Sijasynkretismi morfologian koetinkivenä

Syncretism and the overlapping of morphologi- cally distinct units or entire categories have different influences on morphosyntactically cumulative and less cumulative forms. The Finnic languages, in comparison to the more eastern Finno-Ugric languages, mainly display morphologically less complex forms. Morphologically there is a clear distinction in the way syncretism is manifested in the Finnic languages that, consequently, is one of the most distinct features in the inflectional system despite the close ge- nealogical affinity. This can concretely be seen in the differences in the case inflection of the southern, such as Livonian, Estonian and Votic, and northern Finnic languages, most notably Finnish, Karelian and Veps. The comparison of syncretism in these languages shows both cross-linguistic regularity and language-specific rules that determine syncretic forms. Diachronic change and the erosion of suffixal ele- ments are closely involved in the rise of syncretism. The paper exam- ines the symmetries and asymmetries in the occurrence of syncretic forms in Finnic case paradigms.

Study of multi-muon events produced in p\bar{p} interactions at \sqrt{s}=1.96 TeV

We report the results of a study of multi-muon events produced at the Fermilab Tevatron collider and acquired with the CDF II detector using a dedicated dimuon trigger. The production cross section and kinematics of events in which both muon candidates are produced inside the beam pipe of radius 1.5 cm are successfully modeled by known processes which include heavy flavor production. In contrast, we are presently unable to fully account for the number and properties of the remaining events, in which at least one muon candidate is produced outside of the beam pipe, in terms of the same understanding of the CDF II detector, trigger, and event reconstruction.

Participes présents et gérondifs en traduction finnoise : perte ou changement de valeur ?

Les participes présents apparaissent, entre autres, dans des constructions à prédication seconde détachées : (1) Intervenant hier soir à Ankara, […], Vladimir Poutine s’est risqué à […]. (Le Figaro 7.12.2004 : 4) Même si les gérondifs, formes adverbiales du verbe (« converbes », cf. Haspelmath & König 1995), n’ont pas d’incidence nominale, contrairement aux participes présents, formes adjectivales du verbe, et ne sont donc pas toujours comptés parmi les constructions à prédication seconde (p.ex. Neveu 1998), les deux ont des emplois assez proches : dans des énoncés du type (2a-b), le participe adjoint peut être paraphrasé par un gérondif, même si son statut fonctionnel n’est pas le même (Halmøy, 2003 : 156-157) : (2a) Arrivant à Paris, Emile a proposé à Léa de [...]. (2b) En arrivant à Paris, Emile a proposé à Léa de[...]. (Halmøy, 2003 : 157) Le finnois ne connaît ni ce genre de constructions détachés ni de forme appelée ‘gérondif’, et les deux participes présents finnois (actif et passif) ne correspondent jamais à un participe présent détaché français : en plus de subordonnées, on trouve à leur place le deuxième infinitif, soit à l’inessif, soit à l’instructif, formes nominales qu’on trouve également dans la traduction des gérondifs : (3a) […] ? me demanda-t-elle sèchement en me montrant l’une des lignes incriminées. (Nothomb, p. 62) […] : hän kysyi minulta kuivakkaasti näyttäen erästä Unajin moittimaa riviä. (Suni, p. 4) (3b) L’espace d’un instant, il sourit, croyant que […] je m’étais trompée de commodités. (Nothomb, p. 138-139) Hetken hän hymyili luullen, että minä […] olin erehtynyt mukavuuslaitoksesta. (Suni, p. 94) : Dans cette communication, nous examinerons quatre traductions littéraires en nous demandant dans quels cas et de quelle manière la différence entre le participe et le gérondif a éventuellement été prise en considération.

Religion´s role in Development, Ecology & Climate Change

Islam, Development, Ecology,

Task-dependent activations of human auditory cortex during pitch discrimination and pitch memory tasks

"The functional organization of auditory cortex (AC) is still poorly understood. Previous studies suggest segregation of auditory processing streams for spatial and nonspatial information located in the posterior and anterior AC, respectively (Rauschecker and Tian, 2000; Arnott et al., 2004; Lomber and Malhotra, 2008). Furthermore, previous studies have shown that active listening tasks strongly modulate AC activations (Petkov et al., 2004; Fritz et al., 2005; Polley et al., 2006). However, the task dependence of AC activations has not been systematically investigated. In the present study, we applied high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging of the AC and adjacent areas to compare activations during pitch discrimination and n-back pitch memory tasks that were varied parametrically in difficulty. We found that anterior AC activations were increased during discrimination but not during memory tasks, while activations in the inferior parietal lobule posterior to the AC were enhanced during memory tasks but not during discrimination. We also found that wide areas of the anterior AC and anterior insula were strongly deactivated during the pitch memory tasks. While these results are consistent with the proposition that the anterior and posterior AC belong to functionally separate auditory processing streams, our results show that this division is present also between tasks using spatially invariant sounds. Together, our results indicate that activations of human AC are strongly dependent on the characteristics of the behavioral task."

Activation and persistence of implicit causality information in spoken language comprehension

A visual world eye-tracking study investigated the activation and persistence of implicit causality information in spoken language comprehension. We showed that people infer the implicit causality of verbs as soon as they encounter such verbs in discourse, as is predicted by proponents of the immediate focusing account (Greene & McKoon, 1995; Koornneef & Van Berkum, 2006; Van Berkum, Koornneef, Otten, & Nieuwland, 2007). Interestingly, we observed activation of implicit causality information even before people encountered the causal conjunction. However, while implicit causality information was persistent as the discourse unfolded, it did not have a privileged role as a focusing cue immediately at the ambiguous pronoun when people were resolving its antecedent. Instead, our study indicated that implicit causality does not affect all referents to the same extent, rather it interacts with other cues in the discourse, especially when one of the referents is already prominently in focus.