The spread of the progressive from dynamic to stative verbs started in the seventeenth century, and slowed down in the late twentieth century. The present study investigates recent change in the use of stative progressives in conversational British English from the early 1990s to the early 2010s. The analysis focuses on a total of 100 stative verb lemmata in the spoken, demographic sections of the original and new British National Corpus, restricted to a variable context where a progressive could potentially occur. Results indicate that overall, stative progressives have not become more frequent in the last twenty years, and that the group of stative verbs is highly heterogeneous. However, particular verbs, such as expect and think, do indeed combine more frequently with the progressive now, which could be the cause of the popular impression of the continuing spread of stative progressives. In addition to a frequency-based analysis, a distinctive collexeme analysis offers a more fine-grained analysis of the collostructional preferences of individual verb lemmata and semantic classes of stative verbs. This analysis reveals that the stative verbs are heterogenous and that the lemmata most distinctly associated with the progressive belong to the group of stance verbs.

This article offers an analysis of present perfect (PP) use in Nigerian English (NigE), based on the Nigerian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE). First, we analyze variable contexts with the Simple Past (PT; determined by temporally specified contexts) as one of the main competitors of the PP, and thus assess the PP-friendliness of NigE in contrast to other varieties. We further provide an alternative measure of PP-friendliness and test register effects in terms of normalized and relative PP and PT frequencies. Our results indicate an overall reduced PP-friendliness of NigE and show internal variability in terms of PP frequencies in different variable contexts. As regards register effects, NigE does not show less variability of PP frequencies compared to British English (BrE). However, the distribution of the PP across registers in NigE does not follow the British pattern where certain registers are particularly PP-friendly. We discuss potential determining factors of the low frequency of the PP in NigE, and conclude that neither substrate influence nor general learning mechanisms on their own can comprehensively account for it. Instead, we suggest that historical influence from Irish and perhaps (at a later point) American English, in conjunction with general learning mechanisms, may be responsible.

We describe a hybrid pixel array detector (electron microscope pixel array detector, or EMPAD) adapted for use in electron microscope applications, especially as a universal detector for scanning transmission electron microscopy. The 128×128 pixel detector consists of a 500 µm thick silicon diode array bump-bonded pixel-by-pixel to an application-specific integrated circuit. The in-pixel circuitry provides a 1,000,000:1 dynamic range within a single frame, allowing the direct electron beam to be imaged while still maintaining single electron sensitivity. A 1.1 kHz framing rate enables rapid data collection and minimizes sample drift distortions while scanning. By capturing the entire unsaturated diffraction pattern in scanning mode, one can simultaneously capture bright field, dark field, and phase contrast information, as well as being able to analyze the full scattering distribution, allowing true center of mass imaging. The scattering is recorded on an absolute scale, so that information such as local sample thickness can be directly determined. This paper describes the detector architecture, data acquisition system, and preliminary results from experiments with 80–200 keV electron beams.

We consider strictly stationary infinitely divisible processes and first extend the mixing conditions given in Maruyama [Theory Probab. Appl. 15 (1970) 1–22] and Rosiński and Żak [Stoc. Proc. Appl. 61 (1996) 277–288] from the univariate to the d-dimensional case. Thereafter, we show that multivariate Lévy-driven mixed moving average processes satisfy these conditions and hence a wide range of well-known processes such as superpositions of Ornstein − Uhlenbeck (supOU) processes or (fractionally integrated) continuous time autoregressive moving average (CARMA) processes are always mixing. Finally, mixing of the log-returns and the integrated volatility process of a multivariate supOU type stochastic volatility model, recently introduced in Barndorff − Nielsen and Stelzer [Math. Finance 23 (2013) 275–296], is established.