114 research outputs found
Two Negations for the Price of One
No full textStandard English is typically described as a double negation language. In double negation languages, each negative marker contributes independent semantic force. Two negations in the same clause usually cancel each other out, resulting in an affirmative sentence. Other dialects of English permit negative concord. In negative concord sentences, the two negative markers yield a single semantic negation. This paper explores how English-speaking children interpret sentences with more than one negative element, in order to assess whether their early grammar allows negative concord. According to Zeijlstra’s (2004) typological generalization, if a language has a negative syntactic head, it will be a negative concord language. Since Standard English is often analysed as having a negative head, it represents an apparent exception to Zeijlstra’s generalization. This raises the intriguing possibility that initially, children recognize that English has a negative head (i.e., n’t) and, therefore, assign negative concord interpretations to sentences with two negations, despite the absence of evidence for this interpretation in the adult input. The present study investigated this possibility in a comprehension study with 20 3- to 5-year-old children and a control group of 15 adults. The test sentences were presented in contexts that made them amenable to either a double negation or a negative concord interpretation. As expected, the adult participants assigned the double negation interpretation of the test sentences the majority of the time. In contrast, the child participants assigned the alternative, negative concord interpretation the majority of the time. Children must jettison the negative concord interpretation of sentences with two negative markers, and acquire a double negation interpretation. We propose that the requisite positive evidence is the appearance of negative expressions like nothing in object position. Because such expressions exert semantic force without a second negation, this informs children that they are acquiring a double negation language. © 2016 The Author(s)
Birmingham News sleeve BN0070323
No full textMetro: Mildred Crain author of book on Greenwood community / Mildred Crain - wrote a book on Greenwood community. Feature photo / 5060 Pleasant Hill Road / [Work order included
Comment on Arm\u27s-Length Intimacy: Employment As Relationship
No full textThe author discusses the article “Arm\u27s-Length Intimacy: Employment as Relationship,” by Marion Crain. The author states that Crain\u27s article is provocative for it forces the reader to identify ways in which family and work differs. He says that the article has weaknesses which limit its broader applicability and rest on the assumptions of how labor markets work. Furthermore, he mentions Crain\u27s assumption that employers have the bargaining power and employees are powerless in the relationship
Quantifier raising in 4-year-olds
No full textSeveral studies on the acquisition of quantification (Musolino 1998, Musolino, Crain and Thornton, 2001, Lidz and Musolino 2001) have shown that 4- to 6-year-old children differ systematically from adults in their ability to assign inverse scope to ambiguous sentences like (1) and (2). (1) The Smurf didn’t catch two birds (2) Every horse didn’t jump over the fence Using the Truth Value Judgment Task (Crain and McKee 1985, Crain and Thornton 1998, Gordon 1996), these authors found that adults were able to assign either reading of (3) and (4) to sentences like (1) and (2), respectively.1 (3) a. There are two birds that the Smurf didn’t catch (two> not) b. It is not the case that the Smurf caught two birds (not> two) (4) a. Not every horse jumped over the fence (not> every) b. No horses jumped over the fence (every> not) Four and five-year-old children, however, systematically rejected the inverse scope readings (3a/4a) of the quantificational expressions t w
40 Years Later: Discussing Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION
No full textTo celebrate 40 years of Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION we held a panel discussing the film in detail 🐍 Editor-in-Chief of Ghouls Magazine, Zoë Rose Smith, hosted the discussion, and was joined by an incredible line-up of guests: - Alison Taylor: Author of Troubled Everyday: The Aesthetics of Violence and the Everyday in European Art Cinema and upcoming POSSESSION book / Twitter- Lauren Hart: Owner of Let's Scare Lauren To Death and contributor to Ghouls Magazine / Twitter- Sloane Kay: Podcaster for The Ex Files and Is It Future Podcast, plus writer for Daily Grindhouse, Screen Queens and more / Twitter- Wren Crain: Author of upcoming Transploitation book and writer for Killer Horror Critic and Ghouls Magazine / Twitter<br/
Multiple arenas and professional identity : locating and defining the professionalism and accountabilities of the teacher educators in Lesotho
No full textIncludes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 273-288).Challenged by the granting of institutional autonomy to his institution - the Lesotho National Teachers Training College (now Lesotho College of Education) - the author explores the professional identities of teacher educators in Lesotho. Considering and analysing Lesotho's socio-political historical and institutional contexts of teacher preparation from a postcolonial perspective, he argues that very many factors circumscribe education, in general, and teacher education in particular in Lesotho. Autonomy from the state could therefore mean subjection of the college to these other factors. The socio-political history of Lesotho, chiefly its doublecolonisation through French missionary social and cultural sectarian subjection and British political and economic subjugation, renders it a highly heterogeneous society in subtle and subterraneous ways
Detection and phasing of single base de novo mutations in biopsies from human in vitro fertilized embryos by advanced whole-genome sequencing
No full textCurrently, the methods available for preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) of in vitro fertilized (IVF) embryos do not detect de novo single-nucleotide and short indel mutations, which have been shown to cause a large fraction of genetic diseases. Detection of all these types of mutations requires whole-genome sequencing (WGS). In this study, advanced massively parallel WGS was performed on three 5- to 10-cell biopsies from two blastocyst-stage embryos. Both parents and paternal grandparents were also analyzed to allow for accurate measurements of false-positive and false-negative error rates. Overall, >95% of each genome was called. In the embryos, experimentally derived haplotypes and barcoded read data were used to detect and phase up to 82% of de novo single base mutations with a false-positive rate of about one error per Gb, resulting in fewer than 10 such errors per embryo. This represents a ∼ 100-fold lower error rate than previously published from 10 cells, and it is the first demonstration that advanced WGS can be used to accurately identify these de novo mutations in spite of the thousands of false-positive errors introduced by the extensive DNA amplification required for deep sequencing. Using haplotype information, we also demonstrate how small de novo deletions could be detected. These results suggest that phased WGS using barcoded DNA could be used in the future as part of the PGD process to maximize comprehensiveness in detecting disease-causing mutations and to reduce the incidence of genetic diseases.Brock A. Peters, Bahram G. Kermani, Oleg Alferov, Misha R. Agarwal, Mark A. McElwain, Natali Gulbahce, Daniel M. Hayden, Y. Tom Tang, Rebecca Yu Zhang, Rick Tearle, Birgit Crain, Renata Prates, Alan Berkeley, Santiago Munné and Radoje Drmana
Fluorescence lifetime biosensing with DNA microarrays and a CMOS-SPAD imager
No full textFluorescence lifetime of dye molecules is a sensitive reporter on local microenvironment which is generally independent of fluorophores concentration and can be used as a means of discrimination between molecules with spectrally overlapping emission. It is therefore a potentially powerful multiplexed detection modality in biosensing but requires extremely low light level operation typical of biological analyte concentrations, long data acquisition periods and on-chip processing capability to realize these advantages. We report here fluorescence lifetime data obtained using a CMOS-SPAD imager in conjunction with DNA microarrays and TIRF excitation geometry. This enables acquisition of single photon arrival time histograms for a 320 pixel FLIM map within less than 26 seconds exposure time. From this, we resolve distinct lifetime signatures corresponding to dye-labelled HCV and quantum-dot-labelled HCMV nucleic acid targets at concentrations as low as 10 nM.Micro ElectronicsElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
Children’s Innate Capacity of Learning the First Language: an Overview of Structure-dependent Rules
No full textHow children acquire their first language has always been a question of debate between generativists and cognitive functionalists. Crain and Nakayama (1987) attempt to support the notion that children are innately equipped with syntactic rules and such rules are not learned by the child. They want to persuade functionalist linguists with the rightness of the innateness of the structure-dependent hypothesis (i.e. Universal Grammar/UG and poverty of the stimulus notion). To be precise, Crain and Nakayama discuss the Chomskyain “movement transformation” hypothesis (.i.e. subject/aux inversion in structures with relative clauses). They claim that children do not make errors when attempting to make polar interrogatives from relative clauses; as a result, they reserve the verb inside the relative clause and move the auxiliary in the main clause to the front. For example, children would not form structures like *Is the author who writing this task is confused? This is attributable to the claim that children are innately wired with structure-dependent rule. That is to say, children resort to what so-called innate schematism (UG principles) when they form yes/no questions. This assertion is based on nothing more than the claim that no structure-dependence errors were found so far in the child’s speech. Also, they conclude that grammar and meaning are disconnected from “the autonomy of syntax”. To support their view, Crain and Nakayama conducted a study on thirty children whose age ranged from three to five. This paper is primarily intended to critically review Crain and Nakayama’s article and discuss the structure-dependence rule in favour of both a formalist and cognitive functionalist point of view.How children acquire their first language has always been a question of debate between generativists and cognitive functionalists. Crain and Nakayama (1987) attempt to support the notion that children are innately equipped with syntactic rules and such rules are not learned by the child. They want to persuade functionalist linguists with the rightness of the innateness of the structure-dependent hypothesis (i.e. Universal Grammar/UG and poverty of the stimulus notion). To be precise, Crain and Nakayama discuss the Chomskyain “movement transformation” hypothesis (.i.e. subject/aux inversion in structures with relative clauses). They claim that children do not make errors when attempting to make polar interrogatives from relative clauses; as a result, they reserve the verb inside the relative clause and move the auxiliary in the main clause to the front. For example, children would not form structures like *Is the author who writing this task is confused? This is attributable to the claim that children are innately wired with structure-dependent rule. That is to say, children resort to what so-called innate schematism (UG principles) when they form yes/no questions. This assertion is based on nothing more than the claim that no structure-dependence errors were found so far in the child’s speech. Also, they conclude that grammar and meaning are disconnected from “the autonomy of syntax”. To support their view, Crain and Nakayama conducted a study on thirty children whose age ranged from three to five. This paper is primarily intended to critically review Crain and Nakayama’s article and discuss the structure-dependence rule in favour of both a formalist and cognitive functionalist point of view
Introduction: For Love Or Money? Defining Relationships In Law And Life
No full textThe article focuses on relationships in the light of law and life. It cites the book “Working Relationships,” by Laura Rosenbury wherein the author points on the importance of social ties at work particularly on the legal dichotomy between intimacy, and production. Ethan Leib affirmed the significance of employment where intimacy is formed. Moreover, Mary Anne Case, author of “Enforcing Bargains in an Ongoing Marriage,” says that courts are unwilling to enforce bargains in an ongoing marriage
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