Search

The present article addresses the issue of the existence of noun incorporation in the Southern Wakashan languages of the Pacific Northwest. There have been a number of proposals for treating a process in the languages that combines elements of a theme argument with a bound verbal element. None of these previous treatments account for the full range of data surrounding this phenomenon in this family of languages. This article introduces new data from all of the Southern Wakashan languages, demonstrating that this is a property of the entire family and provides a new analysis of this phenomenon that makes use of a feature of theme attraction that may be associated with select verbal elements in all three languages. This feature, combined with a distinction between verbal suffix and bound verb, suggests a new and more general account of the facts of the process. When combined with the recognition of the thematic parallelism between transitive objects and unaccusative subjects, this leads to a new and general account of the facts of the process of combining elements of the theme argument with bound verbs in Southern Wakashan languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addressed a fractal evolution of 11 one-month lasting MHz electromagnetic disturbances, recorded in Greece prior to nine significant earthquakes of 2009. Time-space wavelet-based power spectral techniques were employed in the analysis. All investigated signals evolved naturally to epochs of fractal organization in space and time. Continuous organization was detected in seven signals. Significant number of successive () power-law-values were observed lying between 1.5 and 3.0 or above. The majority of fractal segments exhibited anti-persistent () or persistent () behaviour. Switching between persistency and anti-persistency was also found. Locality and sensitivity were traced. Findings were considered indicative of self-organized critical states of the last stages of preparation of the investigated earthquakes. Results implied fractional Brownian modelling. Explanations were proposed in view of the asperity model. Persistent–anti-persistent MHz anomalies were due to self-organized micro-cracking of the heterogeneous medium of the earth's crust which may have led the system's evolution towards global failure. The precursory value of the signals was discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we examine early efforts in English language education in Korea, focusing on a student's glossary of Chinese characters that contains Mandarin Chinese, English, and Japanese glosses of the meanings of each character. This book, the Ahak Pyeon, employs a modified version of the Korean Hangul writing system in order to phonetically render the English words, thereby facilitating the acquisition of English pronunciation for Korean learners. We examine the system proposed in this work in detail, noting issues of phonetic accuracy and clarity and assess it with respect to its suitability as a linguistically-sophisticated phonetic transcription system suitable for the representation of English teaching. In this paper we discuss the principles employed in the Ahak Pyeon to render a reasonably accurate phonetic characterization of the pronunciation of the English words included in the book as well as a discussion of the challenges faced by the developer of the system. We discuss this work in terms of the general adaptability of the original Hangul writing system, the creativity of the revised system, and the potential of this system for developing phonemic awareness among Korean learners of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to employ state-of-art graphics processing unit (GPU) technology and CUDA parallel programming to design and implement a stand-alone pattern recognition (PR) system to discriminate between patients with micro-ischaemic (mIS) and multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions. The dataset comprised MRI image series of 32 patients with mIS and 19 with MS lesions. The probabilistic neural network classifier and 40 textural features, calculated from lesions in the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images, were used to design the PR system. The highest classification accuracy was 90.2%, employing six textural features. It took about 135 minutes to design the PR system on a desktop CPU (Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550), using sequential programming, against 250 seconds on the Nvidia 8800GT GPU card, using parallel programming. The proposed PR system may be redesigned on site, when new verified data are incorporated in its depository, and it may serve as a second opinion tool in a clinical environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the environmental monitoring of radon in soil as a potential trace gas in the search of earthquake precursors. The paper reports the following: (a) Pre-monitoring experiments. (b) Set-up of methods and devices. (c) Active and passive monitoring results concentrating on two extremely-strong radon anomalies (∼ 500 kBq m−3). (e) Discussion regarding the employed ±2σ technique for identifying radon disturbances. (f) Application of wavelet-power-spectrum fractal analysis for detecting power-law behaviour. The strong anomalies exhibited anti-persistent power-law-beta-values (b = (1.8 ± 0.2), b = (1.8 ± 0.3)) significantly higher than those of the baseline. Persistent b-values were also detected. The findings comply with a self-organised-critical pre-earthquake state. (h) Discussion on models that interpret the radon anomalies focusing on the recently-proposed asperity-model. (i) Application of a recent technique which showed that the two strong disturbances were proportional to the strain change. It was concluded that the strong radon disturbances may be linked to the strong earthquake of 8/6/2008, M = 6.5, occurred 29 km away from the installed instrumentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All records of Middle Korean are exclusively in the Central dialect, the prestige form spoken in the capital, and all printed material in the newly-created Hangǔl script emanated from there. For this reason, historical studies must rely on modern dialect data for comparison and reconstruction, since there are virtually no early dialect materials. In this study, I investigate the nature of the MK ㅿ, which is most often realized as /Ø/ in Modern Standard Korean, but which often surfaces as /s/ in Southern varieties, including the most conservative of these dialects, Cheju Korean. Sino-Korean forms in Cheju dialect containing an /s/ reflex of ㅿ demonstrate not only that ㅿ was realized as /z/ in such forms, but also that the dialects must have had special phonological rules to deal with their pronunciation. A further important issue concerns the nature of doublets and their treatment in both Middle Korean and Cheju dialect. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study investigated the phonological disruption and subsequent selfcorrecting behaviour in Cantonese aphasic speakers. The self-correcting behaviour was investigated by examining the sequence of successive spontaneous attempts in producing a target sound. Five anomic, five non-fluent aphasic and five normal control subjects were assessed by using a confrontation naming task which included monosyllabic, disyllabic and trisyllabic targets. All the aphasic subjects demonstrated successive phonological self-corrections towards the target. Initial consonants were more vulnerable to phonological disruption and more resistant to self-correction than vowels, lexical tones and final consonants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]