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The concentration and sources of organic nitrogen (ON) in lake sediment significantly affect the lake nitrogen cycle. However, the influencing factors and contributors to the ON accumulation rate (ONAR) are unclear. In this study, tree sediment cores from northern, eastern, and southern Dianchi Lake (DC-N, DC-E, and DC-S, respectively), sampled in July 2014, were used to study the effects of autochthonous and allochthonous sources on ON. The results showed that ON and the ONAR increased 2.4–5.1 and 2.6–4.8 times, respectively, from1900 to2000, especially since the 1980s, at which point algal blooms occurred more frequently. The ON contents decreased in the order: DC-S > DC-N > DC-E, whereas the ONAR values followed the order: DC-N > DC-S > DC-E, suggesting that the ONAR was influenced by ON content as well as depositional environmental conditions. The total concentrations of n-alkanes (n-C12 to n-C34) ranged from 4719.4 ng g− 1 to 61,959.6 ng g− 1 in the three sediment cores, each of which exhibited different n-alkanes characteristic variation with vertical depth. The sources of ON were mainly allochthonous (soil erosion and terrestrial plants) and autochthonous (algal and aquatic plants) in DC-S and DC-N, respectively, whereas they were primarily mixed planktonic and terrestrial sources in DC-E. Using the stochastic impacts by regression on population, affluence, and technology model to further examine the ONAR values revealed that 1% increase in temperature and nitrogen fertilizer can increase the ONAR by 73.8–86.2% and 73.2–151.3% in all sediments, especially in DC-S and DC-E. However, a 1% increase in construction area could reduce the ONAR by 2.4–14.2%, especially in DC-N. Overall, climate change and human activities determine the spatial and temporal ONAR variation in Dianchi Lake.

The extent to which species ranges reflect intrinsic physiological tolerances is a major, unsolved question in evolutionary ecology. To date, consensus has been hindered by the limited tractability of experimental approaches across most of the tree of life. Here, we apply a macrophysiological approach to understand how hematological traits related to oxygen transport shape elevational ranges in a tropical biodiversity hotspot. Along Andean elevational gradients, we measured traits that affect blood oxygen-carrying capacity—total and cellular hemoglobin concentration and hematocrit—for 2,355 individuals of 136 bird species. We used these data to evaluate the influence of hematological traits on elevational ranges. First, we asked whether hematological plasticity is predictive of elevational range breadth. Second, we asked whether variance in hematological traits changed as a function of distance from the midpoint of the elevational range. We found that the correlation between hematological plasticity and elevational range breadth was slightly positive, consistent with a facilitative role for plasticity in elevational range expansion. We further found reduced local variation in hematological traits near elevational range limits and at high elevations, patterns consistent with intensified natural selection, reduced effective population size, or compensatory changes in other cardiohematological traits with increasing distance from species-specific optima for oxygen availability. Our findings suggest that constraints on hematological plasticity and local genetic adaptation to oxygen availability promote the evolution of the narrow elevational ranges that underpin tropical montane biodiversity.

Slope stability analysis and seepage analysis are two important aspects of embankment stability. Landslides are a common risk faced by many people in the world, with this risk increased in the case of an earthfill embankment or water reservoir. People living in downstream regions are always at risk if the dam is not designed to achieve full strength. In this work, a pre-defined earthfill dam was analysed to assess its strength with variations of dam width (WD), shear strength of the soil (τ) and dam slope angle (β). The factor of safety was considered as the dependent, with WD, τ and β as independent variables. A pre-defined proposed dam model was analysed using limit equilibrium (LE) methods with the help of the LE software Slide. Linear regression analysis was performed using SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) software and equations were developed. The computed equations show a very close relation of all the analysed parameters. The coefficient of determination (R2) of all the developed correlations was found to be very high and the equations can thus be used in design analysis of slopes, embankments and earthfill dams.

Preferences for monetary and nonmonetary job attributes are important for understanding workers' motivation and the organization of work. Little is known, however, about how those job preferences are formed. We study how macroeconomic conditions when young shape workers' job preferences for life. Using variation in income-per-capita across U.S. regions and over time since the 1920s, we find that job preferences vary in systematic ways with experienced macroeconomic conditions during young adulthood. Recessions create cohorts of workers who give higher priority to income, whereas booms make cohorts care more about job meaning for the rest of their lives.

Detailed knowledge of the anatomy and different variations of the superficial branch of the radial nerve could be of great importance not only to anatomists but also to clinicians. A predominant radial nerve supply to the dorsum of the hand is rare. Herein, we present an unusual case of unilateral sensory innervation of the dorsal hand found during routine anatomical dissection of a 72-year-old at death male Caucasian cadaver. We also present a brief discussion of the reported variation and emphasize its potential clinical implications.

Conflicts between ethnic groups can threaten group survival and exacerbate son preference in conformity with the traditional role of men as group defenders. We study the impact of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region on the subnational variation of sex ratios among children in Armenia that has one of the world's highest sex ratios at birth. Difference-in-differences analysis show that communities closer to the conflict region have higher sex ratio among children relative to the communities further away. The findings from household surveys show that fear of war is associated with a stronger son preference at the individual level.

We examine price negotiation in the payment card industry by exploiting a unique merchant-, industry-, and city-level data set. Motivated by the substantial variation in acquirer fees and heterogeneous merchant card transactions, we use Nash bargaining to model the negotiation over the acquirer fee between an acquirer and a merchant. We find that the merchants secure a larger incremental surplus than the acquirer on average. Moreover, merchants might face upward pressure on acquirer fees as the card penetration rate rises over time, and policies that weaken the acquirer's bargaining power could relieve the upward fee pressure.

1AbstractIndividuals differ in many ways. Most produce few offspring; a handful produce many. Some die early; others live to old age. It is tempting to attribute these differences in out-comes to differences in individual traits, and thus in the demographic rates experienced. However, there is more to individual variation than meets the eye of the biologist. Even among individuals sharing identical traits, life history outcomes will vary due to individual stochasticity, i.e., to chance. Quantifying the contributions of heterogeneity and chance is essential to understanding natural variability. Inter-individual differences vary across environmental conditions. Heterogeneity and stochasticity depend on environmental conditions. We show that favorable conditions increase the contributions of individual stochasticity, and reduce the contributions of heterogeneity, to variance in demographic outcomes in a seabird population. The opposite is true under poor conditions. This result has important consequence for understanding the ecology and evolution of life history strategies.

The ability to consider the future is critical to many human behaviors. Individuals who consider future outcomes of their actions are more likely to report using emotion regulation strategies that have enduring effects on feelings. However, there has been little examination of how variation in short- and long-term motives across events predicts emotion regulation strategy use. We examined the roles of both interindividual and intraindividual variation in short- and long-term motives in emotion regulation in daily life, while controlling for hedonic and instrumental motives. In a daily diary study (Study 1) and a mobile application study (Study 2), participants (N = 107 and N = 98) reported on their short- and long-term motives for regulation and their use of multiple emotion regulation strategies across multiple negative events. Across both studies, momentary long-term motives were predictive of several strategies, including problem-solving and reappraisal, both of which are associated with more positive mental health outcomes in the long-term. The results suggest that people's long-term motives vary across contexts and relate to the implementation of different regulatory strategies, and that these associations are at least partially independent of the role of hedonic and instrumental motives. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Cementitious materials obtained from different sources, although evaluated and classified by the same methods and criteria, inevitably produce concrete with compressive strength variance despite other inputs and constituents remaining constant. This paper investigates the effect of cement by type and source on strength as a function of supplementary cementitious material (SCM) replacement and aggregate type. This was accomplished by compiling and analysing compressive strength data from previous research initiatives; it was concluded that a cement source change can produce coefficients of variation, range and range divided by average compressive strength values up to 18%, 2700 psi (18·6 MPa) and 0·40, respectively, at 14 to 56 d time frames. Concrete comprising SCMs displayed a statistically significant increase in compressive strength variation and a general decrease in compressive strength predictability against mixtures without SCMs when a cement source was changed, and specific aggregate/cementitious material combinations influenced compressive strength variability due to a change in the cement source.

A striking feature of micro-level plant data is the presence of significant variation in factor cost shares across plants within an industry. We develop a methodology to decompose this variation into idiosyncratic and group-specific components and to use cluster analysis to recover the number and membership of groups using breaks in the dispersion of factor cost shares across firms. We apply our methodology to Chilean plant-level data and find that group-specific variation accounts for approximately one-third of the variation in factor shares across firms. We motivate our results with an economic model in which group-specific variation can arise from differences in production technologies or through distortions that affect different groups of firms. We evaluate several potential explanations for our results and argue that our findings are most consistent with the interpretation of group-specific variation arising from the presence of multiple production technologies. Under this interpretation, ignoring groups overstates the gains from eliminating mis-allocation by roughly one-third.

Managing risk effectively is essential for a business to be successful, and thus understanding risk is vital for business executives. Effective risk management increases firm value, whereas poor risk management will damage shareholder wealth. In this article, we examine the risk literacy of business executives and find significant variation among the leaders we sample. Our findings suggest that business executives would be well served to evaluate their own risk literacy (and remediate, if necessary), to work to increase risk literacy in the company’s employees, and to include risk literacy as an important and routine part of the firm’s overall culture. Because the importance of risk literacy increases with business complexity, we believe that risk literacy will only become more important in the future.

The phenology of Arctic plants is an important determinant of the pattern of carbon uptake and may be highly sensitive to continued rapid climate change. Eriophorum vaginatum L. (Cyperaceae) has a disproportionate influence over ecosystem processes in moist acidic tundra, but it is unclear whether its growth and phenology will remain competitive in the future. We investigated whether northern tundra ecotypes of E. vaginatum could extend their growing season in response to direct warming and transplanting into southern ecosystems. At the same time, we examined whether southern ecotypes could adjust their growth patterns in order to thrive further north, should they disperse quickly enough. Detailed phenology measurements across three reciprocal transplant gardens over a 2-year period showed that some northern ecotypes were capable of growing for longer when conditions were favourable, but their biomass and growing season length was still shorter than those of the southern ecotype. Southern ecotypes retained large leaf length when transplanted north and mirrored the growing season length better than the others, mainly owing to immediate green-up after snowmelt. All ecotypes retained the same senescence timing, regardless of environment, indicating a strong genetic control. Eriophorum vaginatum may remain competitive in a warming world if southern ecotypes can migrate north.

SummaryAfrican populations are the most diverse in the world yet are sorely underrepresented in medical genetics research. Here, we examine the structure of African populations using genetic and comprehensive multigenerational ethnolinguistic data from the Neuropsychiatric Genetics of African Populations-Psychosis study (NeuroGAP-Psychosis) consisting of 900 individuals from Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, and Uganda. We find that self-reported language classifications meaningfully tag underlying genetic variation that would be missed with consideration of geography alone, highlighting the importance of culture in shaping genetic diversity. Leveraging our uniquely rich multi-generational ethnolinguistic metadata, we track language transmission through the pedigree, observing the disappearance of several languages in our cohort as well as notable shifts in frequency over three generations. We find suggestive evidence for the rate of language transmission in matrilineal groups having been higher than that for patrilineal ones. We highlight both the diversity of variation within the African continent, as well as how within-Africa variation can be informative for broader variant interpretation; many variants appearing rare elsewhere are common in parts of Africa. The work presented here improves the understanding of the spectrum of genetic variation in African populations and highlights the enormous and complex genetic and ethnolinguistic diversity within Africa.

We document large variation in the propensity and the intensity in which countries cooperate in the supervision of banks. We show that these variations can be linked to differences in cooperation gains. Using hand-collected data on supranational agreements for 4,278 country pairs during the period 1995-2013, we find that proxies for bilateral cooperation gains a) increase the likelihood of cooperation, b) accelerate the adoption of cooperation, c) make intense forms of cooperation more likely. An analysis of regional cooperation shows that their make-up, as well as their evolution, is broadly consistent with predicted cooperation gains. Our findings suggests that a uniform approach to supranational supervision is not necessarily desirable as countries differ considerably in the extent to which theybenefit from cooperation.

Understanding how individual differences arise and how their effects propagate through groups are fundamental issues in biology. Individual differences can arise from indirect genetic effects (IGE): genetically based variation in the conspecifics with which an individual interacts. Using a clonal species, the Amazon molly ( Poecilia formosa ), we test the hypothesis that IGE can propagate to influence phenotypes of the individuals that do not experience them firsthand. We tested this by exposing genetically identical Amazon mollies to conspecific social partners of different clonal lineages, and then moving these focal individuals to new social groups in which they were the only member to have experienced the IGE. We found that genetically different social environments resulted in the focal animals experiencing different levels of aggression, and that these IGE carried over into new social groups to influence the behaviour of naive individuals. These data reveal that IGE can cascade beyond the individuals that experience them. Opportunity for cascading IGE is ubiquitous, especially in species with long-distance dispersal or fission–fusion group dynamics. Cascades could amplify (or mitigate) the effects of IGE on trait variation and on evolutionary trajectories. Expansion of the IGE framework to include cascading and other types of carry-over effects will therefore improve understanding of individual variation and social evolution and allow more accurate prediction of population response to changing environments.

[eng] It has been suggested that people living in regions with a high incidence of ultraviolet light, particularly in the B band (UV-B), suffer a phototoxic effect during their lifetime. This effect, known as lens brunescence, negatively impacts the perception of visible light in the 'blue' part of the spectrum, which, in turn, reduces the probability that the lexicon of languages spoken in such regions contains a word specifically denoting 'blue.' This hypothesis has been recently tested using a database of 142 unique populations/languages using advanced statistical methods, finding strong support. Here, this database is extended to 834 unique populations/languages in many more language families (155 vs. 32) and with a much better geographical spread, ensuring a much better representativity of the present-day linguistic diversity. Applying similar statistical methods, supplemented with novel piecewise and latent variable Structural Equation Models and phylogenetic methods made possible by the much denser sampling of large language families, found strong support for the original hypothesis, namely that there is a negative linear effect of UV-B incidence on the probability that a language has a specific word for 'blue.' Such extensions are essential steps in the scientific process and, in this particular case, help increase our confidence in the proposal that the environment (here, UV-B incidence) affects language (here, the color lexicon) through its individual-level physiological effects (lifetime exposure and lens brunescence) amplified by the repeated use and transmission of language across generations.

Variation in prescription of psychotropic medications to patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders may underlie health inequities. Using a national U.S. Medicaid sample, the authors examined prescription patterns of psychotropic medications commonly used for managing schizophrenia.Data from the 2011-2012 Medicaid Analytic eXtract were examined for demographic predictors of and variation across states in psychotropic medication prescription among adult patients diagnosed as having schizophrenia spectrum disorders (N=357,914). Percentages of patients in each state who filled prescriptions of at least 15 days of any antipsychotic, clozapine, antidepressant, benzodiazepine, mood stabilizer, or long-acting injectable (LAI) antipsychotic medication were determined after adjustment for demographic and clinical covariates. Multivariate regressions of clinical and demographic factors predicting prescription patterns were conducted.Prescribing patterns for all types of psychotropic medications varied across states. Clozapine and LAI prescriptions showed the most dramatic differences across states and among patients with different demographic characteristics. Across states, adjusted proportions of prescriptions ranged from 4% to 22% for LAIs and from 1% to 11% for clozapine. Non-Hispanic Blacks and people of other race-ethnicities were more likely than non-Hispanic Whites to fill prescriptions for LAIs, and non-Hispanic Whites were more likely than individuals from other racial-ethnic groups to fill prescriptions for clozapine and all other medications.Considerable variation in prescribing patterns of LAIs and clozapine by race-ethnicity and across states suggests uneven quality of care for individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders in the United States. A better understanding of what causes this variation could inform policy makers to improve treatment for this vulnerable population.

This special issue of hagmarl'cs derives from a day-long symposium on "l^anguage Ideology: Practice and Theory" held at the annual meeting of the American Anthropology Association in Chicago, November 1991.1 The organizing premise of the symposium was that language ideology is a mediating link between social structures and forms of talk, if such static imagery for some very dynamic processes can be forgiven. Rather than casting language ideology as an epiphenomenon, a relatively inconsequential overlay of secondary and tertiary responses (Boas 1911; Bloomfield 1944),, the symposium started from the proposition that ideology stands in dialectical relation with, and thus significantly influences, social, discursive, and linguistic practices. As such a critical link, language ideology merits more concerted analytic attention than it has thus far been given. In this first attempt to bring form to an area of inquiry, we have adopted a relatively unconstrained sense of "language ideology." Alan Rumsey's definition, based on Silverstein (1979), is a useful starting point: linguistic ideologies are "shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature of language in the world "(1990: 346). We mean to include cultural conceptions not only of language and language variation, but of the nature and purpose of communication, and of communicative behavior as an enactment of a collective order (Silverstein 1987: l-2). I use the terms "linguistic" and "language" ideology interchangeably, although in the articles that follow one might detect differences in their uses, perhaps varying with the degree to which the authors focus on formal linguistic structures or on representations of a collective order. In order to build toward a general understanding of the cultural variability of language ideology and its role in social and linguistic life, the symposium brought

The investigation of speech acts has been of interest, especially in cross-cultural pragmatics, to many L1/L2 researchers for many years (Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989). Favor-asking, as an important speech act, is centered upon having the other party of conversation do a specific act (Goldschmidt 1999). Although some research has been done on favor-asking in different contexts, studies on this speech act are still scarce, if any, in Persian settings. The main thrust of the current study was to investigate favor-asking among a sample of 20 native speakers of Persian (10 women and 10 men). The participants were selected from graduate students, since the employed oral DCT scenarios were designed to elicit favors asked from three different academic statuses: Higher, equal, and lower (professors, peers, and students, respectively). A total of 240 responses were then analyzed to identify the recurring patterns under the three open-coded categories of pre-favor, favor, and post-favor. The examination of the responses illustrated some variation triggered by gender and academic status differences, namely, the length of favors, frequency of some (sub)themes, and formality degree. Additionally, some relevant syntactic issues were explored (e.g. plural/singular pronouns/verbs), which contributed to the formality/informality of the favors, depending upon the contexts in which they were incorporated. Finally, some insights into Persian sociocultural interactions, favor-asking in particular, were provided.

Previous research on Japanese apologies has presented us with a somewhat static approach, connecting one linguistic form to one aspect of the social context. However, interaction itself is a dynamic and spontaneous process; consequently, apology expressions’ meanings are situated and negotiated in the place of interaction. Therefore, in this study, shifts from gomen to su(m)imasen and gomen nasai, and from su(m)imasen to gomen nasai, were analyzed in order to demonstrate that Japanese apologies function as indexical signs of emotional expression. To this end, data was collected from Japanese television dramas, where the ongoing development of the relationships protagonists were involved in was chronologically observed. Using as analytical concepts, (1) the social context of an interaction, (2) the selves participants impersonate, and (3) the speech styles the interactions occur in, to explain situated variation in the use of apology expressions, the current study revealed new meanings an apology carries in a situated context and also reinforced some of the previous research findings.

In the last decades, the studies on politeness have discussed central concepts stemming from Brown and Levinson’s work ([1978] 1987), such as face, threats, mitigations and strategies of politeness. One of the problems that the study of politeness presents for the analysis of a situated corpus of speech is that the use of the mentioned notions calls for a socio-cultural perspective. In other words, it is necessary to include extralinguistic factors in the analysis of politeness, as the phenomena is beyond the sphere of linguistics in strict terms. In this paper, I approach the challenge based on other studies that I have already done for different corpora of Spanish. I discuss the problem of using certain concepts (face, threats, mitigations and strategies of politeness) as methodological categories for the interpretation of communicative behaviours in situated interactions. In my analysis, I use categories that incorporate, both theoretically and methodologically, socio-cultural variation in the realisations of politeness. To achieve this, I evaluate the social effect that certain behaviours have in the interpersonal relations under study, so as to, from then on, classify those behaviours in terms of politeness, impoliteness or neutrality. Also, I use the categories of “autonomy” and “affiliation”, void of socio-cultural contents. Finally, I put forward extralinguistic elements in the analysis of corpora of Spanish by making explicit those “socio-cultural premises” that an analyst use to make his or her interpretations.

This paper argues for revisiting the traditional adscription of ambiguous readings of personal pronouns, such as hearer-dominantweor genericyou, pluralis maiestatis and pluralis modestiae to specific genres and/or registers. Indeed, in many languages these phenomena are considered typical for a certain genre, register or discourse context. In this paper, I will argue, on the basis of quantitative data and a qualitative analysis of examples taken from different genres (including purposefully creative language use in fiction), that a more accurate account may be formulated in terms of (inter)subjective effect, viz. the attention to the (inter)locutor (among others Benveniste 1966), as a more suitable explanation for the variation of these phenomena attested in corpora.The hearer-oriented uses ofwe, for instance, are considered typical for relationships characterized by power asymmetries such as teacher-student, doctor-patient (Haverkate 1984: 87; Brown & Levinson 1987), whereas generic and speaker-referringyouhave been considered a feature of (informal) oral language than written discourse (Hidalgo Navarro 1996). Recent corpus-based analyses including quantitative and qualitative analyses, however, call for a more nuanced view (De Cock 2011 on Spanish and English; Tarenskeen 2010 on Dutch). We may, for example, find hearer-oriented or even hearer-dominant 1stperson plural forms (Have we taken our medicine?) in contexts where no power- relationship can be defined, e.g. among couples.It will be shown that these uses have different intersubjective effects, however. Their distribution is in line with overall differences as to intersubjectivity according to register and genre, beyond referential ambiguity. The concept of (inter)subjectivity then allows for a more comprehensive analysis of these phenomena and their occurrence in specific registers and genres, addressing the way in which the (inter)locutor is taken into account in each genre.

This paper deals with the use of personal pronouns (PPs) in Ancient Greek in two Aristophanes’ comedies (i.e. Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae). The main purpose of this study is to show that Ancient Greek PPs often have a pragmatic function, in particular linked to the speaker’s communicative goals. The analysis highlights the presence of a gender-related distribution and a context-dependent use of personal pronouns. In particular, male characters prefer 1st person singular pronouns, whereas female characters use more 1st person plural pronouns with an inclusive value. Moreover, in two communicative frameworks it is possible to notice how PPs are used for their value of membership categorization. In this respect PPs can be considered possible markers of autonomía or afiliación (see Bravo 1999). Some peculiar instances of referential ambiguities concern in particular the use of 1st and 2nd person plural pronouns in both comedies.The analysis shows that use of Ancient Greek PPs varies according to gender and context. Moreover, it is clear that in both comedies this variation should be explained mainly as a pragmatic strategy of membership categorization, thus showing instances of non-prototypical uses of PPs similar to other languages (e.g. Spanish, English, Modern Greek).

This article aims to compare three distinct grammatical and conversational patterns of code-switching, which it tentatively links to three different South African ethnoracial labels: White, Coloured and Black. It forms a continuation of a previous article in which correlations were established between Afrikaans-English code-switching patterns and White and Coloured ethnicities. The typological framework used is derived from Muysken, and the hypotheses are based on his predictions as to which type of grammatical CS (i.e. insertional, alternational, congruent lexicalisation) will dominate in which linguistic and sociolinguistic settings. Apart from strengthening the idea of a correlation between patterns of language variation and ethnicity in general, the article explores the theoretical possibility of specific social factors overriding linguistic constraints in determining the grammatical form of CS patterns. In this regard, it will be shown that – on account of specific social factors underlying ethnicity – CS between two typologically unrelated languages, namely Sesotho and English, can exhibit more marks of congruent lexicalization than CS between two typologically related languages, namely Afrikaans and English, while – from the point of view of linguistic constraints – insertional/alternational CS would be expected in the former language pair and congruent lexicalization in the latter. That finding will be placed against the background of different pragmatic norms regulating the conversational use of CS within the Black Sesotho-speaking community (which we will describe as ‘language mixing’ in Auer’s sense) and within the Afrikaans speech community (which in the case of Whites we will describe as tending more towards ‘language alternation’ in Auer’s sense, and in the case of Coloureds as occupying an intermediate position between language alternation and language mixing). The summary of findings on grammatical and conversational CS patterns across ethnic samples will finally be placed against the background of ethnicity and its specific definition in the South African context.

This article focuses on how register considerations informed and guided the design of the spoken component of the British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014). It discusses why the compilers of the corpus sought to gather recordings from just one broad spoken register – ‘informal conversation’ – and how this and other design decisions afforded contributors to the corpus much freedom with regards to the selection of situational contexts for the recordings. This freedom resulted in a high level of diversity in the corpus for situational parameters such as recording location and activity type, each of which was captured in the corpus metadata. Focussing on these parameters, this article provides evidence for functional variation among the texts in the corpus and suggests that differences such as those observed presently could be analysable within the existing frameworks for analysis of register variation in spoken and written language, such as multidimensional analysis.

This study addresses variability among native speaker raters who evaluated pragmatic performance of learners of English as a foreign language. Using a five-point rating scale, four native English speakers of mixed cultural background (one African American, one Asian American, and two Australians) assessed the appropriateness of two types of speech acts (requests and opinions) produced by 48 Japanese EFL students. To explore norms and the reasoning behind the raters’ assessment practice, individual introspective verbal interviews were conducted. Eight students’ speech act productions (64 speech acts in total) were selected randomly, and the raters were asked to rate each speech act and then explain their rating decision. Interview data revealed similarities and differences in their use of pragmatic norms and social rules in evaluating appropriateness.

Previous studies on Chinese dialect variation have mostly focused on the description of dialects, the regions where these dialects are spoken, attitudes towards dialects, and acoustic differences across dialects. The present study draws on experimental evidence concerning a vowel difference in two Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) dialects to provide more understanding on how non-contrastive, dialectal variations may affect speakers’ processing of speech. The variation of interest is a phonemic difference, [ə] and [ɔ], in the vowel inventory in two TSM dialects, in which the difference signals a lexical contrast in one dialect (e.g. [ə-a] ‘oyster’ vs. [ɔ-a] ‘taro’) but not in the other ([ɔ-a] ‘oyster, taro’). A long-term repetition-priming experiment investigating the word recognition involving the two vowels revealed a dialect effect on TSM speakers’ word recognition in accordance with prior exposure, native-ness and variant frequency. Implications of the findings are provided.

In this paper, I will discuss some types of variation in wh-expressions asking for reasons such as why, what…for and how come with special attention to their base-generated positions in the framework of the cartography of syntactic structures. I will first discuss why and what…for to illustrate variation in the base-generated position of wh-expressions asking for reasons. I will next explore a new dimension in the cartography of syntactic structures by discussing some variation in the use of how come and the complementizer that among speakers.

The relation between language and cognition in child development is one of the oldest and most debated questions, which has recently come back to the forefront of several disciplines in the social sciences. The overview below examines several universalistic vs. relativistic approaches to this question, stemming both from traditional developmental theories and from more recent proposals in psycholinguistics that are illustrated by some findings concerning space in child language. Two main questions are raised for future research. First, substantial evidence is necessary concerning the potential impact of linguistic variation on cognitive development, including evidence that can provide ways of articulating precocious capacities in the pre-linguistic period and subsequent developments across a variety of child languages. Second, relating language and cognition also requires that we take into account both structural and functional determinants of child language within a model that can explain development at different levels of linguistic organization in the face of cross-linguistic diversity. Keywords: Linguistic relativity, Child development, Structure, Function, Space.

To what extent do speakers decompose morphologically complex words, such as segmentable, into their morphological constituents? In this article, we argue that spelling errors in English affixes reflect morphological boundary strength and degrees of segmentability. In support of this argument, we present a case study examining the spelling of the suffixes -able/-ible, -ence/-ance, and -ment in an online resource (Tweets), in forms such as , , , and . Based on previous research on morphological productivity and boundary strength (Hay, 2002; Hay & Baayen, 2002, 2005), we hypothesized that morphological segmentability should affect the choice between vs. , vs. , and vs. . An analysis of roughly 23,000 non-standard spellings is consistent with that hypothesis, underscoring the usefulness of spelling variation as a source of evidence for morphological segmentability and for the role of morphological representations in language production and comprehension.

Over the last twenty years, “expert” discourses about the sociolinguistic character of Corsica have shifted from a focus on “diglossia” to an assertion that Corsican is a “polynomic” language. In the context of language shift and efforts at minority language revitalization, these two discourses make different claims about the relationship of language and identity, posit different kinds of power relationships between Corsicans and their two languages, and have different implications for Corsican language policy and advocacy. One of the unintended consequences of a revitalization program built on the idea of “diglossia” was the internal reproduction of dominant language hierarchies that divided rather than unified Corsicans around language. As an antidote, Corsican academics in the late eighties, introduced the notion of Corsican as a “polynomic” language defined both by its internal variation (multiple centers of “authenticity” and “authority”) and by speakers’ recognition of linguistic unity in diversity - a collective stance vis-à-vis linguistic variation that challenges the very principles of dominant (French) language ideologies in its inclusive, non-hierarchical nature. Through analysis of ethnographic data from a month-long bilingual teacher training course and from the way that Corsican orthography is taught in a bilingual school, I explore the ideology of polynomic unity in diversity and how it misrecognizes 1) contemporary speakers’ relationship with regional variation and 2) the new forms of linguistic diversity caused by language shift among both students and teachers in Corsican bilingual classrooms.

This article addresses the replacement of the diminutive form ‑lein by ‑chen as the leading suffix in written German during the New High German period. A large sample of diminutives from 1600–1900, retrieved from the DTA corpus, forms the basis of this investigation. The study aims to provide a detailed periodization of the replacement process with regard to both types and tokens. By using methods from computational linguistics and time series analysis, clear patterns of language variation and change are demonstrated; these patterns are to some extent interrelated and staggered throughout time. The study additionally shows that there are transfers between genres that coincide with the transition from ‑lein to ‑chen. This indicates that the replacement is due to a strengthening of the semantic effort of the diminutive suffix. Finally, information regarding the writers’ origins is used to map the areal distribution of diminutive forms over time. The maps illustrate the importance of geography as a factor, particularly in the initial phase of the replacement; however, it seems to be without any impact by the end of the 19th century. In doing so, the study offers a particular framework for the analysis of word formation based on historical corpora.

Corresponding to the Ba construction (S Ba-OVC) in Mandarin, Cantonese prefers a strong SVCO word order, and the Shaoxing dialect adopts an SOVC variation. This paper makes a detailed cross-linguistic study on the structure and semantic interpretations of disposal NPs and highlights the role of the disposal NPs in the formation of disposal construction in the above three dialects. It suggests that the word order variations in disposal constructions among the Mandarin, Cantonese, and Shaoxing dialects result from the different options being adopted to make the object NPs conform to the so called definiteness constraint of a disposal NP, namely, definite, specific, or generic.

This paper analyses the linguistic resources used by speakers to profile the participants in taboo actions, focusing on expressions for the concept abortar 'to abort' in Spanish sociolinguistic interviews. The tokens referring to the action are analysed in terms of linguistic features that affect agentivity at the level of verbs, subjects and objects. The combination of different linguistic features is classified in three levels of agentivity (prototypical agents, non-prototypical agents and non-agents) with various sublevels. The presence of modals further contributes to reducing agentivity, causing the maximally agentive profiling to be rather infrequent. Second, though the direct construal abortar is generally preferred, the levels of agentivity interplay with onomasiological variation. Third, social variables are not significantly correlated with the levels of agentivity. The paper concludes that mitigating agentivity is a euphemistic strategy against the taboo of a fully agentive woman who aborts, based on the cultural conceptualization of unwanted abortion.

As in other OECD countries, women in New Zealand earn substantially less than men with similar observable characteristics. In this paper, we use a decade of annual wage and productivity data from New Zealand’s Linked Employer-Employee Database to examine different explanations for this gender wage gap. Sorting by gender at either the industry or firm level explains less than one-fifth of the overall wage gap. Gender differences in productivity within firms also explain little of the difference seen in wages. The relationships between the gender wage-productivity gap and both age and tenure are inconsistent with statistical discrimination being an important explanatory factor for the remaining differences in wages. Relating across industry and over time variation in the gender wage-productivity gap to industry-year variation in worker skills, and product market and labour market competition, we find evidence that is consistent with taste discrimination being important for explaining the overall gender wage gap. Explanations based on gender differences in bargaining power are less consistent with our findings.

We formulate a dynamic no-arbitrage asset pricing model for equities and corporate bonds, featuring time variation in both risk aversion and economic uncertainty. The joint dynamics among cash flows, macroeconomic fundamentals, and risk aversion accommodate both heteroskedasticity and non-Gaussianity. The model delivers measures of risk aversion and uncertainty at the daily frequency. We verify that equity variance risk premiums are very informative about risk aversion, whereas credit spreads and corporate bond volatility are highly correlated with economic uncertainty. Our model-implied risk premiums outperform standard instruments for predicting asset excess returns. Risk aversion is substantially correlated with consumer confidence measures and in early 2020 reacted more strongly to new COVID cases than did an uncertainty proxy. This paper was accepted by Haoxiang Zhu, finance.

Pathology reports often contain elements of uncertainty and communication between clinicians and pathologists is paramount for providing the best patient care. Surveys were given to pathology service-users and pathologists in order to ascertain confidence levels regarding certain phrases used in pathology reports. A focus group was then held with pathologists, to gain insight into why certain language is used and the challenges they face in presenting an uncertain diagnosis. Whilst most of the phrases were interpreted similarly between service-users and pathologists, certain phrases elicited more variation in confidence than others, suggesting that message conveyed in pathology reports is not always interpreted the way it is intended to be.

The general purpose of the study was to investigate EFL learners’ speaking anxiety and its associated factors. More specifically, the study purposed to examine was the constructs of a speaking anxiety questionnaire and to explore the model for predicting speaking anxiety based on gender, proficiency and class type. Therefore, explanatory factor analysis and multiple linear regression analysis were used. The result of factor analysis indicated that there are two factors in the questions, but they are difficult to name as a result of overlapping variables in each component. With regards to a multiple linear regression test, the finding shows that proficiency variable is the most significant factor for predicting the variation in speaking anxiety.

Problem definition: We analyze a firm that sells repeatedly to a customer population over multiple periods. Although this setting has been studied extensively in the context of dynamic pricing—selling the same product in each period at a varying price—we consider intertemporal content variation, wherein the price is the same in every period, but the firm varies the content available over time. Customers learn their utility on purchasing and decide whether to purchase again in subsequent periods. The firm faces a budget for the total amount of content available during a finite planning horizon, and allocates content to maximize revenue. Academic/practical relevance: A number of new business models, including video streaming services and curated subscription boxes, face the situation we model. Our results show how such firms can use content variation to increase their revenues. Methodology: We employ an analytical model in which customers decide to purchase in multiple successive periods and a firm determines a content allocation policy to maximize revenue. Results: Using a lower bound approximation to the problem for a horizon of general length T, we show that, although the optimal allocation policy is not, in general, constant over time, it is monotone: content value increases over time if customer heterogeneity is low and decreases otherwise. We demonstrate that the optimal policy for this lower bound problem is either optimal or very close to optimal for the general T period problem. Furthermore, for the case of T = 2 periods, we show how two critical factors—the fraction of “new” versus “repeat” customers in the population and the size of the content budget—affect the optimal allocation policy and the importance of varying content value over time. Managerial implications: We show how firms that sell at a fixed price over multiple periods can vary content value over time to increase revenues.

Dispersal and shared environmental conditions can both synchronize the dynamics of local populations, but disentangling their relative influence on dynamics is challenging. We used a Bayesian approach to estimate the synchrony of a metapopulation of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) composed of 18 populations in Brittany, France, including a 24-year time series of the abundances of juveniles. We estimated the spatial synchrony at a regional and local spatial scale over the study period. We found a strong regional synchrony despite spatiotemporal variability of local synchrony in the abundance of juveniles. We then explored the drivers of synchrony, including environmental conditions (aspects of river flow) and abundance of adult breeders. This revealed that summer low-flow conditions seemed to synchronize the abundances of juveniles more than the synchrony in the abundance of adult breeders, suggesting a Moran effect. Given that drought conditions are expected to become more common with climate change, our work highlights the potentially strong synchronizing effect of summer low flow on the dynamics of local salmon populations and the benefits of considering synchrony at multiple scales.

Rotylenchus is a widely distributed, economically important plant-parasitic nematode group whose species-level identification relies largely on limited morphological characters, including character-based tabular keys and molecular data of ribosomal and mitochondrial genes. In this study, a combined morphological and molecular analysis of three populations of Rotylenchus goodeyi from Belgium, Poland, and the Netherlands revealed important character variations of this species, leading to synonymization of R. rhomboides with R. goodeyi and a high nucleotide variation within cox1 gene sequences in these populations. Additional Illumina sequencing of DNA from individuals of the Dutch population revealed two variants of mitogenomes, each approximately 23 Kb in size, differing by approximately 9% and containing 11 protein-coding genes, 2 ribosomal RNA genes, and as many as 29 transfer RNA genes. In addition to the first representative whole-genome shotgun sequence datasets of the genus Rotylenchus, this study also provides the full-length mitogenome and the ribosomal DNA sequences of R. goodeyi.

Plant responses to glyphosate applied at different doses were examined for one glyphosate resistant (R) and one glyphosate susceptible (S) population of Conyza albida and C. bonarienis. Growth rates and development stages of five R C. albida and three R C. bonarienis populations were also compared with those of their respective S counterparts to investigate the possible impact of the glyphosate resistance trait on their fitness. The GR50 values for C. albida R (3.94−5.22 kg a.i. · ha−1) and S (0.24−0.31 kg a.i. · ha−1) populations were higher than those of C. bonariensis R (0.60−1.51 kg a.i. · ha−1) and S (0.10−0.13 kg a.i. · ha−1). The growth rate (slope b) of one R C. albida population was lower than the respective S and other R populations, while growth rates of most R and S C. bonariensis populations were similar. Some R populations showed inconsistent differences in some development stages when compared to those of the S ones, which cannot be attributed to the glyphosate resistance trait.

Studies of religious and other cultural groups tend to be particularistic or focus on one or more axes of variation. In this article we develop a more comprehensive approach to studying cultural diversity that emulates the study of biological diversity. We compare our cultural ecosystem approach with the axis approach, using the distinction between “tight” and “loose” cultures as an example. We show that while the axis approach is useful, the cultural ecosystem approach adds considerable value to the axis approach. We end by advocating the establishment of field sites for the study of religious and cultural diversity, comparable to biological field sites.