Paleontologists long have argued that the most important evolutionary radiation of mammals occurred during the early Cenozoic, if not that all eutherians originated from a single common post-Cretaceous ancestor. Nonetheless, several recent molecular analyses claim to show that because several interordinal splits occurred during the Cretaceous, a major therian radiation was then underway. This c...

The largest anuran diversity belongs to the Neobatrachia, which harbor more than five thousand extant species. Here, we propose a new hypothesis for the historical aspects of the neobatrachian evolution with a formal biogeographical analysis. We selected 12 genes for 144 neobatrachian genera and four archaeobatrachian outgroups and performed a phylogenetic analysis using a maximum likelihood al...

We analyse the effect of civil war on household welfare. Using Burundian panel data for the 1998-2007 period in which we re-interviewed original as well as newly formed households (split-offs), we show that headcount poverty decreased by 3.5 % points when split-off households are taken into account and 1% when splits are left out. Poverty is persistent while prosperity is not, in particular in ...

Word-order typology often uses the linear order of binary grammatical pairs in sentences to classify a language. The present paper proposes a method based on dependency treebanks as a typological means. This paper investigates 20 languages using treebanks with different sizes from 16 K to 1 million dependencies. The results show that some languages are more head-initial or head-final than other...

the academic community has long noticed the resemblance between mongolian and turkic epics. some believe that the mongols and the turkic people share a narrative tradition that accounts for their commonalities. such a tradition arises from the period of time when ancestors of these two groups lived together in central asia and south siberia (cf. nekljudov 1981). one could also assert that mongo...

People around the world have folk origin myths, stories that explain where they came from and account for their place in the world and their differences from other peoples. As scientists, however, we claim to be seeking literal historical truth. In Western culture, typological ideas about human variation are at least as ancient as written discussion of the subject, and have dominated both socia...

1. Evidence for feet and their internal structure • typological evidence: rhythmical grouping properties found across languages e. • templatic morphology as in reduplication, truncation etc.: assumed to correspond to metrical feet

By adopting theories as primitive components of a logic and recognizing that formulae are just presentation details we arrive at the concept of topological institution. In a topological institution, we have, for each signature , a frame of theories, a set of interpretation structures and a satisfaction relation. More precisely, we have, for each signature, a topological system. We show how to e...

Kalam is a Trans New Guinea language of Papua New Guinea. Kalam has two distinct vowel types: full vowels /a e o/, which are of relatively long duration and stressed, and reduced central vowels, which are shorter and often unstressed, and occur predictably within word-internal consonant clusters and in monoconsonantal utterances. The predictable nature of the reduced vowels has led earlier rese...