Fuck revisited.

This paper is a follow up to the investigation of McEnery, Baker and Hardie (2000) into the use of the word fuck in spoken British English. Both that paper and this are based on the British National Corpus. However, at the time of writing in 2000, the analysis of fuck in the written BNC had not been completed, hence the 2000 paper focussed on spoken English alone. In doing so, it explored the way fuck varied with respect to a range of meta-data encoded in the spoken BNC, principally age, sex and social class. We have now explored the written section of the BNC, and have explored the distribution of fuck with respect to a subset of the metadata encoded in the written BNC, namely domain, author gender, author age, audience gender, audience age, audience level, reception status, medium of text and date of creation. As some of these features have clear analogues in the spoken BNC (most clearly age and sex) comparisons between the work presented here and the earlier work on spoken English will be presented wherever possible. Throughout, unless otherwise stated, references to the frequency of usage of features in spoken language are taken from McEnery, Baker and Hardie (ibid)

Domains, text types, aspect marking and English-Chinese translation.

This paper uses an English-Chinese parallel corpus, an L1 Chinese comparable corpus, and an L1 Chinese reference corpus to examine how aspectual meanings in English are translated into Chinese and explore the effects of domains, text types and translation on aspect marking. We will show that while English and Chinese both mark aspect grammatically, the aspect system in the two languages differs considerably. Even though Chinese, as an aspect language, is rich in aspect markers, covert marking (LVM) is a frequent and important strategy in Chinese discourse. The distribution of aspect markers varies significantly across domain and text type. The study also sheds new light on the translation effect by contrasting aspect marking in translated Chinese texts and L1 Chinese texts

Let Me Call You Dearie

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/1966/thumbnail.jp

A New View of the High Energy Gamma-ray Sky with the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope

This slide presentation reviews some of the findings that have been made possible by the use of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. It describes the current status of the Fermi Telescope and reviews some of the science highlights

A Corpus-Based, Pilot Study of Lexical Stress Variation in American English

Phonological free variation describes the phenomenon of there being more than one pronunciation for a word without any change in meaning (e.g. because, schedule, vehicle). The term also applies to words that exhibit different stress patterns (e.g. academic, resources, comparable) with no change in meaning or grammatical category. A corpus-based analysis of free variation is a useful tool for testing the validity of surveys of speakers' pronunciation preferences for certain variants. The current paper presents the results of a corpus-based pilot study of American English, in an attempt to replicate Mompéan's 2009 study of British English

Probing the response of quantum plasmonic systems: from the macroscopic to the microscopic

In this thesis we investigate the response of plasmonic systems in a quantum optics setting. This work can be grouped into two sub-investigations, the study of macroscopic and microscopic responses. The narrative of the thesis comprises three principal parts. First, we give an in-depth review of the field of quantum plasmonics as it is an important theme that runs through the work contained in this thesis. In particular, we focus on outlining the cutting edge research that is being done on the intense interactions between plasmonic systems and quantum emitters. This leads naturally to the first investigation into the macroscopic response of quantum plasmonic systems in a metamaterial setting. We outline how complex hybrid systems of plasmonic metal nanoparticles (MNP) and two-level quantum dots (QD) can be used to create a quantum plasmonic metamaterial. Metamaterials are structures composed of periodic lattices of identical subwavelength unit cell scatterers, each of which governs completely the electromagnetic properties of the entire bulk material. We theorize the use of MNP-QD nanorings as a unit cell in order to control the macroscopic magnetic properties of the metamaterial. We outline how such a metamaterial can have a tunable, and saturable, magnetic permeability. In the last part of the thesis we consider the model of a single light mode interacting ultrastrongly with a collection of emitters, in the anticipation that quantum plasmonic systems can be brought into this ultrastrong-coupling regime (USC). In particular we study the emission of the system after the coupling between the light mode and the emitters is non-adiabatically switched-on. We find evidence that for both two-level, and multi-level, emitters in the USC, both the counter-rotating terms and the diamagnetic term must be included to prevent qualitative errors.Open Acces

Signatures of the A2A^2 term in ultrastrongly-coupled oscillators

We study a bosonic matter excitation coupled to a single-mode cavity field via electric dipole. Counter-rotating and $A^2$ terms are included in the interaction model, ${\mathbf A}$ being the vector potential of the cavity field. In the ultrastrong coupling regime the vacuum of the bare modes is no longer the ground state of the Hamiltonian and contains a nonzero population of polaritons, the true normal modes of the system. If the parameters of the model satisfy the Thomas-Reiche-Kuhn sum rule, we find that the two polaritons are always equally populated. We show how this prediction could be tested in a quenching experiment, by rapidly switching on the coupling and analyzing the radiation emitted by the cavity. A refinement of the model based on a microscopic minimal coupling Hamiltonian is also provided, and its consequences on our results are characterized analytically.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Photospheric Emission in the Joint GBM and Konus Prompt Spectra of GRB 120323A

GRB 120323A is a very intense short Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) detected simultaneously during its prompt gamma-ray emission phase with the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) on board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the Konus experiment on board the Wind satellite. GBM and Konus operate in the keV--MeV regime, however, the GBM range is broader both toward the low and the high parts of the gamma-ray spectrum. Analysis of such bright events provide a unique opportunity to check the consistency of the data analysis as well as cross-calibrate the two instruments. We performed time-integrated and coarse time-resolved spectral analysis of GRB 120323A prompt emission. We conclude that the analyses of GBM and Konus data are only consistent when using a double-hump spectral shape for both data sets; in contrast, the single-hump of the empirical Band function, traditionally used to fit GRB prompt emission spectra, leads to significant discrepancies between GBM and Konus analysis results. Our two-hump model is a combination of a thermal-like and a non-thermal component. We interpret the first component as a natural manifestation of the jet photospheric emission.Comment: 7 pages of article (3 figures and 1 table) + 3 pages of Appendix (3 figures). Submitted to ApJ on 2017 March 2