Syntax and Language Variation

Linguistic variation has been studied primarily in communities with the dominant social organization of our time: ethnic diversity, socioeconomic stratification, and a population size that precludes c

An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English examines acoustical variations in vowel configurations in a wide variety of dialects of English found in the Western Hemisphere. While

The major thrust of this book is the analysis of pointwise behavior of Sobolev functions of integer order and BV functions (functions whose partial derivatives are measures with finite total variation

One of the most notable features of nanometer scale CMOS technology is the increasing magnitude of variability of the key device parameters affecting performance of integrated circuits. The growth of variability can be attributed to multiple factors, including the difficulty of manufacturing control, the emergence of new systematic variation-generating mechanisms, and most importantly, the increase in atomic-scale randomness, where device operation must be described as a stochastic process. In addition to wide-sense stationary stochastic device variability and temperature variation, existence of non-stationary stochastic electrical noise associated with fundamental processes in integrated-circuit devices represents an elementary limit on the performance of electronic circuits.In an attempt to address these issues, Stochastic Process Variation in Deep-Submicron CMOS: Circuits and Algorithms offers unique combination of mathematical treatment of random process variation, electrical noise

To what extent and in what ways is metaphorical thought relevant to an understanding of culture and society? More specifically: can the cognitive linguistic view of metaphor simultaneously explain both universality and diversity in metaphorical thought? Cognitive linguists have done important work on universal aspects of metaphor, but they have paid much less attention to why metaphors vary both interculturally and intraculturally as extensively as they do. In this book, Zoltán Kövecses proposes a new theory of metaphor variation. First, he identifies the major dimension of metaphor variation, that is, those social and cultural boundaries that signal discontinuities in human experience. Second, he describes which components, or aspects of conceptual metaphor are involved in metaphor variation, and how they are involved. Third, he isolates the main causes of metaphor variation. Fourth Professor Kövecses addresses the issue to the degree of cultural coherence in the interplay among conce

All organisms vary genetically and phenotypically. This variation affects where they live and how they interact with their environment. Parasites are no different, except only in that their habitat includes other organisms as a significant part. Parasite variation can thus have large effects - in terms of disease and fitness - on their hosts (and the converse) leading to the generation of selection pressures on both parasite and host. The effects of host variation are known in some cases, but do not account for all of the variance in disease severity, for example. The papers in this volume consider parasitic variation in relation to environmental significance. A common theme highlights the importance of obtaining data about the ecological and immunological significance of parasitic variation, and not simply relying on a single strain of organisms. The complexities of the real world should be exploited to maximise our future strategies to combat disease.

Similarities and differences between speech and writing have been the subject of innumerable studies, but until now there has been no attempt to provide a unified linguistic analysis of the whole range of spoken and written registers in English. In this widely acclaimed empirical study, Douglas Biber uses computational techniques to analyse the linguistic characteristics of twenty three spoken and written genres, enabling identification of the basic, underlying dimensions of variation in English. In Variation Across Speech and Writing, six dimensions of variation are identified through a factor analysis, on the basis of linguistic co-occurence patterns. The resulting model of variation provides for the description of the distinctive linguistic characteristics of any spoken or written text andd emonstrates the ways in which the polarization of speech and writing has been misleading, and thus enables reconciliation of the contradictory conclusions reached in previous research.

This book is a comprehensive account of the theory and applications of regular variation. It is concerned with the asymptotic behaviour of a real function of a real variable x which is 'close' to a power of x. Such functions are much more than a convenient extension of powers. In many limit theorems regular variation is intrinsic to the result, and exactly characterises the limit behaviour. The book emphasises such characterisations, and gives a comprehensive treatment of those applications where regular variation plays an essential (rather then merely convenient) role. The authors rigorously develop the basic ideas of Karamata theory and de Haan theory including many new results and 'second-order' theorems. They go on to discuss the role of regular variation in Abelian, Tauberian, and Mercerian theorems. These results are then applied in analytic number theory, complex analysis, and probability, with the aim above all of setting the theory in context. A widely scattered literature is