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Of the novelties introduced by digitization in the study of literature, the size of the archive is probably the most dramatic: we used to work on a couple of hundred nineteenth-century novels, and now we can analyze thousands of them, tens of thousands, tomorrow hundreds of thousands. It's a moment of euphoria, for quantitative literary history: like having a telescope that makes you see entirely new galaxies. And it's a moment of truth: so, have the digital skies revealed anything that changes our knowledge of literature? This is not a rhetorical question. In the famous 1958 essay in which he hailed "the advent of a quantitative history" that would "break with the traditional form of nineteenth-century history", Fernand Braudel mentioned as its typical materials "demographic progressions, the movement of wages, the variations in interest rates [...] productivity [...] money supply and demand." These were all quantifiable entities, clearly enough; but they were also completely new objects compared to the study of legislation, military campaigns, political cabinets, diplomacy, and so on. It was this double shift that changed the practice of history; not quantification alone. In our case, though, there is no shift in materials: we may end up studying 200,000 novels instead of 200; but, they're all still novels. Where exactly is the novelty?

Different scales, different features. It’s the main difference between the thesis we have presented here, and the one that has so far dominated the study of the paragraph. By defining it as "a sentence writ large", or, symmetrically, as "a short discourse", previous research was implicitly asserting the irrelevance of scale: sentence, paragraph, and discourse were all equally involved in the "development of one topic". We have found the exact opposite: 'scale is directly correlated to the differentiation of textual functions'. By this, we don't simply mean that the scale of sentences or paragraphs allows us to "see" style or themes more clearly. This is true, but secondary. Paragraphs allows us to "see" themes, because themes fully "exist" only at the scale of the paragraph. Ours is not just an epistemological claim, but an ontological one: if style and themes and episodes exist in the form they do, it's because writers work at different scales – and do different things according to the level at which they are operating.

Of the many, many thousands of novels and stories published in English in the 20th century, which group of several hundred would represent the most reasonable, interesting, and useful subset of the whole?

International audience; One of the theories that have been proposed in Canada’s oil sands area is that early exposure of fish to oil sands related compounds in rivers may cause effects later in life, even after the fish grow and move to larger rivers far from oil sands. The aim of this study was to characterize potential effects of natural oil sands sediments on the fathead minnow in a lifecycle test that assesses growth, maturation, and reproduction. Fish were exposed for 22 days, from egg fertilization to 16 days post hatch (dph) to 1 or 3 g/L of river sediment from 3 different sites: a control site (alkyl PAHs = 3 ng/g wet weight sediment), one site influenced by the natural oil sands (alkyl PAHs = 6200 ng/g), and one site with natural oil sands that is near mining development (alkyl PAHs = 4500 ng/g). After this embryo-larval exposure period, fish were transferred to clean water flow-through tanks and raised to adulthood. Deformities and reduced weight were observed during the exposure period, but growth recovered over time in clean water. Reproduction was decreased (significantly fewer eggs laid) in fish exposed to 3 g/L sediment from the river near mining development. However, although there were effects on the early-exposed fish, there were no effects in their offspring as the F1 showed good hatching, survival, and very low incidences of deformities.

In this paper we reexamine the prosodic system of Yidiji (Australian; Dixon 1977a, b; 1991) as a case supporting an approach to stress assignment in which the construction of bounded feet and the implementation of metrical heads within them occur as separate events (the SEPARABILITY hypothesis; Halle & Vergnaud 1987a,b (= H&V)). Specifically, we argue that a layer of feet assigned early in Yidiji phonological derivations is unheaded and insensitive to weight distinctions, and plays a role in allomorphy. Metrical heads are later assigned to these constituents by independent rules operating under quantity-sensitive principles. In other words, Yidiji employs an additive metrical system in which stressable heads are overlaid on existing foot structures (prosodic overlay). It is the interaction between the outputs of these operations which produces the flexible rhythmic structure for which Yidiji is known. This flexibility is exemplified by the forms in (la) and (lb) (from Dixon 1977a: 40–41), where stress falls on even-numbered and odd-numbered syllables respectively, counted from the left.

This paper argues from an Optimality Theory perspective that no one-to-one correspondence exists between directional footing effects and individual constraints. Recent work in OT claims that directional footing effects are best captured by the constraints All-Feet-Left (Ft-Left) and All-Feet-Right (Ft-Right) in (1) (e.g. McCarthy & Prince 1993b, 1994; Kirchner 1993; Cohn & McCarthy 1994; Crowhurst & Hewitt, in press; Hewitt 1994a; Kager 1994).(1) a. All-Feet-Left: Align(Foot, L, PrWd, L)b. All-Feet-Right: Align(Foot, R, PrWd, R)This paper argues that the relationship between the alignment constraints in (1) and directional footing is more complicated than has been envisioned. In fact, the OT account presented here reveals directional effects to be epiphenomenal: either of the constraints in (1) may yield rightward or leftward footing, depending on its interaction with constraints requiring syllable-to-foot parsing and binary foot structure (see below). We also show that directionality and stray syllable parsing at edges are dependent: right-to-left and left-to-right effects under Ft-Left dominance co-occur with either the presence or the absence of a degenerate foot, but not with both. This relationship is inverted when Ft-Right dominates Ft-Left. One outcome of this study is that interactions among a small number of constraints leads to a modified typological view of metrical patterns familiar from earlier work.