This study investigates how child speakers of a verb second (V2) language acquire the supposedly more basic SVO word order of English. Data comes from approximately 100 Norwegian school children aged 7 to 12 in their acquisition of three related syntactic constructions. The focus of the investigation is the extent of language transfer from the L1, related to questions of markedness. It is shown...

We apply the new orbifold duality transformations to discuss the special case of cyclic coset orbifolds in further detail. We focus in particular on the case of the interacting cyclic coset orbifolds, whose untwisted sectors are Zλ(permutation)-invariant g/h coset constructions which are not λ copies of coset constructions. Because λ copies are not involved, the action of Zλ(permutation) in the...

Two experiments tested how faithfully German children aged 4 ;5 to 5 ;6 reproduce ditransitive sentences that are unmarked or marked with respect to word order and focus (Exp1) or definiteness (Exp2). Adopting an optimality theory (OT) approach, it is assumed that in the German adult grammar word order is ranked lower than focus and definiteness. Faithfulness of children's reproductions decreas...

Most analysis and policy development in research and academia, and often even that which is concerned with gender, continues not to gender men explicitly and not to make explicit men’s part in the problem of gender inequalities. To develop gendered analyses of academia, research and science, and gender-sensitive policies in academia, research and science, involves explicitly gendering men. In t...

The ATLAS specification language is devoted to build models of city sections using microsimulation. The basic language constructions allow defining a static topology of the section to be studied. The dynamic behavior of the section can be modified by including traffic lights, traffic signs, etc. Once the urban section is outlined, models are converted into cell spaces and the traffic flow is au...

We present new achievable rate regions and code constructions for the symmetric n-channel Multiple Descriptions (MD) coding problem [1] for n > 2. Our approach is inspired by unexplored connections between MD and the problem of distributed source coding [2, 3]. For illustrative clarity, we restrict our focus to the important special case relating to (n, k) source-channel erasure codes [4]. This...

Let k, v, t be integers such that k ≥ v ≥ t ≥ 2. A perfect hash family PHF(N ; k, v, t) can be defined as an N × k array with entries from a set of v symbols such that every N× t subarray contains at least one row having distinct symbols. Perfect hash families have been studied by over 20 years and they find a wide range of applications in computer sciences and in cryptography. In this paper we...

This paper addresses optative constructions, constructions that express a wish or desire without a modal that means ‘wish’ or ‘want’. Focusing on German, I argue that “expressing a wish” is a possible use of a conditional antecedent that is freely available. The question is how certain elements, such as the contrastive particle doch (or the focus particle nur ‘only’), which are typical for opta...

The paper provides a semantic analysis of intervention effects in wh-questions. The interpretation component of the grammar derives uninterpretability, hence ungrammaticality, of the intervention data. In the system of compositional interpretation that I suggest, wh-phrases play the same role as focused phrases, introducing alternatives into the computation. Unlike focus, wh-phrases make no ord...

The goal of this article is to provide a gentle introduction to the basic definitions, goals and constructions in coding theory. In particular we focus on the algorithmic tasks tackled by the theory. We describe some of the classical algebraic constructions of error-correcting codes including the Hamming code, the Hadamard code and the Reed Solomon code. We describe simple proofs of their error...