Semantics and Micro-Parametric Variation: The Simple Future in Ibero-Romance

A task like "moving a meeting forward" reveals the ambiguity inherent in temporal references. That speakers of U.S. English do not agree on how to solve it is well established: Roughly one half moves the meeting futurewards, the other half pastwards. But the extent to which individual speakers, rather than groups of speakers, consider such phrases as ambiguous has not been scrutinized. Does the split in readings result from a lack of intraindividual consistency or from a lack of interindividual consensus? And how specific is U.S. English in this regard when compared to other closely related Germanic languages? Based on a taxonomy of spatiotemporal frames of reference (FoRs), we conducted two experiments with speakers of Swedish, U.S. English, and German to assess individual preferences for temporal FoRs, intra- and cross-linguistic variability, consistency and long-term stability of these preferences, and possible effects of priming a spatial FoR. The data reveal cross-linguistic differences, both in terms of which temporal FoRs speakers prefer (the absolute FoR in Sweden, the intrinsic FoR in German, and both of these in the US) and in terms of the extent to which these preferences are shared and stable (high consensus and consistency in Sweden and Germany, and low consensus and partial consistency in the US). Overall, no effect of spatial priming was observed; only speakers of U.S. English with a baseline preference for the absolute temporal FoR seemed to be susceptible to spatial priming. Thus, the assumption that temporal references are affected by spatial references is only weakly supported.

is one of those everyday words that only seems self-evident in its meaning. Physiological measurements alone fail to capture the subjective dimension of health. Health is an end and means--it is foundation for achievement, first achievement itself, and precondition for further achievement. If we devote ourselves to finding holes exactly shaped to house such great words as Freedom, Honour, Bliss we shall spend lifetime slipping, and sliding and searching and all in vain. They are words without home, wanderers like the planets, and that is the end of it.[1] One might assume that just as grocers know what they mean by groceries, so health care providers surely must have dear concept of health in mind when they use this great word. is one of those everyday slippery-as-mercury words, the meaning of which seems so obvious and self-evident that we seldom take few moments to define the term consciously for ourselves. This is unfortunate because we cannot: (1) recognize which of our patients' expectations are authentically medical, (2) identify the appropriate role of physicians in an increasingly technological profession, and (3) understand the interrelationships of health, medicine, and the good life. Along with our patients, we share an amorphous idea of what it is to be healthy beyond simply being well-functioning[2]: clear concept of health could add some form and substance to this vague awareness. Descriptions of health based on physiological measurements ignore the idea of health as value. What they offer in precision, they lack in depth; for, surely, being healthy is much more than having an your organs quietly functioning within plus or minus two standard deviations of normal. Value-free descriptivist definitions of health cannot be more than component of comprehensive concept of health, for health is valued. is value beyond formalizable knowledge. However, value-based definitions of health lack universality; they depend on the individual's (or culture's) determination of what is to be valued. Descriptivist definitions ignore the subjective dimension, whereas normativist definitions exalt it. The World Organization defined health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.[3] This definition, if taken literally, is meaningless. However, we believe that all normativist definitions of health, including this hopelessly utopian WHO vision, derive from common ground, core meaning or experience of health that requires interpretation.[4] Any experienced clinician can recall terminally ill patient who objectively seemed the same the day he died as the day before except for having (often quite explicitly) lost his will to live. Implicit in this will to live, and of special importance to the secular individual, is sense of life being worth living despite all the suffering one may encounter in life and despite the awareness of the certainty of death and nothingness. How admirable! to see lightning and not think life is fleeting (Basho)[5] The healthy individual is well-functioning as whole, in harmony physically and mentally with himself and with his surroundings. A clue to this wholeness characteristic of health can be found in words related to health. The question, ma shlomcha--how are you?--in Hebrew literally asks if you are whole, intact, complete, at peace. The Old English hal, the Old High German heil, and the Greek hygeia and euexia connect health and hygiene to fullness and to the good life. Other words, the Italian salute, the French sante, the Spanish salud, introduce another characteristic of health--salvation. To be healthy is to be `saved' from death. The Hebrew word for health uses the same root, bet, resh, aleph, as the word for create, the opposite of death. …

We present an implementation of the relational programming language miniKanren as a set of combinators and syntax extensions for OCaml. The key feature of our approach is polymorphic unification, which can be used to unify data structures of arbitrary types. In addition we provide a useful generic programming pattern to systematically develop relational specifications in a typed manner, and address the problem of integration of relational subsystems into functional applications.

Lexicalized theories of syntax often assume that verb-structure regularities are mediated by lemmas, which abstract over variation in verb tense and aspect. German syntax seems to challenge this assumption, because verb position depends on tense and aspect. To examine how German speakers link these elements, a structural priming study was performed which varied syntactic structure, verb position (encoded by tense and aspect), and verb overlap. Abstract structural priming was found, both within and across verb position, but priming was larger when the verb position was the same between prime and target. Priming was boosted by verb overlap, but there was no interaction with verb position. The results can be explained by a lemma model where tense and aspect are linked to structural choices in German. Since the architecture of this lemma model is not consistent with results from English, a connectionist model was developed which could explain the cross-linguistic variation in the production system. Together, these findings support the view that language learning plays an important role in determining the nature of structural priming in different languages.

This chapter discusses the necessary linguistic and pragmatic support for improving statistical machine translation systems with respect to verbal tenses. The English Simple Past can be translated into French through a series of tenses because of its conceptual, procedural and pragmatic meanings. By testing and validating its usages in offline experiments with a linguistic judgment task, a general predictive model for the cross-linguistic variation of a verbal tense is proposed. The implementation of the procedure encoded by the Simple Past for a statistical machine translation system improved its results in terms of coherence and lexical choices. Thus, this chapter shows that such approach to automatic translation of verbal tenses seems promising and worth pursuing.

The mathematical definition of the optimal choice problem for software package for an enterprise information system is considered. The problem of the optimal software package choice is a mathematical model of combinatorial optimization on a set of combinations. The algorithm for solving this problem is presented for finding the minimum value of the target function considering additional linear constraints. This method makes it possible to significantly simplify the finding procedure of the optimal solution, since inequalities in the growth of constraints allow us to immediately determine whether a point in the set of combinations will be a support solution or not. In the positive case, the support solution is improved, taking into account the properties of many combinations when directly checking the growth of the target function. The algorithm and its realization are demonstrated by a numerical example. The proposed mathematical model and solution algorithm can be used for a similar class of problems that are modeled by optimization models, where the set of feasible solutions is presented in the many combinations form.

Aim. To reveal the similarities and differences in the grammatical tense of the verbs of the dependent and main parts of complex sentences expressing the real condition in Persian and Russian languages.Methodology. The authors conducted an analysis of the corresponding constructions in Persian and Russian languages, comparing the verb tenses of main and subordinate clauses in sentences of both languages. The analysis was carried out using descriptive and comparative methods.Results. As a result, it was discovered that the main difference between Russian and Persian complex sentences with conditional tense is manifested in constructions where the verb in the main clause is in the imperative mood. In Russian, the verb in the subordinate clause in such scenarios is in the future tense, whereas in Persian it typically appears in the past tense.Research implications. This research deepens the understanding of verb tenses in complex sentences with real conditional tense in Russian and Persian. The comparative analysis of these distantly related languages reveals the main differences and similarities, contributing to a better understanding of their functions. The practical significance lies in applying the results to improve methods used in teaching Russian to Iranian students and improving the quality of translation from Russian to Persian and vice versa. In addition, the results of the research can be used in the compilation of linguistic and translation theories in the field of theoretical, applied, comparative linguistics and linguistic typology, as well as in grammatical descriptions and textbooks.

In both Mandarin and Taiwanese Southern Min, verbal and adjectival reduplication are found. As may be expected between related languages, there are uses involving reduplication that they have in common while there are functions that each possesses uniquely. In what follows, an attempt is made to delineate these similarities and differences and to show, to the extent possible, how these different uses have evolved from a shared core meaning in reduplication. But before we proceed, a few words about each language are in order. The Mandarin examples are mostly drawn from the variety that is commonly spoken in Taiwan. Those who speak it as a native language are estimated to be around three million while an estimated fifteen million people learn it as a second lan guage. Conversely, Taiwanese

Hybrid systems are usually composed by physical components with continuous variables and discrete control components where the system state evolves over time according to interacting laws of discrete and continuous dynamics. Combinations of computation and control can lead to very complicated system designs. We treat more explicit hybrid models by proposing a hybrid relational calculus, where both clock and signal are present to coordinate activities of parallel components of hybrid systems. This paper proposes a hybrid relational modelling language with a set of novel combinators which support complex combinations of both testing and signal reaction behaviours to model the physical world and its interaction with the control program. We provide a denotational semantics (based on the hybrid relational calculus) to the language, and explore healthiness conditions that deal with time and signal as well as the status of the program. A number of small examples are given throughout the paper to demonstrate the usage of the language and its semantics.

This paper proposes a semantic analysis of comparison constructions in Japanese which is crucially different from the standard semantics of comparatives as developed for English and related languages. The interpretation of the Japanese comparison construction is determined to a larger extent by pragmatic strategies, as opposed to compositional semantics. The syntactically provided item of comparison (the constituent accompanying yori) does not, in contrast to an English than-clause, have a degree semantics; it ultimately contributes an individual. From this item the real comparison has to be inferred. We argue that Japanese does not have English-style degree operators and probably lacks abstraction over degree variables in the syntax altogether. The proposed analysis accounts for a number of empirical differences between Japanese and English. A more general outcome is that the semantics of comparison is subject to crosslinguistic variation. A parameter of language variation is suggested as the source of the differences we observe.

Psalms and Interpretation in Milton's Nativity Ode

NeuroMath: Advanced Methods for the Estimation of Human Brain Activity and Connectivity

A set-covering based heuristic algorithm for the periodic vehicle routing problem

Human neocortical processes involve temporal and spatial scales spanning several orders of magnitude, from the rapidly shifting somatosensory processes characterized by a temporal scale of milliseconds and a spatial scales of few square millimeters to the memory processes, involving time periods of seconds and spatial scale of square centimeters. Information about the brain activity can be obtained by measuring different physical variables arising from the brain processes, such as the increase in consumption of oxygen by the neural tissues or a variation of the electric potential over the scalp surface. All these variables are connected in direct or indirect way to the neural ongoing processes, and each variable has its own spatial and temporal resolution. The different neuroimaging techniques are then confined to the spatiotemporal resolution offered by the monitored variables. For instance, it is known from physiology that the temporal resolution of the hemodynamic deoxyhemoglobin increase/decrease lies in the range of 1-2 seconds, while its spatial resolution is generally observable with the current imaging techniques at few millimeter scale. Today, no neuroimaging method allows a spatial resolution on a millimeter scale and a temporal resolution on a millisecond scale. Nevertheless, the issue of several temporal and spatial domains is critical in the study of the brain functions, since different properties could become observable, depending on the spatiotemporal scales at which the brain processes are measured. It is well knownm that the electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) are useful techniques for the study of brain dynamics, due to their high temporal resolution. However, it has been said that the spatial resolution of the EEG is rather low, due to the different electrical conductivities of brain, skull, and scalp that markedly blur the EEG potential distributions, making the localization of the underlying cortical generators problematic. In the last ten years, a body of mathematical techniques, known as high-resolution EEG, was developed to estimate precisely the cortical activity from noninvasive EEG measurements. Such techniques include the use of a large number of scalp electrodes, realistic models of the head derived from magnetic resonance images (MRIs), and advanced processing methodologies related to the solution of the so-called “inverse problem,” that is, the estimation of the brain activity (i.e., electromagnetic generators) from the EEG/MEG measurements. The approach implies both the use of thousands of equivalent current dipoles as a source model and the realistic head models, reconstructed from magnetic resonance images, as the volume conductor medium. The use of geometrical constraints on the position of the neural source or sources within the head model generally reduces the solution space (i.e., the set of all possible combinations of the cortical dipoles strengths). An additional constraint is to force the dipoles to explain the recorded data with a minimum or a low amount of energy (minimum-norm solutions). The solution space can be further reduced by using information deriving from hemodynamic measures (i.e., fMRI-BOLD phenomena) recorded during the same task. The rationale of a multimodal approach is that neural activity, modulating neuronal firing and generating EEG/MEG potentials, increases glucose and oxygen demands. This results in an increase in the local hemodynamic response that can be measured by functional magnetic resonance images (fMRIs). Hence, fMRI responses and cortical sources of EEG/MEG data can be spatially related, and the fMRI information can be used as a prior in the solution of the inverse problem. As a result of all these computational approaches, it is possible to estimate the cortical activity with a spatial resolution of few millimeters and with a temporal resolution of milliseconds from noninvasive EEG measurements. In the framework of a COST Action BM0601 NeuroMath, there was organized a workshop in Rome in 2009 on the themes of the processing of neuroelectromagnetic and hemodynamic signals. Selected papers from this conference were subjected to standard peer-review and compiled in this special issue. With this issue we want to illustrate ongoing and emerging research in the development and application of mathematical methods to the recording, analysis, integration, and modeling of neural activity. The selected papers, written by world class scientists, cover diverse issues ranging from computational models to concrete applications of the methods within the neurosciences. We hope that the readership of CIN could appreciate this special issue as we appreciated it during its composition. Laura Astolfi Sara Gonzalez Andino Fabrizio De Vico Fallani Fabio Babiloni

Internationally recognized brands are an increasingly essential asset for present-day companies. This paper takes a cognitive perspective on the semantics of commercial brands (and their related logos), and explores the role of image schemas in endowing them with a cross-culturally significant core meaning. Two surveys were carried out among speakers of four different languages (i.e., English, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic) in relation to the logos of several car categories (minis, family cars, 4 × 4s, and sports cars) and a limited set of image schemas (CONTAINER, FORCE, and ATTRIBUTE). The analysis of the results reveals a consistent correlation between the participants' semantic interpretation of the car brands, and the basic meanings deriving from the image schemas included in their logos. The outcome of the surveys also points to the existence of potential constraints on the universal reach of image-schematic-based communication. These limitations emerge either from the combination of image schemas with additional idealized cultural models, or from the use of specific richer configurations of the image-schematic visual cues at work. In this connection, the present study explores the inventory of visual configurations available for the representation of the image schemas under scrutiny, assesses their universal significance, and raises awareness about differences in the cross-cultural communicative effectiveness of the various layouts of a given image-schematic cue.