Syntax is a discipline of many theories, and it is accordingly difficult to build a syntactically annotated corpus that would not put off at least some syntacticians by an alleged or real theoretical bias. Yet despite appearances and focus on slightly different sets of linguistic phenomena the theories strive to describe and explain the same object – a natural language. In fact there is a large...

How should a firm modify its product assortment over time when learning about consumer tastes? In this paper, we study dynamic assortment decisions in a horizontally differentiated product category for which consumers’ diverse tastes can be represented as locations on a Hotelling line. We presume that the firm knows all possible consumer locations, comprising a finite set, but does not know the...

We report on the results of two online experiments designed to compare different soundtracks that had been composed (by various researchers and sound designers) in order to evoke/match different basic tastes. In Experiment 1, 100 participants listened to samples from 24 soundtracks and chose the taste (sweet, sour, salty, or bitter) that best matched each sample. Overall, the sweet soundtracks ...

BACKGROUND/AIMS The influence of TAS2R38 haplotype on the relationship between the perceived intensity of propylthiouracil (PROP) and the basic tastes of salt, sweet, sour, and bitter (quinine) was evaluated in the Beaver Dam Offspring Study. METHODS Genotyping was performed on 1,670 participants aged ≥45 years (mean age = 54.4; range = 45-84), and suprathreshold taste intensity was measured ...

What has become familiar tends to be preferred while the unfamiliar is avoided. Additionally, liking is impacted by associative learning processes where new stimuli become liked via repeated pairings with familiar, already-liked stimuli. In addition to the ability to learn to like new foods and flavors, infants bring genetic taste predispositions to the table, including an unlearned preference ...

A mass customization (“customer as designer”) strategy enables a firm to yield a closer match between its products and customer tastes. A mismatch between those tastes and the delivered product implies a cost to the consumer. Rather than assume all products, other than the one purchased, are immaterial to the customer, we consider the brand-level issue of mismatch between customers’ tastes and ...

ture and social structure—going all the way back to the classic statements by Marx and Engels (1939) and Durkheim ([1933] 1997:215, 276)—aim at explaining the connection between these two domains by highlighting the ways in which patterns of social relations affect the composition and structure of cultural systems (Bearman 1993; Douglas 1978; Martin 2002). Some of the more ambitious projects, s...