The goal of this work is to examine how second-language learners acquire grammatical knowledge. To measure this knowledge, our research examines how native speakers of English choose between constructions that have similar meanings, but occur in different discourse contexts. An example is the dative alternation (give someone the book vs. give the book to someone). The distribution of these two ...

Representative government in the West was born under an ideology that postulated a basic harmony of interests in society. The political decision process was thus expected to be largely consensual. This ideology obfuscated important con‡icts of values and interests, and it became untenable with the rise of class-based and religious parties. Beginning with Kelsen (1923) and culminating with Schum...

Abstract Previous research has tracked the history of theme-recipient alternation (or: “dative” alternation) in Chinese, but few studies have embedded their analysis a probabilistic variationist framework. Against this backdrop, we explore language-internal and language-external factors that probabilistically influence between theme-first recipient-first ordering large diachronic corpus Chinese...

Binary information is prevalent in the environment and contains 2 distinct outcomes. Binary sequences consist of a mixture of alternation and repetition. Understanding how people perceive such sequences would contribute to a general theory of information processing. In this study, we examined how people process alternation and repetition in binary sequences. Across 4 paradigms involving estimat...

Male frogs vocalize calls to attract conspecific females as well as to announce their own territories to other male frogs. In the choruses, acoustic interaction allows the male frogs to alternate their calls with each other. Such call alternation is reported in various species of frogs including Japanese tree frogs (Hyla japonica). During call alternation, both male and female frogs are likely ...

Alternating pyrimidine-purine sequences typically form Z-DNA, with the pyrimidines in the anti and purines in the syn conformations. The observation that dC and dT nucleotides can also adopt the syn conformation (i.e. the nucleotides are out-of-alternation) extends the range of sequences that can convert to this left-handed form of DNA. Here, we study the effects of placing two adjacent d(G*C) ...

In the Type A Imperfective paradigm of Tigrinya (Ethio-Semitic), unsuffixed verbs have a geminate medial consonant (yÁ-s√bbÁr), while verbs with a subject or object suffix do not have gemination (yÁ-s√br-u). This alternation has been analyzed from various points of view. A fundamental question is whether the more basic stem-form has gemination (Berhane 1991, Rose 1993) or not (Harris 1987, Dena...

We present a general construction for eliminating imperfect information from games with several players who coordinate against nature, and to transform them into two-player games with perfect information while preserving winning strategy profiles. The construction yields an infinite game tree with epistemic models associated to nodes. To obtain a more succinct representation, we define an abstr...

0. Introduction The fundamental problem posed by Slavic alternating vowels, called yers, is represented by the three nominal paradigms in (1). In (1b) a full vowel appears throughout the inflectional paradigm; the stem is invariant. In (1c) the stem is also invariant and ends in a cluster regardless of the following inflection. The paradigm in (1a) contains the yer (underlined). This vowel is p...