Production of relative clauses in monolingual Turkish children

Research on the production of relative clauses (RCs) has shown that in English, although children start using intransitive RCs at an earlier age, more complex, bi-propositional object RCs appear later (Hamburger & Crain, 1982; Diessel and Tomasello, 2005), and children use resumptive pronouns both in acceptable and unacceptable ways (McKee, McDaniel, & Snedeker, 1998; McKee & McDaniel, 2001). To date, it is unclear whether or not the same picture emerges in Turkish, a language with an SOV word-order and overt case marking. Some studies suggested that subject RCs are more frequent in adults and children (Slobin, 1986) and yield a better performance than object RCs (Özcan, 1996), but others reported the opposite pattern (Ekmekçi, 1990). Our study addresses this issue in Turkish children and adults, and uses participants’ errors to account for the emerging asymmetry between subject and object RCs. 37 5-to-8 year old monolingual Turkish children and 23 adult controls participated in a novel elicitation task involving cards, each consisting of four different pictures (see Figure 1). There were two sets of cards, one for the participant and one for the researcher. The former had animals with accessories (e.g., a hat) whereas the latter had no accessories. Participants were instructed to hold their card without showing it to the researcher and describe the animals with particular accessories. This prompted the use of subject and object RCs. The researcher had to identify the animals in her card (see Figure 2). A preliminary repeated measures ANOVA with the factor Group (pre-school, primary-school children) showed no differences between the groups in the use of RCs (p>.1), who were therefore collapsed into one for further analyses. A repeated measures ANOVA with the factors Group (children, adults) and RC-Type (Subject, Object) showed that children used fewer RCs than adults (F(1,58)=7.54, p<.01), and both groups used fewer object than subject RCs (F(1,58)=22.46, p<.001), but there was no Group by RC-Type interaction (see Figure 3). A similar ANOVA on the rate of grammatical RCs showed a main effect of Group (F(1,58)=77.25, p<.001), a main effect of RC-Type (F(1,58)=66.33, p<.001), and an interaction of Group by RC-Type (F(1,58)=64.6, p<.001) (see Figure 4). Children made more errors than adults in object RCs (F(1,58)=87.01, p<.001), and children made more errors in object compared to subject RCs (F(1,36)=106.35, p<.001), but adults did not show this asymmetry. The error analysis revealed that children systematically avoided the object-relativizing morpheme –DIK, which requires possessive agreement with the genitive-marked subject. They also used resumptive pronouns and resumptive full-DPs in the extraction site similarly to English children (see Figure 5). These findings are in line with Slobin (1986) and Özcan (1996). Children’s errors suggest that they avoid morphosyntactic complexity of object RCs and try to preserve the canonical word order by inserting resumptive pronouns in the extraction site. Finally, cross-linguistic similarity in the acquisition of RCs in typologically different languages suggests a higher accessibility of subject RCs both at the structural (Keenan and Comrie, 1977) and conceptual level (Bock and Warren, 1986).

Is there regime behavior in monsoon convection in the late 20th century?

Mixture model techniques are applied to a daily index of monsoon convection from ERA‐40 reanalysis to show regime behavior. The result is the existence of two significant regimes showing preferred locations of convection within the Asia/Western‐North Pacific domain, with some resemblance to active‐break events over India. Simple trend analysis over 1958–2001 shows that the first regime has become less frequent while the second becomes much more dominant. Both undergo a change in structure contributing to the total OLR trend over the ERA‐40 period. Stratifying the data according to a large‐scale dynamical index of monsoon interannual variability, we show the regime occurrence to be strongly perturbed by the seasonal condition, in agreement with conceptual ideas. This technique could be used to further examine predictability issues relating the seasonal mean and intraseasonal monsoon variability or to explore changes in monsoon behavior in centennial‐scale model integrations.

Counting Her Dresses and other plays

Counting Her Dresses and other plays, devised by Lib Taylor, is a short, mixed-media, promenade performance based on theatre writings by Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Stein was an American writer who lived in Paris for most of her adult life and was a significant figure in the development of early twentieth century modernism. She was an artists’ patron and one of the first collectors of paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne and others. She wrote novels, short stories, poetry and criticism, as well as a number of very short ‘plays’ and opera libretti. Even though her plays are very rarely performed they have been very influential in the development of avant-garde theatre. The performance juxtaposes a soundcape of voices, live performance, an ‘exhibition’ of paintings and mediated images projected onto and across the space to evoke Stein’s sense of theatre as a place of experience and emotion, not as a place of story and action. The performance comprises five theatre fragments which have been combined in a collage that alludes to the experimental art that Stein promoted.

The lay of the trilobite: rereading May Kendall

The impact of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection on the culture of late Victorian England and on the development of Western thought at large is at once widely acknowledged and hotly contested. In this essay, I revisit the question of what difference an understanding of Darwin's ideas, their reception and their afterlife within evolutionary biology makes to how we read Victorian poetry. I suggest that there are three distinct ways of approaching poetry after Darwin. The first is to examine poems in their own cultural context, considering how they respond to the scientific discourses of their time in the light of internal and external evidence as to the specific sources of each poet's knowledge of those discourses. The second is to ground an interpretative framework in Darwinism's insights into human biology itself. The third is to explore how a given poem's responses to the philosophical issues raised by Darwin's thinking, including questions of ethics and theology, give its readers a possible model for their own responses to the same concerns today. I suggest too that the limitations of each approach may be best overcome by bringing them together. I go on to explore the potential of the first and third approaches through a reading of May Kendall's poem 'The Lay of the Trilobite' in a series of different contexts, from its first appearance in 'Punch', through her first collection Dreams to Sell, to her essays on Christian ethics from the 1880s and 1890s

Credit flow [poetry]

A poem within the Alhambra Poetry Calendar 2011, a desk calendar and poetry anthology in one.