 2) presented in 1972 to determine the total electron energy of the alternate hydrocarbons. For a long time, these connection indices did not receive much research attention. Ali and Trinajstić [Mol. Inform. 37, Art. No. 1800008, 2018] examined the Zagreb connection indices and found that they compared to basic Zagreb indices and that they provide a finer value for the correlation coefficient for the 13 physico-chemical characteristics of the octane isomers. This article acquires the formulae of expected values of the first Zagreb connection index of a random cyclooctatetraene chain, a random polyphenyls chain, and a random chain network with l number of octagons, hexagons, and pentagons, respectively. The article presents extreme and average values of all the above random chains concerning a set of special chains, including the meta-chain, the ortho-chain, and the para-chain

Synthesis and Characterization of Graphene sheets from graphite powder by using ball milling

Due to the rising trend in 2-Dimensional material, graphene has gained a lot of interest in the recent past. Graphene is the 2D carbon allotrope with high strength and improved mechanical, chemical, and electrical properties. Despite being excellent properties among other types of carbon allotropes but still, graphene use is limited because of its costly synthesis technique. In this research, a cheap and effective method is adapted for the preparation of graphene from graphite powder. The graphite powder is thermally treated to prepare the exfoliated graphite then exfoliated graphite is milled to produce the 2D graphene sheets. The synthesized graphene is characterized by X-Ray Diffractometry (XRD) and Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The XRD results show that graphene is successfully synthesized, and SEM results show that graphene is 2D which can be used in various applications. This research provides a direction for the synthesis of graphene from graphite powder on an industrial scale.Debido a la tendencia al alza en el material bidimensional, el grafeno ha ganado mucho interés en el pasado reciente. El grafeno es el alótropo de carbono 2D con propiedades mecánicas, químicas y eléctricas mejoradas de alta resistencia. A pesar de tener excelentes propiedades entre otros tipos de alótropos de carbono, el uso del grafeno es limitado debido a su costosa técnica de síntesis. En esta investigación se adapta un método económico y efectivo para la preparación de grafeno a partir de polvo de grafito. El polvo de grafito se trata térmicamente para preparar el grafito exfoliado y luego se muele para producir las láminas de grafeno 2D. El grafeno sintetizado se caracteriza por difractometría de rayos X (XRD) y microscopio electrónico de barrido (SEM). Los resultados de XRD muestran que el grafeno se sintetiza con éxito y los resultados de SEM muestran que el grafeno es 2D que se puede usar en varias aplicaciones. Esta investigación proporciona una dirección para la síntesis de grafeno a partir de polvo de grafito a escala industrial

Pharmacological evaluation of ONNO donor quadridentate Schiff bases

Four ONNO donor Schiff bases 2-((E)-(2-((E)-2-hydroxybenzylideneamino)ethylimino) methyl)phenol (H2L1), 2-((E)-(2-((E)-2-hydroxybenzylideneamino)propylimino)methyl) phenol (H2L2), 2-((E)-1-(2-((E)-1-(2-hydroxyphenyl) ethylideneamino)ethylimino)ethyl) phenol (H2L3) and 2-((E)-1-(2-((E)-1-(2-hydroxyphenyl)ethylideneamino)propylimino) ethyl)phenol (H2L4) were synthesized by the reactions of ethylene/propylene diamines with 2-hydroxy benzaldehyde/2-hydroxy acetophenone. The new compounds were characterized by FT-IR and NMR (1H and 13C) spectroscopic techniques accompanied by elemental, GC/MS and single crystal X-ray diffraction analyses. These compounds were screened for various biological studies i.e. brine shrimp cytotoxic, antitumor and antibacterial activities The compound H2L3 showed highest cytotoxic and antitumor activities with lowest LD50 (14.27) and IC50 values (18.90). All the compounds were highly active in protecting DNA against hydroxyl free radicals. Antibacterial studies had shown that these were inactive against Gram positive bacteria (Staphylococcus aureus and Micrococcus luteus) while active against Gram negative bacteria (Enterobacter aerogenes, Bordetella bronchiseptica and Salmonella typhi) showing variable antibacterial activity

A Novel Artificial Neural Network (ANN) Using The Mayfly Algorithm for Classification

acceptedVersio