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The paper investigates focus marking devices in the scarcely documented North-Ghanaian Gur language Konkomba. The two particles lé and lá occur under specific focus conditions and are therefore regarded as focus markers in the sparse literature. Comparing the distribution and obligatoriness of both alleged focus markers however, I show that one of the particles, lé, is better analyzed as a connective particle, i.e. as a syntactic rather than as a genuine pragmatic marker, and that comparable syntactic focus marking strategies for sentence-initial constituents are also known from related languages.
"Die Toten reiten schnelle."
(2007)
Viele Briefe von und an Alexander von Humboldt enthalten Zitate aus klassischen Werken der Antike oder aus zeitgenössischen Gedichten, Dramen, Erzählungen. Der Aufsatz versucht anhand einiger Beispiele zu zeigen, dass es den Briefeschreibern weniger darum ging, die Empfänger mit gediegener Bildung zu beeindrucken, als darum, ihren Gedanken anschaulicher und prägnanter Gestalt zu verleihen, zumal in gebildeten Kreisen die Kenntnis der Klassiker und der zeitgenössischen Literatur sozusagen zur Grundausstattung an Bildung gehörte, mit der beinahe spielerisch umgegangen werden konnte.
Characterization of NE81, the first lamin-like nucleoskeleton protein in a unicellular organism
(2012)
Lamins build the nuclear lamina and are required for chromatin organization, gene expression, cell cycle progression, and mechanical stabilization. Despite these universal functions, lamins have so far been found only in metazoans. We have identified protein NE81 in Dictyostelium, which has properties that justify its denomination as a lamin-like protein in a lower eukaryote. This is based on its primary structure, subcellular localization, and regulation during mitosis, and its requirement of the C-terminal CaaX box as a posttranslational processing signal for proper localization. Our knockout and overexpression mutants revealed an important role for NE81 in nuclear integrity, chromatin organization, and mechanical stability of cells. All our results are in agreement with a role for NE81 in formation of a nuclear lamina. This function is corroborated by localization of Dictyostelium NE81 at the nuclear envelope in human cells. The discovery of a lamin-like protein in a unicellular organism is not only intriguing in light of evolution, it may also provide a simple experimental platform for studies of the molecular basis of laminopathies.
R. Sekuler, P. Tynan, and E. Levinson (1973) found that when 2 characters are presented side-by-side with a short onset asynchrony, subjectively, they often appear in a "first-left, then-right" order. The authors of this article conducted 6 experiments in which observers judged the temporal order (TOJs) in which 2 digits were presented. They found a consistent TOJ benefit (larger d') when the numerically smaller digit was presented first, even though this semantic information was irrelevant to the task and unrelated to the correct response. They concluded that digits located to the left of the mental number line are transmitted faster to a central comparison stage, which represents an "internal counterpart" to the Sekuler et al. (1973) finding regarding external locations. A corresponding benefit is found for letters pairs (e.g., A-Z) and also for mixed digit-letter pairs (e.g., I-Z).
We present three experiments in which observers searched for a target digit among distractor digits in displays in which the mean numerical target-distractor distance was varied. Search speed and accuracy increased with numerical distance in both target-present and target-absent trials (Exp. 1A). In Experiment 1B, the target 5 was replaced with the letter S. The results suggest that the findings of Experiment 1A do not simply reflect the fact that digits that were numerically closer to the target coincidentally also shared more physical features with it. In Experiment 2, the numerical distance effect increased with set size in both target-present and target-absent trials. These findings are consistent with the view that increasing numerical target-distractor distance affords faster nontarget rejection and target identification times. Recent neurobiological findings (e.g., Nieder, 2011) on the neuronal coding of numerosity have reported a width of tuning curves of numerosity-selective neurons that suggests graded, distance-dependent coactivation of the representations of adjacent numbers, which in visual search would make it harder to reject numerically closer distractors as nontargets.
In this paper, we describe tools and resources for the study of African languages developed at the Collaborative Research Centre 632 "Information Structure". These include deeply annotated data collections of 25 sub-Saharan languages that are described together with their annotation scheme, as well as the corpus tool ANNIS, which provides unified access to a broad variety of annotations created with a range of different tools. With the application of ANNIS to several African data collections, we illustrate its suitability for the purpose of language documentation, distributed access, and the creation of data archives.
This paper investigates the structural properties of morphosyntactically marked focus constructions, focussing on the often neglected non-focal sentence part in African tone languages. Based on new empirical evidence from five Gur and Kwa languages, we claim that these focus expressions have to be analysed as biclausal constructions even though they do not represent clefts containing restrictive relative clauses. First, we relativize the partly overgeneralized assumptions about structural correspondences between the out-of-focus part and relative clauses, and second, we show that our data do in fact support the hypothesis of a clause coordinating pattern as present in clause sequences in narration. It is argued that we deal with a non-accidental, systematic feature and that grammaticalization may conceal such basic narrative structures.
Contents: 1. Introduction 2. Selection of QUIS Data for Comparative Goals 2.1 Fairy Tale (Topic and Focus in Coherent Discourse) 2.2 Focus Translation Extract 3. On the Presentation and Comparison of the Data 4. Buli 4.1 Tomatoes Fairy Tale in Buli 4.2 Focus Translation Extract in Buli 5. Kɔnni 5.1 Tomatoes Fairy Tale in Kɔnni 5.2 Focus Translation Extract 6. Baatɔnum 6.1 Tomatoes Fairy Tale in Baatɔnum 6.2 Focus Translation Extract in Baatɔnum