F or me (Dedre) Dan has been a protean figure. 1 first met him when I was a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego and he was a young professor at Berkeley. He was brilliant, charismatic, and compelling, yet at times engagingly shy. We stayed connected through a circle of friends centered in Nijmegen and the Bay Area, a group united by a passion for psychoIogically juicy th...

The potential energy surfaces of the cycloaddition reactions MO(4)(NC(5)H(5))(2) + C(60)→ MO(4)(NC(5)H(5))(2)(C(60)) (M = Fe, Ru, and Os) have been studied at the B3LYP/LANL2DZ level of theory. It has been found that there should be two competing pathways in these reactions, which can be classified as a [6,5]-attack (path A) and a [6,6]-attack (path B). Our theoretical calculations indicate tha...

Linguists and psychologists have long been studying cross-linguistic transfer, the influence of native language properties on linguistic performance in a foreign language. In this work we provide empirical evidence for this process in the form of a strong correlation between language similarities derived from structural features in English as Second Language (ESL) texts and equivalent similarit...

Introduction. One of the most contested debates in phonology concerns identifying factors that affect typology. The Analytic Bias approach (AB) claims that biases in learning affect the typology, while the Channel Bias approach (CB) assumes phonetic precursors and transmission of language affect the typology (Moreton 2008). Empirical evidence in favor of both hypotheses exists: processes that a...

In the Government-based literature, all structural principles supplied by UG are, without exception, assumed to exert their influence over every well-formed representation. We do find cases, however, where two principles that appear to be universally applicable make opposing predictions as to the grammaticality of a given structure. To resolve such instances of principle clash, I propose a loca...

There are approximately 7000 languages spoken in the world today. This diversity reflects the legacy of thousands of years of cultural evolution. How far back we can trace this history depends largely on the rate at which the different components of language evolve. Rates of lexical evolution are widely thought to impose an upper limit of 6000-10,000 years on reliably identifying language relat...