The Grammar of Giants: Late-stage debonding of kæmpe ‘giant’ in Danish

It is a common process of language change for free morphemes to become bound morphemes, but the inverse process (termed ‘debonding’ by Norde 2009) is much rarer. Previous studies have found that lexemes with the original meaning ‘giant’ (German Riesen, Dutch reuze) have historically grammaticalized as prefixes, and subsequently debonded into free morphemes with the same bleached meaning as the prefixes (Van Goethem & Hiligsmann 2014; Norde & Van Goethem 2014). Using a synchronic corpus of written Danish (KorpusDK), this paper shows that the Danish word kæmpe, originally ‘giant’, is in the late stages of a similar process of debonding. By investigating the morphological and syntactic patterning of kæmpe, the paper shows that kæmpe has indeed debonded, and occurs as a free-standing semantically bleached adjective, but that it does not yet exhibit fully prototypical adjectival behavior. All three functions of kæmpe remain in use: a noun with the specific meaning ‘giant’, a semantically bleached prefix, and a corresponding semantically bleached adjective. This would argue against an account relying on abrupt category change, and it is proposed that kæmpe has reached its current status through gradual analogy-driven change

Variation in fine phonetic detail can modulate the outcome of sound change: The case of stop gradation and laryngeal contrast implementation in Jutland Danish

This paper provides evidence for the assumption that the precise phonetic implementation of laryngeal contrast in obstruents can have an influence on higher order linguistic structure. Traditional varieties of Jutland Danish – which are all broadly ‘aspirating’ varieties – are used as a case study. The paper shows that the precise implementation of the aspirated–unaspirated contrast in stops varied systematically in these varieties, and that this covaries with the morphophonological process of stop gradation. Stop gradation is a lenition process which is historically found in the entire Danish-speaking area, but with quite varying outcomes, which were mapped extensively by dialectologists more than a century ago. Using a large legacy corpus of sociolinguistic interviews from the 1970s, this study shows that more sonorous outcomes of stop gradation covary with higher rates of continuous closure voicing in /b d g/ and shorter aspiration in /p t k/, and vice versa for less sonorous outcomes of stop gradation

Autonomy among physically frail older people in nursing home settings: a study protocol for an intervention study

BACKGROUND: Experiencing autonomy is recognised to promote health and well-being for all age groups. Perceived lack of control has been found to be detrimental to physical and mental health. There is a lack of evidence-based knowledge elucidating how frail older people in nursing home settings themselves perceive autonomy in daily life. Further, there are no studies on the extent to which this perception can be influenced positively by participating in an individually tailored programme based on residents' own wishes for daily activities. METHODS AND DESIGN: A total of 9 nursing homes and 55 participants aged 65 years or older were included in the study. All the participants were restricted in performing at least one P-ADL activity unassisted and had a Mini Mental State Examination-score above 16. Perceived autonomy was measured at baseline, after 12 weeks and after 24 weeks by The Autonomy Sub-dimension in the Measure of Actualisation of Potential test. Programmes were based on participants' individual assessment of their most important daily activities. Staff at all nursing homes who usually organize physical training, social or creative activities carried out individually tailored programmes using their usual methods and equipment. Participants in each nursing home were divided by lot into either a control group or an intervention group. The control groups received their usual care and treatment. DISCUSSION: This study is designed to assess the status of perceived autonomy at baseline and to provide information about the effectiveness of individually tailored programmes according to perceptions of autonomy registered in institutionalised physically frail older people. This will add knowledge to assist response to present and future challenges in relation to health promotion initiatives for this group

A pitch accent for contrastive emphasis in Danish?

This paper presents an exploratory study of a previously unde scribed tonal contour in Danish questions. We analyze pitch trajectory data collected for a different purpose using functional principal component analysis and hierarchical clustering, which converge to show that two distinct pitch patterns are used for cueing pragmatic focus in utterance medial position: the ‘ex pected’ tonal contour that is generally used to signal stress in Danish regardless of the presence of focus (low–high), and an entirely differently shaped contour (high–low), which we inter pret as cueing ‘extra’ contrastive emphasis. We are (somewhat controversially) proposing that the pattern may constitute a new pitch accent for contrastive emphasis in Danish, although we also call for more targeted research into the intonation of con trastive emphasis in contemporary standard Danish

Adaptable automation driven by simulation and digital twins:Made fast ws3 - agile production systems

Den diskrete fremstillingsindustri bliver stadig mere digitaliseret. Som følge heraf har virtuel design og udvikling længe været en væsentlig forudsætning, på trods af manglende konformitet. Mekatroniske maskiner er i selve hjertet af denne industri, ansvarlige for at skabe og håndtere de produkter, hvorfra deres værdi skabes. Produkterne er derfor kun så gode som de maskiner, der producerer dem. Det er derfor afgørende, at disse maskiner præsterer som specificeret. Virtuel design og udvikling øger kvaliteten og reducerer fremstillingstiden. Små og mellemstore virksomheder mangler dog ofte ressourcer og kompetencer til at påbegynde den virtuel udvikling på det fornødne niveau. Hvad værre er at der ingen konsensus er om kravene til virtual udvikling af digitale tvillinger for mekatroniske maskiner og den virtuelle værktøjskasse er i det store hele uforenelige og spredt.Derfor har dette Ph.d.-projekt til formål at bryde disse barrierer ved at skabe en struktureret fremgangsmåde fra design til drift, hvor virtuelle modeller benyttes fra maskinbygger til slutkunde. Gennem denne forskning er både generiske og leverandørspecifikke løsninger blevet undersøgt og testet. Selvom maskinkompleksitet i høj grad er situationsafhængig, så kan meget kompleksitet også tilskrives det virtuelle ingeniørværktøj. Sammenligninger af det virtuelle værktøj, bør således foretages på samme præmisser og på samme detaljeniveau. I dette PhD projekt foreslås det derfor, at virtuel udvikling bør udføres med høj præcision, og på flere virtuelle abstraktionsniveauer, for tilstrækkeligt at spejle virkeligheden. Mens usikkerhed i maskindesign og udvikling øger antallet af komponenter, der skal laves med høj præcision, så gælder det modsatte, når tilliden til løsningerne er stor.I denne forskning er det blevet bevidnet, hvordan virtuel og fysisk modularisering øger maskinernes tilpasningsevne, og hvordan dette skaber tillid til løsningerne. Herved reduceres udviklingstiden. Dette betyder dog ikke, at kompleksiteten er forsvundet; den er blot skjult, for at reducere mængden af ting der skal tages stilling til ved første øjekast.Den strukturerede og integrerede fremgangsmåde som præsenteres i denne afhandling, gør ændringer og modifikationer mulig, da det inkluderer alle virtuelle abstraktionsniveauer. Dog kan informationsdeling på tværs af det virtuelle værktøj stadig optimeres. Dette betyder dog at der skal være konvergens mellem værktøjet, hvilket kræver harmoniserede standarder og procedurer, eller fuld kontrol af den komplette virtuelle værdikæde. Når dette ikke er muligt, er yderligere procedurer og software integration nødvendig, hvilket komplicerer og øger udviklingstiden. Der er således et presserende behov for åbenhed inden for virtuel design og udvikling på tværs af det virtuelle værktøj og på det rette niveau.Denne afhandling har undersøgt brugen af virtuelt værktøj til udvikling af digitale tvillinger for mekatroniske maskiner i fremstillingsindustrien. På baggrund af resultaterne er der udviklet og demonstreret en fremgangsmåde for virtuel design og udvikling af digitale tvillinger for mekatroniske maskiner. Fremgangsmåden illustrerer et integreret virtuelt udviklingsforløb fra design til drift. Den viser hvordan fælles virtual udvikling af mekatroniske maskin moduler kan facilitere tilpasningsevnen og øge samarbejdet mellem maskinbyggere og slutkunder. De langsigtede konsekvenser af forskningen mangler stadig at blive undersøgt, dog er der allerede sat en plan i værk for dette.The discrete manufacturing industry is getting increasingly digitalized. As a result, virtual engineering has long been an essential requisite, although conformity is scarce. Mechatronic discrete manufacturing machines are at the heart of the industry, responsible for creating and handling the products from where their value is created. Thus, products are only as good as the machines that produce them. It is, therefore, vital that these machines perform as specified. Virtual engineering increases quality and reduces time to market. However, Small and Medium Enterprises lack the resources and competencies to commence in virtual engineering at the required level. To make things worse, there is essentially no consensus on the requirements for virtual engineering in digital twin-ready mechatronic discrete manufacturing machines, and virtual engineering toolchains are largely inconsistent and sporadically spread.Therefore, this thesis aims to break these barriers by creating an integrated framework from design to operation, where virtual models are utilized from the machine builder to the end customer. During the research, both generic and vendor-specific solutions have been investigated and tested. While machine complexity is largely case-dependent, much can also be ascribed to the complexity of virtual engineering tools. Comparisons on VE tools should thus be made on the same premises and at the same detail level. This Ph.D. project, therefore, suggests that virtual engineering should be done with high accuracy and on several virtual engineering abstraction levels to mirror reality properly. While uncertainty in the machine design and development increases the number of entities that must be made with high accuracy, the opposite applies when confidence in the solutions is high.In this research, it has been witnessed how virtual engineering modularization increases the adaptability of the machines and confidence in the solutions. Thus, the development time is reduced. However, it does not mean complexity is eliminated; instead, it's hidden to reduce the number of items that need to be considered at first glance.The integrated framework presented in this thesis makes changes and modifications feasible as they apply to all virtual engineering abstraction levels, although information sharing across virtual engineering tools could be further optimized. However, this means there must be convergence between the tools, which requires harmonized standards and procedures or full control of the complete virtual value chain. When this is not possible, additional procedures and software integration are necessary, complicating and increasing the development time. Thus, openness in virtual engineering is urgently needed across virtual engineering tools and at the required level.This thesis has examined the use of virtual tools for the development of digital twin-ready mechatronic discrete manufacturing machines in the production industry. Based on the results, a framework for future virtual engineering of digital twin-ready mechatronic discrete manufacturing machines has been developed and demonstrated. This framework effectively illustrates an integrated virtual engineering value chain from design to operation. It depicts how shared virtual machine modules can facilitate adaptability and increase collaboration between machine builders and end customers. Therefore, the long-run implications of the research are yet to be investigated, although a plan has already been put into action.<br/

Stylised sustained prosody in three Australian languages

A similar, striking prosodic pattern is reported to occur in languages around Australia. It is characterised by a stretch of level, high pitch, and lengthening of the IP-final vowel. This pattern appears to have a similar meaning in each language, expressing the extension of an event in space or time. However, there are some differences in the form described. In this paper, we present a study of the acoustics of this pattern in three unrelated Australian Indigenous languages, and propose a method for automatically identifying examples within an audio file. Hence, the purpose of this paper is twofold: 1) to provide a cross-linguistic description of this prosodic pattern with the aim of acoustically describing cross-linguistic variation, and 2) to provide a proof-of-concept for a method to automatically identify this pattern which could allow other language data to be incorporated into the typological description in the future

Analyzing time-varying spectral characteristics of speech with function-on-scalar regression

The acoustic characteristics of noise from fricatives and stop releases are difficult to analyze. The spectral characteristics of such noise are multi-dimensional, and popular methods for analyzing them typically rely on reducing this complex information to one or a few discrete numbers, such as spectral moments or coefficients of discrete cosine transformations. In this paper, I propose using function-on-scalar regression models as a method for analyzing and mass-comparing spectra with minimal reduction of the complexity in the signal. The method is further useful for analyzing how spectra change as a function of time. The usefulness of this method is demonstrated with a corpus analysis of Danish aspirated stop releases, using the DanPASS corpus. The analysis finds that /t/ releases are invariably affricated; /k/ releases are highly affected by coarticulatory context; and /p/ releases are almost always dominated by aspiration in the latter half of the release, but are affricated in the first half in certain contexts.Theoretical and Experimental LinguisticsDescriptive and Comparative Linguistic

The grammar of giants: late-stage debonding of kæmpe 'giant' in Danish

It is a common process of language change for free morphemes to become bound morphemes, but the inverse process (termed ‘debonding’ by Norde 2009) is much rarer. Previous studies have found that lexemes with the original meaning ‘giant’ (German Riesen, Dutch reuze) have historically grammaticalized as prefixes, and subsequently debonded into free morphemes with the same bleached meaning as the prefixes (Van Goethem & Hiligsmann 2014; Norde & Van Goethem 2014). Using a synchronic corpus of written Danish (KorpusDK), this paper shows that the Danish word kæmpe, originally ‘giant’, is in the late stages of a similar process of debonding. By investigating the morphological and syntactic patterning of kæmpe, the paper shows that kæmpe has indeed debonded, and occurs as a free-standing semantically bleached adjective, but that it does not yet exhibit fully prototypical adjectival behavior. All three functions of kæmpe remain in use: a noun with the specific meaning ‘giant’, a semantically bleached prefix, and a corresponding semantically bleached adjective. This would argue against an account relying on abrupt category change, and it is proposed that kæmpe has reached its current status through gradual analogy-driven change.Descriptive and Comparative Linguistic

God tilgængelighed – fælles interesse – fælles ansvar

Opsamling fra workshop på Trafikdage 2016 Special session: God tilgængelighed – fælles interesse – fælles ansvar

Succesfulde tiltag på arbejdspladserne: Rådhuse og hospitaler har sparet 8-10% CO2

I perioden fra 2011 til 2014 har 26 partnere samarbejdet i projektet Formel M om at udvikle, afprøve og forankre mobility management i dansk trafikplanlægning. Projektet var støttet af Trafikstyrelsen og Region Hovedstaden. Baggrunden for projektets idé og mission var, at kommunerne oplevede en stigende udfordring i at kunne arbejde målrettet med at opnå klimamålsætningerne på transportområdet. Hospitalerne oplevede udtalte udfordringer med lokal trængsel. Formel M var opbygget omkring en række demonstrationsprojekter, heraf seks på rådhusene og tre på hospitalerne. Deres udfordringer i forhold til at arbejde med mobility management var en usikkerhed i forhold til metode, holdning hos ledelse og medarbejdere, samt et højt krav om effektivitet. I projektet var mobilitetsindsatsen på rådhusene i gang længst og opnåede en CO2‐reduktion fra pendlingen blandt medarbejderne på 9,4 %. Rådhusene opnåede en nedgang i antal ture med bil fra 54 % til 52%, samt en fremgang af ture med bus og tog. De deltagende hospitaler opnåede på kun 12 måneder en CO2‐reduktion på 7,8 % og en nedgang i antallet af bilture fra 50 % til 46 %. Hospitalerne oplevede også en fremgang i antallet af cykel/gang‐ture. Rådhuse og hospitaler har grebet opgave forskelligt an, idet rådhusene har fokuseret på kørslen i arbejdstiden, mens hospitalerne har fokuseret på pendlingen. De mobilitetstiltag, som partnerne har taget i brug, er derfor også forskellige. Rådhusene har kortlagt og optimeret vognparken og implementeret retningslinjer for tjenesterejser. Hospitalerne har tilbudt deres medarbejdere en palette af forskellige mobilitetsformer – cykling, kollektiv transport og samkørsel. Alle partnerne har været enige om at højne opmærksomheden på transport med kampagner, øget information og synlige tiltag. Nogle af de udslagsgivende elementer for successen på rådhusene og hospitalerne har været lokale projektledere, som fx mobilitetskoordinatorer, der har søgt og fået opbakning fra ledelse og kollegaer. Der har i organisationerne været en vilje til forandring, som er blevet udfordret af fællesskabet i Formel M. Et fællesskab faciliteret af Grønt Mobilitetskontor i Gate 21, der samler forskellige kompetencer, skaber synergi mellem aktiviteter, og udvikler værktøjer som transportvaneundersøgelser og guider til projektparterne