More Like this

1. Deriving a complex BIN through adverbial BIN complexes

   https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v7i1.5288  

   Whitmal, Ayana (May 2022, Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America)

   Work by Green (1998) discusses 3 sub-types of stressed BIN in African American English (AAE): stative, habitual, and completive. BIN constructions that co-occur with temporal adverbials exhibit limited grammaticality, with each sub-type differing in how they interact with these adverbials. Non-BIN constructions that involve multiple instances in the same clause of adverbials of the same class exhibit restrictions that resemble BIN + adverbial data. Drawing on works that analyze BIN as a remote past marker (Rickford 1975, Green 1998) and on works connecting adverbial position to interpretation (Ernst 2020), I argue that BIN is an adverbial itself that situates the initiation of an eventuality in the remote past. This adverbial BIN, in concert with certain combinations of tense and aspect, forms a complex that makes up the canonical BIN construction. 

   more » « less
2. Acanthemblemaria aceroi, a new species of tube blenny from the Caribbean coast of South America with notes on Acanthemblemaria johnsoni (Teleostei: Chaenopsidae)

   https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4816.2.5  

   HASTINGS, PHILIP A.; EYTAN, RON I.; SUMMERS, ADAM P. (July 2020, Zootaxa)

   null (Ed.)

   Acanthemblemaria aceroi new species is described from the upwelling region of the Caribbean coasts of Venezuela and Colombia. It differs from its closest relative, Acanthemblemaria rivasi Stephens, 1970, known from Panama and Costa Rica, in the posterior extent of the infraorbitals, details of head spination, and unique COI sequences. The description of Acanthemblemaria johnsonsi Almany & Baldwin, 1996, heretofore known only from Tobago, is expanded based on specimens from islands offshore of eastern Venezuela. 

   more » « less
3. Proteins: “Boil ’Em, Mash ’Em, Stick ’Em in a Stew”

   https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpcb.9b05467  

   Boob, Mayank; Wang, Yuhan; Gruebele, Martin (September 2019, The Journal of Physical Chemistry B)
4. When the syntactic bootstrap breaks: Some children think any means no

   https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.18974  

   Illingworth, Caitlin; Kang, Jee_Won Diane; Gibbs, Haley; Davidson, Kathryn; Feiman, Roman (September 2025, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics)

   Children can use distributional information about where words occur to figure out their meanings. But what happens when two very different words not only have most of their distribution in common, but also compose to form indistinguishable sentential meanings in those common cases? As a negative polarity item (NPI), any is selectively licensed by certain linguistic environments, the most common of which is negation. This is the context in which children hear any in around 80% of their input. However, under negation, the meaning of any looks just like a negative quantifier in concord with the higher negation (a negative concord item; NCI). While studies of children’s production indicate that they hardly ever produce any without a licensing negation, suggesting competence with its distribution, we hypothesize that some children may have misanalysed its meaning. To investigate what children think any means, we tested 106 monolingual English-speaking children between 2 and 6 years of age, as well as 20 adults, in two picture-choice comprehension tasks. These tasks assessed their interpretation of any without a preceding negation, both in a licensed (free choice) and an unlicensed context. While most children interpreted any the same way adults did, we also found a group of children who systematically responded to any as if it meant no, consistent with a negative concord (mis)analysis. In addition to illustrating how much children rely on distributional information to learn such abstract words, this finding bears on several debates. It raises the question of whether it is possible to represent the licensing conditions of NPIs prior to knowing their meanings. And it suggests that children may be biased to assume that their language uses negative concord constructions even when it does not. 

   more » « less
5. In-vivo and Ex-vivo Calcium Imaging of an Olfactory Circuit Neuron in the Third-Instar Drosophila melanogaster Larva

   https://doi.org/10.3791/68956  

   Cheung, Dilys; Jain, Roshni; Kolhe, Rutuj; Brown, Elizabeth; Mathew, Dennis (October 2025, Journal of Visualized Experiments)

   Calcium imaging is crucial for studying neural dynamics and brain function. However, current methods for imaging calcium in Drosophila larvae are challenging due to motion artifacts and specialized equipment needs. Here, we present a practical, low-cost method for performing both in vivo and ex vivo calcium imaging in third-instar Drosophila larvae, using a topical tissue adhesive for immobilizing samples. We also provide custom R scripts and a framework for data analysis, facilitating measurements of calcium changes under different experimental conditions. Using this approach, we successfully recorded calcium transients in a pair of larval CNS neurons with minimal motion artifacts, demonstrating reproducibility across preparations. The method is compatible with standard spinning disk confocal systems and can be adapted for DIY or commercial two-photon setups, making it accessible to laboratories with different resources. This approach may increase accessibility to larval calcium imaging studies and can be adapted to examine the effects of both external stimuli, such as odors, and internal stimuli, such as neuromodulators. 

   more » « less