scholarly journals Evidence of a configurational structure in Meskwaki

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 64
Author(s):  
Paul A. Morris

Meskwaki, like many polysynthetic Algonquian languages, is often analyzed as having a non-configurational structure because it exhibits the three core characteristics of non-configurationality: free word order, discontinuous expressions, and null anaphora (Hale 1983). While free surface form word order is attributed to a preverbal discourse-based hierarchy, non-topic/focus NPs are in a post-verbal, non-hierarchical XP structure (Dahlstrom in progress). This paper posits that Meskwaki has an underlying configurational syntactic structure based on novel and prior data showing (1) discontinuous NP ordering restrictions with locality constraints, (2) superiority effects in multiple wh-phrases, and (3) long-distance movement and island effects.

Author(s):  
Pragya Katyayan ◽  
Nisheeth Joshi

Hindi is the third most-spoken language in the world (615 million speakers) and has the fourth highest native speakers (341 million). It is an inflectionally rich and relatively free word-order language with an immense vocabulary set. Despite being such a celebrated language across the globe, very few Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications and tools have been developed to support it computationally. Moreover, most of the existing ones are not efficient enough due to the lack of semantic information (or contextual knowledge). Hindi grammar is based on Paninian grammar and derives most of its rules from it. Paninian grammar very aggressively highlights the role of karaka theory in free-word order languages. In this article, we present an application that extracts all possible karakas from simple Hindi sentences with an accuracy of 84.2% and an F1 score of 88.5%. We consider features such as Parts of Speech tags, post-position markers (vibhaktis), semantic tags for nouns and syntactic structure to grab the context in different-sized word windows within a sentence. With the help of these features, we built a rule-based inference engine to extract karakas from a sentence. The application takes in a text file with clean (without punctuation) simple Hindi sentences and gives back karaka tagged sentences in a separate text file as output.


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Antje Gerda Muntendam

In this paper, I report the results of tests that I designed to show how Andean Spanish(AS) word order is affected by language contact with Quechua. In AS the object appears in preverbal position more frequently than in Standard Spanish(SS). The main syntactic properties of focus-fronting in SS are weak-crossover and long-distance movement. I constructed tests to check for these syntactic properties and the pragmatics of focus in AS and Quechua. The results show that AS and SS are syntactically identical, but that there is pragmatic transfer from Quechua into AS. The study has implications for language contact and syntax.


Author(s):  
Carolyn Swan

Around the year 970 CE, a merchant ship carrying an assortment of goods from East Africa, Persia, India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and China foundered and sank to the bottom of the Java Sea. Thousands of beads made from many different materials—ceramic, jet, coral, banded stone, lapis lazuli, rock crystal, sapphire, ruby, garnet, pearl, gold, and glass—attest to the long-distance movement and trade of these small and often precious objects throughout the Indian Ocean world. The beads made of glass are of particular interest, as closely-dated examples are very rare and there is some debate as to where glass beads were being made and traded during this period of time. This paper examines 18 glass beads from the Cirebon shipwreck that are now in the collection of Qatar Museums, using a comparative typological and chemical perspective within the context of the 10th-century glass production. Although it remains uncertain where some of the beads were made, the composition of the glass beads points to two major production origins for the glass itself: West Asia and South Asia.


Author(s):  
A. M. Devine ◽  
Laurence D. Stephens

Latin is often described as a free word order language, but in general each word order encodes a particular information structure: in that sense, each word order has a different meaning. This book provides a descriptive analysis of Latin information structure based on detailed philological evidence and elaborates a syntax-pragmatics interface that formalizes the informational content of the various different word orders. The book covers a wide ranges of issues including broad scope focus, narrow scope focus, double focus, topicalization, tails, focus alternates, association with focus, scrambling, informational structure inside the noun phrase and hyperbaton (discontinuous constituency). Using a slightly adjusted version of the structured meanings theory, the book shows how the pragmatic meanings matching the different word orders arise naturally and spontaneously out of the compositional process as an integral part of a single semantic derivation covering denotational and informational meaning at one and the same time.


2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (SI 2 - 6th Conf EFPP 2002) ◽  
pp. 542-544
Author(s):  
R. Pokorný ◽  
M. Porubová

Under greenhouse conditions 12 maize hybrids derived from crosses of four resistant lines with several lines of different level of susceptibility were evaluated for resistance to Czech isolate of Sugarcane mosaic virus (SCMV). These hybrids were not fully resistant to isolate of SCMV, but the symptoms on their newly growing leaves usually developed 1 to 3 weeks later in comparison with particular susceptible line, the course of infection was significantly slower and rate of infection lower. As for mechanisms of resistance, the presence of SCMV was detected by ELISA in inoculated leaves both of resistant and susceptible lines, but virus was detected 7 days later in resistant line. Systemic infection developed only in susceptible lines. These results indicate restriction of viral long distance movement in the resistant line.


Genetics ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 163 (2) ◽  
pp. 823-831
Author(s):  
J A Sved ◽  
H Yu ◽  
B Dominiak ◽  
A S Gilchrist

Abstract Long-range dispersal of a species may involve either a single long-distance movement from a core population or spreading via unobserved intermediate populations. Where the new populations originate as small propagules, genetic drift may be extreme and gene frequency or assignment methods may not prove useful in determining the relation between the core population and outbreak samples. We describe computationally simple resampling methods for use in this situation to distinguish between the different modes of dispersal. First, estimates of heterozygosity can be used to test for direct sampling from the core population and to estimate the effective size of intermediate populations. Second, a test of sharing of alleles, particularly rare alleles, can show whether outbreaks are related to each other rather than arriving as independent samples from the core population. The shared-allele statistic also serves as a genetic distance measure that is appropriate for small samples. These methods were applied to data on a fruit fly pest species, Bactrocera tryoni, which is quarantined from some horticultural areas in Australia. We concluded that the outbreaks in the quarantine zone came from a heterogeneous set of genetically differentiated populations, possibly ones that overwinter in the vicinity of the quarantine zone.


Cells ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 1221
Author(s):  
Samar Sheat ◽  
Paolo Margaria ◽  
Stephan Winter

Cassava brown streak disease (CBSD) is a destructive disease of cassava in Eastern and Central Africa. Because there was no source of resistance in African varieties to provide complete protection against the viruses causing the disease, we searched in South American germplasm and identified cassava lines that did not become infected with the cassava brown streak viruses. These findings motivated further investigations into the mechanism of virus resistance. We used RNAscope® in situ hybridization to localize cassava brown streak virus in cassava germplasm lines that were highly resistant (DSC 167, immune) or that restricted virus infections to stems and roots only (DSC 260). We show that the resistance in those lines is not a restriction of long-distance movement but due to preventing virus unloading from the phloem into parenchyma cells for replication, thus restricting the virus to the phloem cells only. When DSC 167 and DSC 260 were compared for virus invasion, only a low CBSV signal was found in phloem tissue of DSC 167, indicating that there is no replication in this host, while the presence of intense hybridization signals in the phloem of DSC 260 provided evidence for virus replication in companion cells. In neither of the two lines studied was there evidence of virus replication outside the phloem tissues. Thus, we conclude that in resistant cassava lines, CBSV is confined to the phloem tissues only, in which virus replication can still take place or is arrested.


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