Between 15 and 18 days of age, rat pups develop an alternation strategy in a spatial non-match-to-sample task. Adapting the rat pups to the apparatus by housing them in it overnight, the difference in behavioral patterns can readily be observed in a single laboratory session. The opportunity of the pups to "nipple attach" to an anesthetized dam serves as the reinforcer. Discussion questions are...

The lexically accented words in Goshogawara Japanese can be realized in either of the two surface pitch patterns. The pitch pattern is said to alternate regularly, depending on the phrasing structure of an utterance. The organization of prosodic phrasing of this dialect, however, has been little investigated and thus it remains unclear what prosodic phrase functions as the domain for the altern...

We propose a method for identifying diathesis alternations where a particular argument type is seen in slots which have different grammatical roles in the alternating forms. The method uses selectional preferences acquired as probability distributions over WordNet. Preferences for the target slots are compared using a measure of distributional similarity. The method is evaluated on the causativ...

After setting out the challenges posed by argument alternations for linguistic theory, this paper reviews the development of accounts of argument alternations over the last fifty years, documenting a shift from accounts that are primarily syntactic in nature to accounts with semantic and pragmatic components. The remainder of the paper consists of case studies of the developing understanding of...

This paper investigates the mixed mutation in Breton, an endangered language which has seen a gap in transmission. Initial consonant mutation is a highly salient feature of the language, but susceptible to change in the context of widespread bilingualism and an ageing population of speakers. We investigate to what extent a younger generation is continuing to maintain the mixed mutation, and fin...

1. The purpose of this paper is the establishment of classes of verbals according to the morphemic alternations of base-form finals; 2. Verbals which are subject to morphemic alternation are treated as single entries instead of as multiple entries; 3. The patterns of compatibility between a given set of compound suffixes and a class of verbal bases are designed to be suitable whether used as in...

That there exist two losing games that can be combined, either by random mixture or by nonrandom alternation, to form a winning game is known as Parrondo’s paradox. We establish a strong law of large numbers and a central limit theorem for the Parrondo player’s sequence of profits, both in a one-parameter family of capital-dependent games and in a two-parameter family of history-dependent games...

In this article, we automatically create two large and richly annotated data sets for studying the English dative alternation. With an intrinsic and an extrinsic evaluation, we address the question of whether such data sets that are obtained and enriched automatically are suitable for linguistic research, even if they contain errors. The extrinsic evaluation consists of building logistic regres...

This paper proposes two syntax-semantics correspondence rules which consistently account for the distribution of Japanese locative postpositions ni and de. We demonstrate how to adapt the machinery of the occurrence of the postpositions based on the assumption of Conceptual Semantics (Jackendoff, 1983; 1990; 1991) to fit the organization of Japanese grammar. The correspondence rules correlate w...

The problem of solvability of infinite games is closely connected with the classical question of uniformization of relations by functions of a given class. We work out this connection and discuss recent results on infinite games that are motivated by the uniformization problem. The fundamental problem in the effective theory of infinite games was posed by Church in 1957 (“Church’s Problem”; see...