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Despite a growing body of theoretical work on the music of George Crumb, surprisingly little has been said about his use of rhythm and metre, elements which are often more aurally accessible than complex pitch structures and which constitute a recognisable aspect of Crumb's style. Much of Crumb's output is characterised by a unique combination of metric ambiguity with clear and often recurrent rhythmic gestures whose use and juxtaposition creates varying levels of metricity. A significant portion of his music can then be situated in the middle of a spectrum that ranges from completely non-metrical to clearly metrical. The result is a unique rhythmic language that stringently avoids large-scale metrical structures but makes frequent use of localised metrical gestures and brief moments of metrical emergence. These rhythmic and metric structures are then used in different ways to create a range of temporal and formal effects. This paper focuses on the rhythmic and metric characteristics of motives from several pieces by George Crumb. Emphasis will be placed on a particularly interesting case in the final movement from Crumb's Vox Balaenae, where the repetition and shifting musical context of a small set of rhythmic motives results in a process of metrical emergence and dissolution that contributes to the arch form of the piece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Research on how patients with Broca's aphasia and concomitant agrammatism process dependency structures online offers a window into the understanding of how language is organized in the mind. Previous studies have shown that patients evince differential performances on dependency structures generated at different levels of linguistic representation. The present study extends this line of research to investigate patients' online processing of referential dependencies involving ambiguous pronominal interpretations. Aims: Mandarin, unlike English, allows the object to be missing (null) in some contexts, rendering these null pronominal forms as ambiguous between two interpretations (strict vs. sloppy), which are generated in different levels of linguistic representation. This study examined Mandarin-speaking healthy and agrammatic aphasic participants' processing of the two interpretations of the null pronominal form such as Zhangsan qile ta de ma, Lisi ye qile e "literally: Zhangsan rode his horse and Lisi rode, too", where Lisi rode either Zhangsan's horse (strict) or Lisi's horse (sloppy). Methods & Procedures: Two experiments, employing a Cross-Modal Picture Priming paradigm, manipulated three probe picture conditions (strict, sloppy, control) and two probe positions (at the verb phrase offset and 400 ms afterwards). Experiment 1 tested neurologically unimpaired controls in order to establish the time course of processing as a standard of comparison. Experiment 2 tested patients with agrammatic aphasia. Outcomes and Results: Immediately at the verb phrase offset where the null object is structurally licensed, unimpaired individuals primed both the strict and the sloppy interpretations, with no significant difference in reaction times between the two conditions. At the position 400 ms after the verb phrase offset; however, unimpaired participants did not show priming of either of the two interpretations. Patients showed the opposite pattern: at verb phrase offset, they did not show threshold-level priming of either of the two interpretations; 400 ms afterwards, they showed priming of both the strict and sloppy interpretations, with the strict interpretation eliciting significantly longer reaction times than the sloppy interpretation. Conclusions: Patients' delay in priming both the strict and the sloppy interpretations shows that patients evince a temporal delay when processing dependency structures, which may arise from patients' deficit with lexical integration. Additionally, patients spent significantly longer reaction times on the strict interpretation relative to the sloppy interpretation, which confirms the prediction that that the former, which is generated in the level of discourse, is computationally more costly than the latter, which is generated in the level of semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central thesis of the paper – that the seriously disordered patient's use of language is central to retrieving and containing split-off and dissociated aspects of mental life – is taken up in this discussion both with respect to its possible clinical utility and as a broader critique of contemporary trends in clinical theory. Certain questions are raised regarding the ambiguity inherent in our relation to language, the importance of shared perceptual and speech patterns in setting up a basis for linguistic communication, and the constant search for new ways to use words in the clinical situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Restrictive contextual information has been found to bias syntactic disambiguation, when only one alternative leads to a meaningful interpretation. The current study tests whether disambiguation can be influenced by nonrestrictive cues – when several alternatives are equally plausible. We first evaluated if modifier number biased the disambiguation of number- and case-ambiguous nouns in Basque. In a noun phrase comprehension paradigm, ambiguous noun number judgments were biased by preceding modifier number. Then, using a preamble completion paradigm, we examined whether headnoun disambiguation and thus sentence completion was also biased by modifier number. Our results suggest that nonrestrictive information (singular and plural number) can affect disambiguation. We also report task differences in the overall interpretation of ambiguous Basque nouns, as well modifier-induced agreement errors. We suggest that the parser uses any available context information when there is ambiguity, including preceding modifier markings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay attempts to explore the links between politics, poetry, and collective, embodied readings and discussion in the classroom. When my Year 12 class were asked 'What is Poetry?', their answers suggested something in the Romantic tradition – of poetry as expressive, individual and emotional. My experience studying poetry with my Year 9 class suggests something altogether different – that studying poetry allows students to have an embodied and collective reading. In the sense that politics concerns the control of bodies, poetry allows the class to read in an embodied sense, thus politically, in a way that assessment criteria and the demands of high-stakes testing, with their focus on individual understanding, do not. Thus, I argue for the study of poetry as essential in terms of recognising students' political agency – not primarily as exam-takers but as citizens of a country and an Earth they will, to put it grandly, inherit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the multinational corporation (MNC) context the crossing of linguistic boundaries and the fast-paced change of linguistic ecologies due to market trends and new business activities is the rule rather than the exception. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to discuss language policy and language practice in one consortium of three multinational companies and to problematise the extent to which the dynamics of language use are reflected in the companies' language policy. The paper draws on interview and questionnaire data and discusses the employees' perceptions of language practices in their workplace context and the perceived implications of the companies' official policy. The analysis shows that the language policy in these MNCs is constructed as beingflexiblewhere both employees and managers typically take a ‘what works’ approach regarding language practice. Special attention is paid here to the use of local languages in relation to English which is the official working language. The analysis shows that employees construct multilingualism as a ‘given reality’ and as an ‘opportunity’ and foreground the social aspect of non-L1 language use in the workplace. The paper closes by problematising the concept ofde jurelanguage policy and its strategic (non)implementation in the case discussed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a novel method for establishing the preferred interpretation of ambiguities in spoken sentences. It makes use of the phoneme restoration effect (Warren, 1970): when noise replaces phoneme(s) in a word, listeners report that they perceive the word as intact and congruent with the context. If the word disambiguates a potentially ambiguous sentence, the word that is 'heard' reveals which interpretation listeners assigned. The advantage of this method is its naturalness: no deliberative judgements, no interrupting task, no attention drawn to the ambiguity, and no reliance on anomalous sentences. Our experiments examined the contribution of prosodic phrasing to syntactic ambiguity resolution, using three different tasks to probe what participants thought they had heard: Visual Word Choice, Sentence Repetition, and Speech Shadowing. All three tasks showed a powerful effect of prosody on the resolution of two syntactic ambiguities in Bulgarian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates language use and language attitudes in state kindergarten education in Cyprus. Kindergarten education is the primary setting where Greek-Cypriots learn to employ the standard variety on a systematic basis. Consequently, the context of kindergarten education is a principal setting for examining language attitudes and language variation. Specifically, this study examines whether teachers' ambiguities regarding language use exist in kindergarten education as in other levels of formal education and whether at the age of kindergarten education children's language attitudes towards the standard and non-standard varieties begin to develop. The data gathered via class observations and teacher interviews suggest that teacher ambiguities do seem to exist in relation to the use of the two varieties in the classroom and children do distinguish between the two language varieties, as they employ these on different speaking occasions in the classroom with their peers and teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The P600 is an event-related brain potential (ERP) typically associated with the processing of grammatical anomalies or incongruities. A similar response has also been observed in fully acceptable long-distance wh-dependencies. Such findings raise the question of whether these ERP responses reflect common underlying processes, and what might be the specific mechanisms that are shared between successful processing of well-formed sentences and the detection and repair of syntactic anomalies. The current study presents a comparison of the ERP responses elicited by syntactic violations, garden path sentences, and long-distance wh-dependencies, using maximally similar materials in a within-subjects design. Results showed that a P600 component was elicited by syntactic violations and garden path sentences, but was less robustly elicited in the long-distance wh-dependency condition. Differences in the scalp topography, onset and duration of the P600 effects are characterised in terms of the syntactic operations involved in building complex syntactic structures, with particular attention to retrieval processes, which control the latency of the P600, and structure building processes, which control its duration and amplitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether they teach or apply quantitative (QUAN) or qualitative (QUAL) methodology, textbooks as well as research reports often use ambiguous language in the sense that many formulations cannot be assigned unequivocally to one of the main methodological orientations. An analysis of research reports on the linguistic level shows that QUAN and QUAL paradigms cannot be separated strictly on the level of language. The use of language consolidates the strands of research activities and, therefore, the logic and hidden meanings behind scientific conclusions are revealed. QUAL studies often quantify at least their findings, and QUAN approaches implicitly introduce concepts, ideas and strategies from the field of QUAN. Examples from empirical research and the teaching of statistics demonstrate this ambiguity. Supposing that both approaches actually do not represent isolated paradigms but rather more or less clearly identified steps in the research process, we compare the essential criteria of quality in the domains of QUAN and QUAL. A common ground for both paradigms is identified within basic assumptions from measurement theory and its associated criteria of quality. To make these interrelations more explicit, stronger efforts should be undertaken to document the inputs, the outputs and the methods applied during the various stages of the research process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by adult models of language production and comprehension, we investigate whether children's nonadult interpretation of ambiguous negative quantified sentences reflects their sensitivity to distributional patterns of language use. Studies 1 and 2 show that ambiguous negative quantified sentences of the sort typically used in acquisition studies are strongly avoided in adult production and are judged as poor alternatives by adults. Corpus Studies 3 and 4 show that children and adults overwhelmingly use quantifiers and negation in ways that promote one interpretation of these ambiguous quantified sentences over others. We argue that these patterns guide children's ambiguity resolution processes and explain children's interpretations of ambiguous quantified sentences. The origin of distributional patterns in adult production processes is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mathematics is commonly seen as a discipline with no place for linguistic ambiguity. In this paper, the treatment of ambiguity in two data extracts is critically examined. Analysis draws on two contrasting models of the nature of mathematics and mathematical language. The formal model sees meaning as fixed and relating to language relatively unproblematically. The discursive model sees meaning as situated in and by interaction, and so as shifting and changing as interaction unfolds. Analysis of the extract from the National Numeracy Strategy suggests that it is based on the formal model. This analysis is contrasted with analysis of classroom interaction which reveals how, from a discursive perspective, ambiguity can be seen as a resource for doing mathematics and for learning the language of mathematics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic and psycholinguistic research has documented that there exists a close relationship between a verb's meaning and the syntactic structures in which it occurs, and that learners and comprehenders take advantage of this relationship both in acquisition and in processing. We address implications of these facts for issues in structural ambiguity resolution, arguing that comprehenders are sensitive to meaning-structure correlations based not on the verb itself but on its specific senses, and that they exploit this information on-line. We demonstrate that individual verbs show significant differences in their subcategorisation profiles across three corpora, and that cross-corpora bias estimates are much more stable when sense is taken into account. Finally, we show that consistency between sense-contingent subcategorisation biases and experimenters' classifications largely predicts results of recent experiments. Thus comprehenders learn and exploit meaning-form correlations at the level of individual verb senses, rather than the verb in the aggregate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two experiments were conducted with male and female university students in an attempt to establish whether syntactically ambiguous words are better represented by independent lexical entries for each syntactic context in which the items occur, or whether the different usages could be adequately represented by single entries. Both experiments were attempts to influence recall through control of the coding of ambiguous items. Experiment one (N = 128) involved a free recall procedure in which ambiguous items were embedded in lists of nonambiguous nouns or verbs, and Experiment two (N = 144) involved a release from proactive inhibition procedure which has been shown to make syntactic features highly salient. The results of both experiments supported the single entry view; that is, the ambiguous items apparently were not coded according to one usage independent of other usages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Desmet, Brysbaert, and De Baecke (2002a) showed that the production of relative clauses following two potential attachment hosts (e.g., ‘Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony’) was influenced by the animacy of the first host. These results were important because they refuted evidence from Dutch against experience-based accounts of syntactic ambiguity resolution, such as the tuning hypothesis. However, Desmet et al. did not provide direct evidence in favour of tuning, because their study focused on production and did not include reading experiments. In the present paper this line of research was extended. A corpus analysis and an eye-tracking experiment revealed that when taking into account lexical properties of the NP host sites (i.e., animacy and concreteness) the frequency pattern and the on-line comprehension of the relative clause attachment ambiguity do correspond. The implications for exposure-based accounts of sentence processing are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]