What is the lexicon’s role in licensing the selection of phonologically-marked structures in Old English verse? Specifically, what is its role in the avoidance of certain nominal compounds in verse, even though the same compounds are used apparently freely in prose (Terasawa 1994)? Using a simulation of the Old English lexicon, we offer a statistical analysis of the poetic use of nominal compounds compared to the availability of relevant prosodic structures in the ambient language. In the process, we unify Terasawa’s separate constraints and demonstrate a new way of addressing the complex interplay between Old English prosody and the structure of Old English alliterative meter. Our results endorse Terasawa’s position: We find that the dispreference for nominal compounds of the XX-LX type is a general but noncategorical property of Old English. We attribute their highly restricted usage in verse to the demands of poetic diction and their incompatibility with the metrical templates that scops and scribes replicate. Additionally, while syllable weight factors into metrical organization, it does so less for stress placement, which remains morphologically grounded; this asymmetry in the ranking value of weight between poetry and prose is considered briefly in the context of the Old English monastic scribal training.

Only three English diatones, outlaw, rebel, record, out of the current 235-item list in Hotta (2015), are on record prior to the seventeenth century; the latest record of diatonic outlaw is 1786 (Sherman 1975: 63). Whether this type of functional prosodic contrast was inherited or innovative is controversial. We revisit the Old English metrical evidence for functional stress-shifting and present new attestations of verb–noun pairs in Middle English verse in an effort to establish if the limited inherited stress-shifting model survives, and, if so, whether or how it accommodates the incoming loan vocabulary. The additional verse attestations support the idea of continuity, yet the scarcity of data falls short of statistical verifiability. A search into detailed lexicographical information for 1200–1550 reinforces the hypothesis of continuity by documenting the differential patterns of borrowing of nouns and verbs, prefixed and unprefixed. Taken together, these two sources endorse a proposal that in its earliest stages functional stress-shifting was predicated on prefixation, and that the ongoing conflict between prefixal defooting and Align-L (Root, PrWd) in ME is a necessary component of the diachronic account of English prosody.

Listeners often have the intuition that the speech of broadcast news reporters somehow ‘sounds different’; previous literature supports this observation and has described some distinctive aspects of newscaster register. This article presents two studies further describing the characteristic properties and functions of American English newscaster speech, focusing specifically on prosody. In the first, we investigate the production of newscaster speech. We describe the measurable differences in pitch, speed, intensity, and melodic features between newscaster and conversational speech, and connect those traits to perceptions of authority, credibility, charisma, and related characteristics. In the second, we investigate the perception of newscaster speech. Our experiments demonstrate that listeners can distinguish newscaster from conversational speech given only prosodic information, and that they use a subset of the newscasters’ distinguishing features to do so. (News, prosody, discourse registers, speech perception, credibility, authority)*

Objective: To investigate the effects of various activation methods on freeze–thawed rabbit oocytes developmental potential. Methods: Rabbit oocytes were vitrified by cryoleafs and cryoprotected with ethylene glycol and propanediol. After thawing, the oocytes were fertilized by intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). Surviving oocytes after ICSI were divided into five groups at random. Group 1: Oocytes (n = 30) activated 1 h after ICSI by calcium ionomycin (I0634); Group 2: Oocytes (n = 26) activated by strontium chloride an hour after ICSI; Group 3: Oocytes (n = 33) activated by I0634 twice; Group 4: Oocytes (n = 28) were activated by strontium chloride twice; Control Group: Inactivated oocytes (n = 39). Blastocysts derived from each group were transplanted to recipient rabbits. Results: Rates of fertilization, cleavage and blastocyst formation of Group 3 were higher than those of Group 1 and Group 2 (81.8% vs 33.3% vs 53.8%, 54.5% vs 16.7% vs 26.9%, p < 0.05; 15.2% vs 3.3% vs 7.7%, p > 0.05). The rabbit transplanted with embryos derived from Group 3 became pregnant. Embryos derived from double activation could implant into endometrium. Conclusion: Double activation may increase freeze–thawed oocytes developmental potential. After activation, oocytes cleavage velocity may be faster than that of oocytes without activation.

UV Tri was observed photometrically from 1999 to 2000. A period analysis of the data reveals two pulsation frequencies at 9.3299 and 10.8483 c d-1. From uvbyHβ data we derive V = 11.085, b – y = 0.215, m1 = 0.169, c1 = 0.783, and β = 2.775 mag. With these color indices and some calibrations, we obtain Mv = 2.44 mag, Mbol = 2.27 mag, Teff = 7500 K, log L/L⊙ = 0.99 and a distance of ∼536 pc.