text:
Radiation Oncology/Nephroblastoma/Randomized

Nephroblastoma (Wilms Tumor) Randomized Evidence

NWTS Trials

 * NWTS 4 (1986-94) -- no RT randomizations; chemo randomizations
 * Randomized. 1638 patients. Compared standard schedule (STD) of AMD + ADR vs pulse-intensive (PI), and short (5-6 months) vs long courses (15-16 months)
 * Stage I, FH or anaplastic: AMD + VCR, STD vs PI
 * Stage II, FH: 2x2 design: AMD + VCR, STD vs. PI, and short vs long
 * High risk (FH Stage III-IV or CCSK): 2x2 design: AMD + VCR + ADR STD vs PI, and short vs long
 * 2-years 1998 PMID 9440748 — "Comparison between single-dose and divided-dose administration of dactinomycin and doxorubicin for patients with Wilms' tumor: a report from the National Wilms' Tumor Study Group." (Green DM et al. J Clin Oncol. 1998 Jan;16(1):237-45.)
 * Fractionation outcome: RFS for STD 91% vs. PI 91% (NS)
 * Conclusion: Pulse-intense chemothereapy equivalent to standard fractionated chemotherapy, less toxic, and logistically much easier

 * NWTS 3 (1979-1985) -- High dose RT vs. low dose RT; low dose RT vs. no RT
 * Randomized. 1439 patients. Treatment adapted by Stage and histology; FH in 90%, anaplastic 4%, CCSK 4%, RTK 2%. 2x2 design for Stage II and III. RT given in 1.8 Gy/fx, large fields 1.5 Gy/fx. Evaluated RT dose and chemo intensity
 * Stage I, FH: No RT. AMD + VCR x 10 weeks vs 6 months.
 * Stage II, FH: No RT vs 20 Gy. AMD+VCR+ADR vs intensive AMD+VCR, both for 15 months.
 * Stage III, FH: RT 10 Gy vs 20 Gy. AMD+VCR+ADR vs intensive AMD+VCR, both for 15 months.
 * Stage IV and All UH: RT per NWTS 2 followed by AMD+VCR+ADR vs AMD+VCR+ADR+ cyclophosphamide, both for 15 months.
 * 4-years: 1989 PMID 2544249 — "Treatment of Wilms' tumor. Results of the Third National Wilms' Tumor Study." (D'Angio GJ et al. Cancer. 1989 Jul 15;64(2):349-60.)
 * Stage I FH Outcome: RFS 10 weeks 89% vs. 6 months 91% (NS)
 * Stage II FH Outcome: No difference between no RT and RT 20 Gy. Also no difference between chemo regimens
 * Stage III, FH Outcome: No difference between RT 10 Gy and RT 20 Gy. Also no difference between chemo regimens
 * Stage IV and UH Outcome: Cyclophosphamide didn't improve outcomes
 * RT Conclusion: Stage II FH doesn't require RT; Stage III FH RT 10 Gy sufficient with doublet chemotherapy

 * NWTS 2 (1974-78) -- chemo randomizations
 * Randomized. 513 patients. Surgery first. RT within 10 days of surgery, same dose schedule as NWTS 1. If pulmonary mets, 12 Gy whole thorax (had toxicity at 14 Gy); if liver/brain mets 30 Gy
 * Group I (35%): Actinomycin D + vincristine x6 months, then Arm 1) observation vs. Arm 2) additional 9 months of chemo. No RT for anyone, assume addition of VCR in age >2 will obviate need for adjuvant RT, and compare to historical outcomes
 * Group II-IV: RT everyone, then Arm 1) Actinomycin D + vincristine vs. Arm 2) Actinomycin + vincristine + doxorubicin. Total 15 months both arms
 * 2-years; 1981 PMID 6164480 — "The treatment of Wilms' tumor: results of the Second National Wilms' Tumor Study." D'Angio GJ et al. Cancer. 1981 May 1;47(9):2302-11.
 * Group I Outcome: No difference in RFS or OS between arms. Age >2 2-year OS comparison: NWTS2 (AMD+VCR, no RT) 89% vs. NWTS1 (AMD+RT) 77% vs. NWTS1 (AMD, no RT) 51%. Abdominal relapse <5%
 * Group II-IV Outcome: DFS AMD + VCR 62% vs. AMD + VCR + doxorubicin 77% (SS)
 * RT Conclusion: RT not necessary in Group I with chemo doublet

 * NWTS 1 (1969-74) -- Group I Adjuvant RT vs. adjuvant chemo
 * Randomized. 259 patients. Surgery first. RT given within 2 days of surgery. Dose 0-18 months 18-24 Gy, 18-30 months 24-30 Gy, 30-40 months 30-35 Gy, >40 months 35-40 Gy. Fields: Group I/II flank, Group III whole abdomen
 * Group I (n=163): Arm 1) RT + Actinomycin D vs. Arm 2) Actinomycin D only
 * Group II/III (n=100): Surgery + RT and Arm 1) Actinomycin D vs. Arm 2) Vincristine vs. Arm 3) Actinomycin D + Vincristine
 * Group IV (n=26): Arm 1) Surgery + RT + adjuvant chemo vs. Arm 2) Neoadjuvant vincristine + surgery + RT + adjuvant chemo
 * 2-years; 1976 PMID 184912, 1976 — "The treatment of Wilms' tumor: Results of the national Wilms' tumor study." D'Angio GJ et al. Cancer. 1976 Aug;38(2):633-46.
 * Group I Outcome: Age <2 years: RT 90% vs. no RT 88% (NS); age >2 years RT 77% vs. 58% (SS). More infradiaphragmatic failures without RT, leading to worse survival
 * Group II/III Outcome: Actinomycin D 57% vs. Vincristine 55% vs. Combination 81% (SS)
 * RT Conclusion: Adjuvant RT not necessary for Group I patients <2 years treating with Actinomycin D, but important for patients >2 years.

SIOP Trials

 * SIOP 93-01 (1993-2000) -- short vs. long adjuvant chemo
 * Randomized. 847 patients, excluding Stage IV and bilateral. Preop chemo, followed by surgery, followed by risk-adapted therapy. In Stage I intermediate risk/anaplasia, randomized to adjuvant chemo 3 courses vs. 1 course. Benign tumors treated 1.3%, surgical Stage I 61%, Stage II LN0 24%, Stage II LN+ 5%, Stage III 7%. Histology low risk 3%, intermediate risk 90%, high risk 7%
 * 2004 PMID 15175957 -- "Results of the SIOP 93-01/GPOH trial and study for the treatment of patients with unilateral nonmetastatic Wilms Tumor." (Reinihard H, Klin Padiatr. 2004 May-Jun;216(3):132-40.)
 * Outcome: short adjuvant chemo 90% vs. long adjuvant chemo 91% (NS)
 * Conclusion: Post-op chemo in Stage I intermediate risk (44% patients) can be reduced to 4 weeks

 * SIOP-9 (1987-1993) -- Short vs. long neoadjuvant chemo
 * Randomized. 382 patients. Arm 1) 4 weeks of Actinomycing D + vincristine vs. Arm 2) 8 weeks of same chemo. Then surgery and risk-stratified therapy: Stage I FH observation, Stage I SH/anaplasia VCR+AMD x4 months; Stage II-III FH/SH VCR + AMD + anthracycline x6 months. Stage II-III Anaplastic/CCSK AMD + VCR + anthracycline + ifosfamide 9 months. RT given: Stage II LN0 no RT, Stage II LN+/Stage III 15 Gy
 * 2001 PMID 11208843 -- "Optimal duration of preoperative therapy in unilateral and nonmetastatic Wilms' tumor in children older than 6 months: results of the Ninth International Society of Pediatric Oncology Wilms' Tumor Trial and Study." (Tournade MF, J Clin Oncol. 2001 Jan 15;19(2):488-500.)
 * Outcome: No benefit for longer pre-op course
 * Abdominal recurrence: Stage II LN0 (no RT): 7%
 * Conclusion: 4-week neoadjuvant chemo should be standard

 * SIOP-6 (1980-1987) -- Risk adapted randomization
 * Randomized. 509 patients. Risk adaptive therapy. Neoadjuvant chemo (AMD+VCR), surgery, then assigned based on stage, LN involvement.
 * Stage I: 4 months (short) vs. 9 months (long) adjuvant chemo
 * Stage II LN0: adjuvant RT 20 Gy vs. no RT (Stopped prematurely due to high failures in no RT arm
 * Stage II LN+/Stage III: intensified VCR + AMD vs. VCR + AMD + doxorubicin. RT 30 Gy + 5 Gy boost dose to residual disease
 * 5-years; 1993 PMID 8388918 -- "Results of the Sixth International Society of Pediatric Oncology Wilms' Tumor Trial and Study: a risk-adapted therapeutic approach in Wilms' tumor." (Tournade MF, J Clin Oncol. 1993 Jun;11(6):1014-23.)
 * Outcome: 2-year DFS and 5-year OS
 * Stage I: DFS short 92% vs. long 88% (NS); OS 95% vs. 92% (NS)
 * Stage II LN0: DFS RT+ 72% vs. RT- 78%; OS 88% vs. 855 (NS) - (trial stopped early in favor of RT+, due to first year 6 consecutive failures in RT- arm vs none in RT+ arm)
 * Stage II LN+/III: DFS VCR+AMD 49% vs. VCR+AMD+doxorubicin 74% (SS); OS 77% vs. 80% (NS)
 * Conclusion: Risk-adapted therapy possible. Continued RT or more chemo necessary for LN+

 * SIOP-5 (1977-1979) -- neoadjuvant chemo vs. chemo-RT
 * Randomized. 164 patients. Arm 1) Preop RT 20 Gy + concurrent Actinomycin D then surgery then post-op RT 15 Gy vs. Arm 2) Pre-op Actinomycin D + vincristine then surgery then post-op RT 30 Gy. Both arms maintenance Actinomycin D + vincristine. Primary criterion was effectiveness of pre-op therapy on surgical outcome
 * 4-years; 1983 PMID 6321673 -- "Effectiveness of preoperative chemotherapy in Wilms' tumor: results of an International Society of Paediatric Oncology (SIOP) clinical trial." (Lemerle J, J Clin Oncol. 1983 Oct;1(10):604-9.)
 * Outcome: No difference in tumor size or intra-op tumor rupture; chemo resulted in less necrosis and tumor histology distortion. 4-year RFS chemo 76% vs. chemo-RT 69% (NS), OS chemo 89 vs. chemo-RT 83% (NS). No difference in failure patterns
 * Downstaging: 43% of patients were Stage yI at surgery, and thus may not need post-op RT
 * Conclusion: Neoadjuvant chemo alone comparable to neoadjuvant chemo-RT

 * SIOP-1 (1971-1974) -- Pre-op vs. Post-op RT
 * Randomized. 195 patients. 2x2 design. Arm 1) Pre-op RT 20 Gy + surgery + post-op RT (Stage I none, Stage II-III 15 Gy) vs. Arm 2) post-op RT (Stage I 20 Gy, Stage II-III 30 Gy). Post-op RT arm ended prematurely due to worse outcome. Actinomycin D single course vs. 15 months
 * 1976 PMID 184913 -- "Preoperative versus postoperative radiotherapy, single versus multiple courses of actinomycin D, in the treatment of Wilms' tumor. Preliminary results of a controlled clinical trial conducted by the International Society of Paediatric Oncology (S.I.O.P.)." (Lemerle J, Cancer. 1976 Aug;38(2):647-54.)
 * RT outcome: Tumor rupture during surgery pre-op RT 4% vs. post-op RT 31% (SS). No difference in RFS or OS. Post-op arm stopped, because massive tumor rupture in 11 patients during surgery necessitated upstaging and whole-abdomen RT
 * Chemo outcome: No difference between single course and multiple courses
 * Conclusion: Pre-op RT superior, as it leads to less tumor rupture during surgery

UK CCSG Trials

 * UKW3 (1991-2001)
 * Randomized. 205 patients with renal tumors. Arm 1) immediate surgery vs. Arm 2) biopsy, then 6 weeks preoperative chemotherapy (AMD+VCR) followed by surgery. Both groups received risk-adjusted post-op therapy. Post-op RT FH 20 Gy, UH 30 Gy. Wilms confirmed in 91%, CCSK 4%.
 * 2006 PMID 16904312 -- "Immediate nephrectomy versus preoperative chemotherapy in the management of non-metastatic Wilms' tumour: results of a randomised trial (UKW3) by the UK Children's Cancer Study Group." (Mitchell C, Eur J Cancer. 2006 Oct;42(15):2554-62.)
 * Stage distribution: surgery vs. chemo Stage I 65% vs. 54%, Stage II 24% vs. 15%, Stage III 10% vs. 30%, (SS). This resulted in 20% fewer children receiving RT or doxorubicin
 * Outcome: 5-year EFS both groups 80% (NS), OS both groups 89% (NS)
 * Conclusion: Neoajduvant chemotherapy shifts patients to better stage, and hence reduction in adjuvant therapy


text:
Spanish/Tenses/Indicative/Perfect/Present

Some things to note:
 * 1) This tense (and all perfect tenses) uses a form of the irregular helping verb haber (meaning to have done). As this is the present perfect indicative, it takes the simple present indicative form of haber.
 * 2) The past participle of a regular verb is formed by adding -ado to the stem of an -AR verb, and -ido to the stem of an -ER or -IR verb.
 * 3) As the structure for this tense is a form of haber with the past participle, there are no irregular verbs in this tense. Any irregularity would come from a verb with an irregular past participle, but the haber + past participle structure still holds true.
 * 4) While the past participle is oftentimes the same word as the adjective form of a verb (las palabras habladas  - the spoken words), the past participle itself is not an adjective, and therefore does not have to "agree" with the subject. Regardless of the subject's gender or number, the past participle remains the same. Ellas han hablado, NOT ellas han habladas.
 * 5) Be careful not to confuse the past participle with the gerund. He hablado, not he hablando.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
C++ Programming/Code/Standard C Library/Functions/getchar

getchar
The getchar function returns the next character from stdin, or EOF if the end of file is reached.

 * Related topics: fgetc - fopen - fputc - putc


text:
C++ Programming/Code/Standard C Library/Functions/fprintf

fprintf
The fprintf function sends information (the arguments) according to the specified format to the file indicated by stream. fprintf works just like printf as far as the format goes. The return value of fprintf is the number of characters outputted, or a negative number if an error occurs. An example:

 * Related topics: fputc - fputs - fscanf - printf - sprintf


text:
C++ Programming/Code/Standard C Library/Functions/ftell

ftell
The ftell function returns the current file position for stream, or -1 if an error occurs.

 * Related topics: fgetpos - fseek - fsetpos


text:
User:Nether~enwikibooks

Adam Mickiewicz - my favourite poet.

title: User:Nether~enwikibooks


text:
Spanish/Tenses/Past participle

Some things to note:
 * 1) There are several irregular participles: romper (roto), volver (vuelto), resolver (resuelto), escribir (escrito), poner (puesto), decir (dicho), hacer (hecho), satisfacer (satisfecho), morir (muerto), cubrir (cubierto), ver (visto), abrir (abierto), imprimir (impreso but also the regular imprimido), freír (frito but also the regular freído).  -Er/-Ir double vowels, excluding -uir verbs, will place an accent over the 'i':  caer (caído), leer (leído), creer (creído), oír (oído), etc.  The participle of verbs composed of a prefix plus a previously mentioned irregular will follow the pattern:  devolver (devuelto), componer (compuesto), descubrir (descubierto), etc.
 * 2) The past participle can also be used as an adjective. If used as such, they must agree with the subject. Las palabras habladas (the spoken words), not las palabras hablado.
 * 3) The past participle is used with the verb ser to form the passive voice: Las casas fueron destruidas.  (The houses were destroyed.)
 * 4) Past participles are used in perfect tenses along with the verb haber.
 * 5) Past participles are non-finite, or impersonal, meaning they are not conjugated based on the subject of the sentence. Regardless of whether it is ellos, nosotras, or yo who have spoken, it is the verb haber that must agree with the subject, tense, and mood.
 * 6) "Las palabras habían sido habladas" (the words had been spoken) uses the past participle as part of the verb. Las palabras habladas uses it as an adjective.
 * 7) -ER and -IR verbs follow the same structure

title: Spanish/Tenses/Past participle


text:
Spanish/Tenses/Gerund

Some things to note:
 * 1) Verbs that are -Er/-Ir double vowel verbs (caer, creer, leer, huir, etc.) will substitute a 'y' for the 'i' in the ending: cayendo, creyendo, leyendo, huyendo, etc.  This does not include -guir verbs, as the 'u' exists only to elecit the hard 'g' sound and is not pronounced.  This same change occurs in the third person of the preterit.
 * 2) With -Ir stem changing verbs (morir, dormir, sentir, vestir, pedir) the 'o' in the stem will change to a 'u' (muriendo, durmiendo), or the 'e' to an 'i' (sintiendo, vistiendo, pidiendo). This same change occurs in the third person of the preterit and the nosotros and vosotros of the present subjunctive.
 * 3) Ir has the irregular gerund, yendo, and poder the irregular gerund pudiendo.
 * 4) These are not nouns. Me gusta nadando is incorrect. While in English, we say "I like swimming," you cannot do so in Spanish. "Swimming" can be either a verb or noun in English, meaning "moving through water" (a verb) or the act of doing so (a noun). In Spanish, you say "me gusta nadar". "I like to swim."
 * 5) These forms are often used with the verb estar, for use in continuous tenses. When used as such, it is estar that is conjugated to agree with the subject. The gerund does not change. Ellas están hablando is correct, while ellas están hablandas is not.
 * 6) -ER and -IR verbs undergo the same change to make the gerund.

title: Spanish/Tenses/Gerund


text:
Futurebasic/Language/Reference/fbgetsystemname$

= FBGetSystemNames$ function =

Revised
April, 2003 (Release 8)

Description
This function returns the computer name or the user name according to the  parameter. is one of the following constants:,   or.

To make this routine available to your program, you must include the header file "Util_ComputerNames.Incl".

Example
Include "Util_ComputerNames.Incl" Print "Computer Name:";;¬ Fn FBGetSystemName$ (_FBComputerName);"""" Print "Long  User Name: """;¬ Fn FBGetSystemName$ (_FBLongUserName);"""" Print "Short User Name: """;¬ Fn FBGetSystemName$ (_FBShortUserName);""""

Do HandleEvents Until 0


text:
Futurebasic/Language/Reference/fbtestforlibrary

= FBTestForLibrary function =

Function
✔ Appearance ✔ Standard ✔ Console

Revised
July 28, 2000 (Release 3)

Description: This function determines whether a library exists and returns a boolean result. Keep in mind that libraries often have one name that is visible in the Finder and a different name that is used for access. To determine the required name for  statements, use a resource editor like Resorcerer and examine the   resource. The proper names for many common libraries can be found under the help menu in the manual named "Mac Libraries."

Example:


text:
User:Terra/monobook.js

// User:Lupin/popups.js mw.loader.load(            'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Lupin/popups.js'             + '&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&dontcountme=s'); // User:Dschwen/highlightredirects.js - please include this line document.write(' '); // User:Ioeth/friendly.js document.write(' ');

// User:MarkS/extraeditbuttons.js - please include this line document.write(' ');

// User:Misza13/viewSource.js - please include this line document.write(' ');

// User:AzaToth/twinkle.js - please include this line document.write(' ');

// User:Lupin/recent2.js - please include this line mw.loader.load(            'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Lupin/recent2.js'             + '&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&dontcountme=s');

// User:Ais523/votesymbols.js - please include this line document.write(' ');

// MediaWiki:UserMessages.js - please include this line document.write(' '); // MediaWiki:Delete.js - please include this line document.write(' '); // MediaWiki:Quick-delete.js - please include this line document.write(' '); // MediaWiki:TextCleaner.js - please include this line document.write(' ');

title: User:Terra/monobook.js


text:
Futurebasic/Language/Reference/frac

= FBTestForLibrary function =

Revised
July 28, 2000 (Release 3)

Description
This function determines whether a library exists and returns a boolean result. Keep in mind that libraries often have one name that is visible in the Finder and a different name that is used for access. To determine the required name for  statements, use a resource editor like Resorcerer and examine the   resource. The proper names for many common libraries can be found under the help menu in the manual named "Mac Libraries."

Example:

title: Futurebasic/Language/Reference/frac


text:
Futurebasic/Language/Reference/for

= FBTestForLibrary function =

Function
✔ Appearance ✔ Standard ✔ Console

Revised
July 28, 2000 (Release 3)

Description: This function determines whether a library exists and returns a boolean result. Keep in mind that libraries often have one name that is visible in the Finder and a different name that is used for access. To determine the required name for  statements, use a resource editor like Resorcerer and examine the   resource. The proper names for many common libraries can be found under the help menu in the manual named "Mac Libraries."

Example:

title: Futurebasic/Language/Reference/for


text:
Futurebasic/Language/Reference/fix

= FIX function =

Description
This function returns a whole number representation of  (it strips off digits to the right of the decimal point). Although  always returns an integer, the number it returns is considered to be a double-precision floating-point value.

title: Futurebasic/Language/Reference/fix


text:
Futurebasic/Language/Reference/flushevents

= FLUSHEVENTS statement =

Description
This statement removes all pending events from the system event queue and from FutureBasic's internal event queues. This is useful when you want to prevent your event-handling functions from processing any old events that may currently exist in the queue. does not inhibit future events from being put into the queue.


text:
Futurebasic/Language/Reference/flushwindowbuffer

= FLUSHWINDOWBUFFER statement =

Statement
✔ Appearance ✔ Standard ✔ Console

Revised
April 2003 (Release 8)

Description
Under OS X, all drawing to a window is intercepted and stored ("buffered") by the Window Server. The Window Server normally transfers the drawing to the screen only when your program executes a  statement. You can force an early update with.

If  is omitted, or is 0, the current output window is flushed by the OS X Window Server. If  is non-zero, window   is flushed.

The default behavior of the FutureBASIC runtime is to flush the current output window each time a  statement is performed. You can control that behavior:  will turn off the automatic flushing. You still can force the flushing for a specific window with. will restore the automatic flushing.

The  command has no effect unless the program is running under OS X.

Example:


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Futurebasic/Language/Reference/fn toolbox

= FN <toolbox> function =

Description
This function executes a Toolbox function as defined in Inside Macintosh. A Toolbox function (as opposed to a Toolbox procedure) returns a value.

must be the name of a Macintosh Toolbox function. FB recognizes the names of hundreds of Toolbox functions and procedures; advanced programmers can also use the  statement and the   statement to add new Toolbox function/procedure names.

The use of the,   and   parameters is identical to their use in the   statement. See the description of the CALL statement for more information.


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Talk:VHDL for FPGA Design/Multiplexer

Sequencial vs. paralell
A multiplexer is by nature unclocked and paralell. It triggers on all signals, so it shouldn't have D-latches.

I think this code can be made better using with/select-statement. Like:

(I don't have access to a simulator to verify my code here, so I don't update the main page right now...)

Thoughts?

--Pengi (talk) 14:00, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Contributors
Some content was contributed by User:Garycookejr while the page was being developed at Wikiversity. Those edits are not reflected in the page history. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 20:07, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

title: Talk:VHDL for FPGA Design/Multiplexer


text:
Futurebasic/Language/Reference/fn userfunction

Description
Executes the user function specified by, and optionally returns a numeric or string result. The user function must be one which was defined or prototyped at an earlier location in the program. A user function is defined using,   or   statement. A user function is prototyped using the  statement.

If the user function returns a value, you can use  as part of a numeric or string expression, as in this example:

If the user function does not return a value, then you should use  as a standalone statement.

If the function definition includes a list of parameters, then you must provide the same number of parameters (in param1, param2, etc.) when you call the function, and the parameters that you pass must be of compatible types. The compatible types are summarized here (not all of these are available for all kinds of functions; see the individual descriptions of LOCAL FN, LONG FN

and DEF FN <expr>):

Notes:  1. Non-integer values are rounded to integers before being moved into integer or pointer variables. 2. If you pass a numeric value that's outside the range of the formal variable type, you may get an unexpected result, or you may get an overflow error. 3. If you pass a string value that is longer than the maximum size of the formal variable, the string will be truncated. 4. If you specify a variable here, the variable's address will be copied into the formal parameter (addr& or p). If you specify a long-integer expression preceded by "=", then the value of that expression is copied into addr& or p. 5. The array must be a numeric or string array (not an array of records). All of the array's elements are accessible to the function. Any changes that are made to the array's elements within the function will also affect the array outside of the function. Note that if the array specified in the formal FN definition has a different type or different dimensions from the array you pass when you call the function, you may get unexpected results, or even a crash. (Be sure you know what you're doing before you try this!) 6. If you specify a record variable here, the record's address will be copied into the formal parameter (p). If you specify a long-integer expression, then the value of that expression is copied into p.

If the function definition does not have a list of parameters, then you must not include any parameters (nor parentheses) when you call the function.

In most cases, the parameters that you specify in  are "passed by value." That means that the user function receives a private copy of the parameter's value; if the function changes that copy, it doesn't affect the value of the parameter that was used in the  call.

In a few cases, the parameters that you specify in  are "passed by reference." That means that the user function receives the address of the parameter that you specified. If the function changes the contents at that address, it will affect the value of the parameter you passed. Parameters are passed by reference when you use the following kinds of formal parameter declaractions in the function definition:

 pointer. (Parameter is passed by reference if you specify a record variable when you call the function.)

address reference. (Parameter is passed by reference if you specify a variable when you call the function.)

array declaration )

You can also pass the address of a variable or array by using the  function (  or  ) when you call the function (if you do this, then specify a long integer variable or a pointer variable as the formal parameter in the FN definition). This is another way to give the function direct access to the memory comprising the variable or array, allowing it possibly to change its value. Note: that there is no way to pass the contents of a record directly to a function. To give the function access to a record's contents, either pass the record by reference, or pass the record's address directly (passing  or   when you call the function).

A  call may appear anywhere below the place where the function is defined (or prototyped). It can appear in the "main" scope of the program, or inside other functions. It may even appear inside the very function that it is calling—this allows you to implement so-called "recursive" functions (functions which call themselves).


text:
Ancient History/Greece/Classical Greece

 Classical Greece 750 - 336 BCE

The glory of Classical Greece reached its zenith in the Athens of Socrates and remained unabated until the self-imposed exile of Aristotle. Socrates was born an Athenian citizen and was sentenced to death in 399 BCE by an Athenian court for sedition specifically on the emotionally charged crime of corrupting the young and the often-used specious claim of religious impiety - both still powerful accusations today and the common currency of power politics in all constitutions though the latter has more force in a theocracy. Aristotle was born in Macedonia and left Athens after failing to secure the leadership of Plato's Academy in 348 BCE. These two philosophers bookend a remarkable period of experimentation and innovation in Greek culture which itself was the culmination of three centuries of investigative and analytical thought.

Herodotus, a Greek colonist from Halicarnassus, wrote the first objective history in European literature and Pericles, an Athenian statesman and General, initiated a building program in Athens unparalleled in beauty and scope. We can only use our imagination as we look upon the ruins of the Parthenon of Pericles' Athens. Shorn of its metopes and internal decorations and devoid of function it still preserves the majesty of focus and aims. During this period Attic drama became the dominant form of theater throughout the region and the Festival of Dionysus at Athens saw the first productions of plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. This cultural dominance by Athens was matched by Spartan military hegemony both a byproduct of the defeat of Xerxes and his Persian army at the Battle of Platea in 479 BCE by the combined Greek city states. The end of the Persian threat led to increasingly strained relationships between the city states of Athens and Sparta due in part to Athens now safe access to the Aegean where it could dominate trade with its navy and correspondingly increase its regional influence. To Sparta this was an unacceptable proposition and the friction would result in the Peloponnesian War. Sparta would emerge victorious but would not be able to retain its territorial gains since both sides were constrained by internal and external pressures. Sparta attempted to impose upon Athens the client rule of the Oligarchs to which Plato was extended an invitation which he declined. The death sentence of Socrates and his execution in 399 BCE was just one symptom amongst many of the increasing oppression and violence by the government of the Oligarchs. Plato recorded for prosperity the trial and execution of Socrates in the form of a philosophical dialectic called the Apologia. Plato's testament to the death of his teacher and friend was to idealize the philosophical integrity of Socrates. In the Apologia Socrates denies himself the right to flee the injustice for he is an Athenian citizen and subject to the laws of the state. However it must be noted that Plato was related to one of the Thirty Tyrants though declined an offer to be part of their rule. This does raise some doubt as to whether the Apologia can be read as a defense of Socrates since when faced with the same fate it would only be human to avoid the same charge. Twenty-four years earlier Aristophanes had lampooned Socrates in his play The Clouds presenting Socrates' entrance upon a deus ex machina and basket. The inference of impiety could not be discarded and the power of Socratic dialogue had been acknowledged. The Thirty Tyrants through a popular revolt were removed and Spartan influence failed as democracy was restored. Athens had stated its wish to return to self-determination.

The death of Socrates offers a glimpse of why any idealization of this period as glorious may fall far short of our modern expectations or to the sceptic further confirm that we have hardly progressed in our behaviour. The glory of Classical Greece was stained by slavery, the death penalty, exile and constant war. The advocation by Aristotle in his book Politics that slavery, though an unfortunate condition for those that are slaves, is the natural result of their own personality elicits a response. Aristotle's assertion that a slavish personality leads to enslavement strikes an uncomfortable note. The distance in time of thousands of years does not lessen the impact of such statements and the conflict that arises in response has drawn out of each generation the question of whether Aristotle is just stating a truth. If the material world we create is the result of our internal responses then Aristotle has quite rightly laid bare the human condition for further investigation. This is the true glory of Classical Greece. When we look upon the buildings of the Acropolis or admire the bronze bust of the Cynic philosopher it is prudent to remember Aristotle's assertion for such statements are intricately woven into the creation of the material and external world of Classical Greece.

The Ancient Greeks believed that justice arose out community and that laws naturally emanate from relationships. Whether we agree with Plato's statement in the Republic that democracy is like a ship without a Captain, always in danger of wrecking on the rocks of majority consensus, we must acknowledge that this is an essential question. For justice must govern relationships and laws must be applied to mediate relationships yet universal suffrage was considered to be impractical by the Greeks. Access to justice was automatic for native citizens born of free parents and arbitrary for metics engaged in international trade but for slaves it was denied. Slaves became Freedmen for many reasons but the highest distinction conferred was access to justice as a citizen of a polis. The patronage and status of the male citizen who had granted this right was, by legal requirement, acknowledged in the adoption of their family name. Exclusion is advocated by Plato in the Republic and despite Aristotle's claim that Politics is his objective view of the various constitutions some of his personal observations present a similar sentiment. However we can never level the charge that the issue of universal suffrage was not understood only that the Greek polis as the most perfect community offered limited scope for its application. Modern democracy extends over thousands of miles and all citizens are granted rights and access to justice. Classical Greece is the birthplace of democracy but the influence and extent of that democracy was limited and not equally applied if applied at all.

title: Ancient History/Greece/Classical Greece


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Ancient History/Greece/Hellenistic Greece

 Hellenistic Greece 336 - 146 BCE

This period is marked by the decline of Athens and Sparta as external forces pressed upon the war-weary alliances of the Greek city-states. Philip II of Macedon, building upon the legacy of his grand-father and father, would set in motion a series of events that would lead to Rome's eventual domination of Greece. However this was to be in the future for during his reign he had incurred the wrath of Rome by his support for their enemies - a slight they never forgot. Cleopatra was a descendant of a Macedonian general and the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE where the forces of Octavian defeated those of Mark Anthony and Cleopatra marked the end of Macedonian control of Greece, Egypt and Asia Minor. It was the son of Philip II, Alexander the Great, who had conquered the East but it was Philip II who had conquered Greece. The empire of Rome was forged out of the Greek world and their achievements and failures.

The Macedonians, who history records as being a fractious people, gave us one of the greatest philosophers in Aristotle. There is no doubt that Macedon was a Hellenistic kingdom whose legacy to the world was as profound as that of Athens yet we still feel a tinge of regret that it was achieved by the sword and not ideas. Yet for all the powers exhibited by the Socratic dialogues of the Athenian Plato it is the earthly Macedonian Aristotle who bequeathed to the modern world the rational enlightenment that we proudly claim as our greatest achievement. Aristotle's philosophy and science were forged in Athens for he was a long-term resident of that polis. There would be no papyrus describing the Macedonian constitution for Kings allow of no law above themselves. Bear in mind that the "Athenian Constitution" was written by Aristotle not Plato. Sometimes the most valued commentators are those who are not embroiled in the biases of allegiance.

The salient point that democracy was born in Athens yet never held much sway on the practical Macedonians, whose city states were minor kingdoms whose rulers eventually were brought under the power of Philip II, should be kept in mind. The Hellenistic period does not prove that Athenian democracy is the ship without a captain that Plato considered the weakest of constitutions for Sparta capitulated to the Macedonians readily. The Spartans themselves cannot be accused of defeat for the Macedonians accorded their city state much honor recognizing a kindred warrior spirit. As with all achievements by men of personalty Macedonian power could only last as long as the natural life span of those who were willing to defend it. So despite the corpus of Aristotle we still hold up Athens as the corner-stone of democracy. We cast an Athenian vote in our modern elections yet the Macedonians and Spartans highlight that war and power are never far from severing the citizen's right to representation.

 Alexander the Great

There is a distinction between myths and legends. It is one of mortality. Alexander the Great was thirty-two years old when he died. During his brief life he conquered vast lands in which he founded new cities based on the Greek polis. The boundary stone to his adventures lay at the edge of present day Afghanistan, where still a tribe claim to be the modern day descendants of his army, when his men refused to travel into India. During the long journey back Alexander died in Babylon which we now call Iraq. The modern city of Alexandria in Egypt still bears his name two thousand years after his death. It was one of many cities named after him. The epithet "great" is not one of conquest for Alexander was steeped in the Hellenistic tradition of aversion to cultural tyranny. There are no Alexandrian edicts forbidding the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians from following their own traditions and culture. The epithet is given because he willingly met the conditions of the people he conquered seeking not to reject their cultures but to embrace their diversity. The Alexandrian edict that offers proof of this is the mass marriages of his senior officer to noble Persian women in the city of Susa in Iran. Upon his death the empire was fought over by his generals. Within a few generations Rome would seize the remnants of the Macedonian conquests.


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XForms/Process Step Editor

Motivation
You want to create a process editor where a process is a series of steps that grow horizontally as you add steps to a process. You want to override the default behavior of items in an repeat to be added horizontally, not vertically.

Process
Use a repeat but add the following to your css file

Working XForms Application
Load XForms Application

Source Code
  Process Step Editor Process:

  +        <xf:label>-</xf:label> <xf:delete nodeset="instance('process')/activity[index('activity-repeat')]" ev:event="DOMActivate"/> </xf:trigger> </xf:repeat> <xf:label class="group-label">Activity Inspector:</xf:label> <xf:repeat nodeset="instance('process')/activity[index('activity-repeat')=position]" style="display:inline"> <xf:input ref="activity-name"> <xf:label>Step Name:</xf:label> </xf:input> <xf:select1 ref="activity-type-code"> <xf:label>Activity Type:</xf:label> <xf:item> <xf:label>Enrich</xf:label> <xf:value>enrich</xf:value> </xf:item> <xf:item> <xf:label>Validate</xf:label> <xf:value>validate</xf:value> </xf:item> <xf:item> <xf:label>Check Ruleset</xf:label> <xf:value>check-ruleset</xf:value> </xf:item> </xf:select1> <xf:input ref="webservice-id"> <xf:label>Enrichment Service ID:</xf:label> </xf:input> <xf:input ref="ruleset-id"> <xf:label>Ruleset ID:</xf:label> </xf:input> <xf:input ref="schema-id"> <xf:label>Validate with Schema ID:</xf:label> </xf:input> </xf:repeat>

title: XForms/Process Step Editor


text:
Starting A Website/Server-Side Services

Frameworks
When designing an application there may be a discussion of using a so called framework or not. A framework is simply a bunch of functions and/or classes that makes common tasks simpler to do. Though a framework may not always be necessary because if a developer is good at reusing code it might have developed a own small framework of reusable code.

Example of one page:

Smarty
The only framework that is really useful for this project is the Smarty template engine. There are a bunch of other frameworks around, but from experience a framework can sure bring all kind of glory and bells and whistles. Though when it comes to performance and such everything depends on the framework, and if something goes wrong you probably do not want to go inside a framework and mess around with the code. The thing is, If you have code it yourself you can also fix it.

jQuery
Smarty is a way of splitting HTML-layout from PHP-logic. Though when an application grows, the need for JavaScript might increase and clutter the html-code. A framework named jQuery might solve this since it separates JavaScript from the html itself. It also simplifies common tasks such as the commonly used ajax-technology.

How to do ajax with jQuery
A common use of ajax is to load a chunk of html to somewhere on a web page. This may be a problem since XHTML is not that descriptive of the information. Then it is better to load XML information from ajax and transform it to XHTML. Then you have the XML left on the client side to reuse. Therefore minimizing the database calls needed.

title: Starting A Website/Server-Side Services


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User talk:Slade

Welcome!
Come introduce yourself at the new users page. If you have any questions, you can ask there or contact me personally.-- – Mike.lifeguard  | talk 23:40, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

title: User talk:Slade


text:
C++ Programming/Code/Standard C Library/Functions/fopen

fopen
The fopen function opens a file indicated by fname and returns a stream associated with that file. If there is an error, fopen returns NULL. mode is used to determine how the file will be treated (i.e. for input, output, etc.)

The mode contains up to three characters. The first character is either "r", "w", or "a", which indicates how the file is opened. A file opened for reading starts allows input from the beginning of the file. For writing, the file is erased. For appending, the file is kept and writing to the file will start at the end. The second character is "b", is an optional flag that opens the file as binary - omitting any conversions from different formats of text. The third character "+" is an optional flag that allows read and write operations on the file (but the file itself is opened in the same way.

An example:

 * Related topics: fclose - fflush - fgetc - fputc - fread - freopen - fseek - fwrite - getc - getchar - setbuf


text:
C++ Programming/Code/Standard C Library/Functions/freopen

freopen
The freopen function is used to reassign an existing stream to a different file and mode. After a call to this function, the given file stream will refer to fname with access given by mode. The return value of freopen is the new stream, or NULL if there is an error.

 * Related topics: fclose - fopen


text:
C++ Programming/Code/Standard C Library/Functions/fread

fread
The function fread reads num number of objects (where each object is size bytes) and places them into the array pointed to by buffer. The data comes from the given input stream. The return value of the function is the number of things read. You can use feof or ferror to figure out if an error occurs.

 * Related topics: fflush - fgetc - fopen - fputc - fscanf - fwrite - getc


text:
C++ Programming/Code/Standard C Library/Functions/fputc

fputc
The function fputc writes the given character ch to the given output stream. The return value is the character, unless there is an error, in which case the return value is EOF.

 * Related topics: fgetc - fopen - fprintf - fread - fwrite - getc - getchar - putc


text:
User:Psygnisfive

Why hello.

title: User:Psygnisfive


text:
Conlang/Advanced/Grammar/Government

What is Syntax?
Syntax is the how and why of sentence’s structured: the relationship between elements of a sentence and what those relationships encode. It’s the way a language organizes bits of meaning into representations of the world, of ideas, of situations, etc. Without syntax, there’d be no way of putting any particular meaning into sounds or symbols, and there’d be no way of getting a particular meaning out of sounds or symbols. In short, without syntax, there’s no language, just like without meaningful components there’s no language.

Some examples of word order affecting grammaticality:

 * 1) The dog bit the man.
 * 2) The dog is brown.
 * 3) *Man bit dog the the.
 * 4) *The is brown dog.

Some examples of word order affecting meaning:

 * 5) The man bit the dog.
 * 6) The dog bit the man.
 * 7) Is the dog brown?

[Note: An asterisk before a sentence indicates ungrammaticality. A superscript question mark before a sentence indicates questionable or unknown grammaticality, or grammaticality to only some speakers.]

Syntax generally describes two things: where certain things can go, and what those positions mean. At this level we’ll be looking at various languages and comparing the different ways languages achieve the same thing. Later, in the advanced syntax tutorial, we’ll go back and attempt to find out if it’s possible to describe all languages using the same fundamental syntactic rules and structures, and why they seem to be so very different.

Unlike the simpler approach to syntax, this tutorial will be an in-depth look at linguistic theories. Where traditional approaches just discuss things like SOV vs. SVO vs. etc. word order, or such, this tutorial will explore the underlying structures and rules that produce those word orders. In the advanced syntax tutorial we’ll see how the rules we develop shed more light on the situation, and prompt us to throw out the simplistic notion of SOV vs. SVO vs. etc. word order as being a fundamental concept in syntax.

This tutorial will deal with some of the preliminary concepts used in syntax, primarily the structural components of sentences. As we’ll see by the end of the tutorial, we can account for a large number of features of languages with just this approach, but that we still miss a significant portion of what languages do in fact produce. The advanced syntax tutorial will take us into new territory, exploring a few different theories that aim to account for still more of language. Both this tutorial and the advanced syntax tutorial will be following the general structure of Andrew Carnie’s Syntax: A Generative Introduction (2nd edition), and could be considered a conlanger’s summary of that book. If you’re serious about understanding syntax from a P&P perspective, that book is highly recommended.

What's in this section?
The parts of this section are:
 * Parts of speech: What classes do words fall into?
 * Constituency, trees, rules: How do words combine?
 * Structural relationships: How do words and combinations relate to one another?
 * Binding theory: Why do pronouns seem to behave oddly?
 * Linguistic universals: How do the syntaxes of various languages pattern?
 * Applying knowledge: How do you apply this knowledge in creating a language?
 * Finding problems: What problems still exist in this theory?

Parts of Speech
Sentences, as we all know, are made up of words. But not all words are alike; some words represent objects, some represent actions, etc. What a word represents — its part of speech or syntactic category — plays a significant role in its behavior in a language’s syntax. We can identify two major categories of words. Lexical parts of speech convey whole meanings in themselves, and consist of categories like noun and verb. Functional parts of speech, on the other hand, show relationships between words, or provide extra meaning to words, and include categories like preposition and conjunction.

Lexical
The lexical parts of speech can be divided into the four major categories of nouns (N), verbs (V), adjectives (Adj), and adverbs (Adv). These categories aren’t necessarily universal, and what distinguishes them from one another is a matter of how they behave. Identifying a word as noun or verb is done by looking at what it does: a word is a noun because it behaves like a noun, etc. These particular categories are specific to English and many Indo-European languages, and because this tutorial is in English, and will focus primarily on English syntax, these are the categories that’ll be used.

Nouns
The typical way of describing what nouns are, in informal or grade school English grammar, is “person, place, or thing”. Nouns can also be emotions, colors, abstract concepts, etc. Nouns can often have quantity, specificity, properties as shown by adjectives, roles in an action, etc.

Verbs
Verbs are usually actions, involving some change, or states of being, involving one manner of being vs. another. They often can be described as having tense (when it occurred), aspect (how it occurred through time), manner as shown by adverbs, participants as shown by nouns and other phrases, etc.

Adjectives
Adjectives describe qualities of nouns. They can represent colors, shapes, or more abstract qualities like true, honest, or absurd. Adjectives themselves can have quality or manner, described by adverbs.

Adverbs
Adverbs describe qualities of non-nouns, i.e. verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. They’re perhaps the most abstract of the lexical categories. For example, quickly is an adverb that describes the speed of a verb, but there’s no quality of quickness in an action that can be measured, it’s a very abstract and relative notion compared to a quality such as red. Adverbs like very are even more abstract.

Functional
Functional categories are even harder to conceptualize than the most abstract adverbs. They convey things like tense, ability, permission, and aspect of verbs, relationships between phrases, specificity of nouns, etc. Some common functional categories in English are prepositions (P), determiners (D), conjunctions (Conj), complementizers (C), tenses (T), and negation (Neg).

Features
Features are abstract semantic properties that can be used to describe words. Some, such as purality, are not as abstract as others, such as modality. They tend to be extra information about a word that’s relevant to the structure of the sentence, governing the relationship between the word and other words around it. Features are generally written between brackets. Having a feature is indicated by prepended “+” to the feature, lacking it is indicated by prepending “–”. Multiple features are separated by commas.

Some examples of features:

In the advanced tutorial we’ll see how features themselves can be indicated lexically, and how features can exist in certain places and affect the behavior of words in a sentence to convey certain meanings.
 * [+plural]
 * [–definite]
 * [+past,+inchoative]
 * [+Q,–WH]

In looking at how various types of words behave, we find that they end up dividing into various classes that govern how they can be placed in a sentence. In some languages these subcategories can be overtly marked on the words (Spanish, for instance, has overtly marked gender subcategories, which governs verb agreement), while in others the subcategories are covert and don’t show any markings of the subcategory they belong to.

In English, nouns can be divided into two categories, count nouns, which represent individual countable items, and mass nouns, which represent uncountable things or substances. Count nouns require an indication of number, while mass nouns don’t:

Count nouns can also be used only with certain quantifiers, while mass nouns certain others:
 * *Dog bit the man.
 * A dog bit the man.
 * The dog bit the man.
 * Dogs bit the man.

If we want to label these nouns for subcategory, we can do so with features. For instance, the distinction between count and mass nouns can be marked with the feature [±count]:
 * many cats
 * *much cats
 * much water
 * *many water

 * dog[+count]
 * cat[+count]
 * water[-count]

Verb Subcategories
We can also look at some subcategories of verbs in English. By examining the number of arguments a verb takes, and where they’re positioned in the sentence, we can find some useful properties of verbs.

Just by looking at the number of arguments a verb takes (its valency) we find three kinds of verbs in English. Intransitive verbs take only one argument, the subject, transitive verbs take two arguments, the subject and the direct object, and ditransitive verbs take three arguments, the subject, the direct object, and the indirect object. Some verbs seem to have optional transitivity, such as the verb “drive”: You can say “I drive.” but you can also say “I drive a car.”. In these situations we can say that there are actually two verbs with different valency.

Verbs can also require certain things in certain places relative to them in the sentence. Intransitive verbs require their argument before them. We can indicate this with a feature such as [NP __], with the underscore representing the position of the verb and with NP representing a Noun Phrase. Transitive verbs require an argument before them and after them, and this can be indicated by the feature [NP __ NP] or [NP __ {NP/CP}] (CP for Complement Phrase). The curly braces enclose alternate options, separated by slashes. We say that the object of some transitive verbs can be either an NP or a CP because we have examples like “I said nothing.”, as well as “I said that the pie was tasty.”. Ditransitive verbs can be described with yet another feature.

Here’s an example table of English verb subcategories, with their matching features, and with examples:

Constituency, Trees, Rules
A constituent is any group of items in a sentence that are linked to one another to form a unit. So far the only constituents we’ve seen are words, but there are other sorts of constituents too, namely, phrases. Phrases are groups of words or phrases that are connected more closely to one another than to words and phrases outside the group. In general we say that every phrase has a head (a word) and every head projects a phrase, but this isn’t always the case. A head of a particular syntactic category projects a phrase for that category: a noun (N) projects a noun phrase (NP), a verb (V) projects a verb phrase (VP), etc. We can also say that phrases can be composed of two conjoined phrases of the same time, without having a head.

We can see constituents in sentences just by asking if two words are more closely related to one another than to something else. For example, in “the dog bit the man”, we would say that “the” and “dog” form a constituent with one another, “the” and “man” form a constituent, and so on. Knowing which form of phrase is formed depends on what’s more central to the meaning of the constituent. “The dog” and “the man” are more about “dog” and “man”, respectively, and not as much about “the”, so each of those constituents would be NPs.

Brackets
There are two ways of showing constituency. The first method is by using brackets. This is the easiest to do in text, because it doesn’t involve any special shapes or such. The general way of showing constituency is by putting brackets around a constituent and putting the type of constituent in subscripts after the first bracket. The two identified constituents from the previous example sentence would then be:

 * 1) [NP [D the] [N dog]]
 * 2) [NP [D the] [N man]]

Sometimes you’ll see some constituents incompletely bracketed, such as
 * 3) [NP the dog]
 * 4) [NP the man]

This occurs when the structure that’s been neglected is irrelevant to whatever is being demonstrated by showing constituency. You might also see bracketing without labels (e.g. [the dog] for [NP the dog]) when the labels are irrelevant or recoverable from context. When you’re beginning with constituency it’s better to fully indicate constituency, regardless of relevance.

Trees
More common for showing the structure of a sentence is the tree diagram. In trees, constituents are represented by nodes connected by lines. Lines connect up from one constituent to another that encloses it. The nodes themselves are the type (N, NP, V, VP, etc.). Heads (N, V, etc.) often have the actual word written below them. The tree versions of [NP [D the] [N dog]] and [NP [D the] [N man]] are shown below.

 * 5 & 6) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Trees-5&6.jpg]]

￼ Triangles are used to indicate that the constituency isn’t fully shown.

 * 7 & 8) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Trees-7&8.jpg]]

￼ One general rule for drawing tree structures is that lines never cross. In other words, a constituent must be formed by adjacent items. In the advanced syntax tutorial we’ll explore how non-adjacent constituency is handled and why it arises.

Describing Allowable Constituency Hierarchies
Showing constituency via bracketing and trees is useful for describing what a particular sentence looks like, but syntax is about describing how all sentences look like, and what rules are followed by those sentences. What we need, then, is some way of describing what constituents are acceptable, and what’s contained within them. Looking at the simple examples “the dog” and “the man”, we can derive some basic rules for English NP. In each we have a determiner followed by a noun. If we were to reverse these, giving “dog the” and “man the”, we get ungrammatical phrases, so we can say that an NP consists of a D followed by an N. We can represent this more succinctly as

 * 9) NP → D N

English, of course, also allows collections of adjectives, AdjP, before a noun, but after the determiner, as in “the big dog” (but not as in “big the dog” or “the dog big”), and prepositional phrases, PP, after the noun, as in “the dog in the house” (but not as in “in the house the dog” or “the in the house dog”). So English NP’s can be described more fully like so:

 * 10) NP → D AdjP N PP

We can use X, Y, Z, etc. as metavariables indicated an arbitrary head type. If something is optional, we put it inside parentheses, as in (XP). Alternating choices are put inside braces and separated by forward slashes, as in {XP/YP}. If you need to have any number of an item, for example “XP or XP XP or XP XP XP or ...”, you can put one of the items append a “+” after it, as in XP+. These can be combined to create multiple optional items — (XP+) being no XP, one XP, two XPs, etc. — or multiple instances of a collection of items — {XP/YP/ZP}+ being one or more phrases, each of which can be either an XP, YP, or ZP — and so on.

These rules, with a phrase on the left of an arrow and the contents of that phrase on the right of the arrow, are called Phrase Structure rules, or PS rules. For English, we can describe a large number of sentences with the following set of PS rules:

 * 11) CP → (C) TP
 * 12) TP → {NP/CP} (T) VP
 * 13) VP → (AdvP+) V (NP) ({NP/CP}) (AdvP+) (PP+) (AdvP+)
 * 14) NP → (D) (AdjP+) N (PP+) (CP)
 * 15) PP → P (NP)
 * 16) AdjP → (AdvP) Adj
 * 17) AdvP → (AdvP) Adv
 * 18) XP → XP conj XP
 * 19) X → X conj X

So if we wanted to describe the sentence “the dog bit the man”, we can make this bracketed sentence:

 * 20) [TP [NP [D the] [N dog]] [VP [V bit] [NP [D the] [N man]]]]

And as a tree:

 * 21) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Trees-21.jpg]]

￼

Tests for Constituency
To develop a list of PS rules for a language, it’s necessary to determine what forms constituents. To some extent, it’s possible to do this merely by intuition for your native language, but there are many cases where it’s hard to tell what is a constituent and what is not. To make it easier to determine constituency, there are numerous tests that can be performed on any potential constituent. In the advanced syntax tutorial, we’ll see how these tests give us reason to revise the PS rules, reformulating them as a whole new theory.

Replacement
One way to test for constituency is to see whether the potential constituent can be replaced by a single word without affecting the meaning of the sentence.

 * 22a) The dog bit the man.
 * 22b) The dog bit him.
 * 23a) The dog bit the man.
 * 23b) It bit him.

In these examples we see pronouns replacing strings of words of the form D N, which suggests that D N forms a constituent. This of course is an English NP. We can then say that anything replaceable by a pronoun is of the same kind of constituent, which allows us to take any collection of sentences and identify examples of pronoun-replaceable constituents to identify what can go into them. This is what gives us the rule for what constitutes an NP.

Stand Alone
Another kind of constituency test is the stand alone test (a.k.a. the sentence fragment test). For example, if a group of words can be used as an answer to a question, that is, if it can stand alone as a meaningful independent clause, we can say that it’s a constituent.

 * 24a) The dog bit the man.
 * 24b) The dog bit the man.

 * What did the dog do?

 * 25a) Bit the man.
 * 25b) *Bit the.

These show that “bit the man” forms some constituent, while “bit the” doesn’t form a constituent in English.* By continuing tests involving V’s we find a definition for VP’s.

* The situation is less clear in languages where "the" and "him/her" have the same form. For example, Spanish la "her" resembles la "the (feminine singular)".

Movement
Movement tests show constituency by moving a potential constituent without making the sentence ungrammatical. Clefting involves inserting It is or It was before the potential constituent that after it (26). Preposing/pseudoclefting involves inserting Is/are what/who the potential constituent (27). Making a sentence passive, by swapping subject and object, inserting by before the former subject, and turning the verb into passive form (bit becomes was bitten, etc.), will also indicate constituency.

 * 26) It was the dog that bit the man.
 * 27) The dog is what bit the man.
 * 28) The man was bitten by the dog.

Conjunction
The last test for constituency involves taking a potential constituent and conjoining it with something else that’s similar.
 * 29) The dog bit the man.
 * 30) The dog and the cat bit the man.

Constituency Test Failures
Constituency tests are not always a guarantee. There are situations where a language appears to have constituents that violate other previously identified constituents.
 * 31) The cat saw and the dog bit the man.

(31) would indicate to us that “the cat saw” and “the dog bit” each form a constituent, because they seem to satisfy the conjunction test, which is a violation of previously determined constituency rules. Situations like this require further inquiry. One way we can resolve this, which is taken in the Principles and Parameters framework, is by positing that “the cat saw and the dog bit” aren’t in fact a constituence, but instead there’s an unspoken pronoun (i.e. it has lexical content but no phonological content) that’s called pro, which references “the man”. This would allow us to reanalyze (31) as being a conjunction of two full sentences.

 * 32) [The cat saw [pro]i] and [the dog bit [the man]i]

Here a subscript “i” is used to indicate that pro and the man reference are the same. In this analysis there’s no violation of the PS rules we’ve previously found for English. Other frameworks will handle this sort of situation differently. Lexical Functional Grammar, for example, doesn’t use pro and instead allows a much looser variety of constituents. This sort of failure of the tests show us that there’s more going on in the sentence than there first seems to be, and we’ll explore various different ways of addressing these apparent oddities in the advanced tutorial.

Structural Relationships
Trees structures, as previously mentioned, have distinct components, the nodes, that contain or are contained by other nodes. This hierarchy of containment, and co-contained-ness, allows us to identify certain relationships between nodes that are useful in describing why things behave the way they behave in a language.

Parts of a Tree
Starting with some simple PS rules

 * 1) A → B C
 * 2) B → D E
 * 3) C → F G
 * 4) F → H

we can generate a tree

 * 5) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Structure-5.jpg]]

￼ We can now explore the different parts of trees. A, B, ... are examples of nodes. Nodes are connected to one another by lines, which differentiate branches. B, and the nodes below it, form a branch distinct from C and the nodes below C. D is a distinct branch from E, and so on. If a node has only one branch below it, it’s said to be non-branching; if it has more than one branch below it, it’s branching.

 * 6) [[Image:Structure-6.jpg]]
 * 7) [[Image:Structure-7.jpg]]

￼ At the top of the tree we find A, which is not below any other node. Such nodes are root nodes. At the bottom we find D, E, H, and G, which have no nodes below them. Such nodes are terminal nodes (sometimes called leaf nodes). The nodes A, B, C, and F, all have nodes below them, and are called non-terminal nodes. The actual letters given to the nodes are called labels.

Terminal nodes are almost always heads (in the advanced syntax tutorial we’ll say that all terminal nodes are also heads), and all non-terminal nodes are phrases.

Domination Structures
The simplest kind of structural relationship between nodes is a dominance relationship. A node dominates another node if it’s above that node in the tree. In the example tree, A dominates all other nodes, B dominates D and E, C dominates F, H, and G, and F dominates H.

 * 8) A node X dominates another node Y if and only if X is higher in the tree than Y (i.e. fewer nodes between X and the root node) and you can trace a path between X and Y by going in only up from Y to X or only down from X to Y.

We can also make statements about which collections of terminal nodes are dominated by which other nodes. For instance, the set {D, E} is dominated by both B and A. With B, the set is the same as the set of nodes dominated by B, but with A, the set is only some of the nodes dominated by A. We can say then that B exhaustively dominates the set, but A doesn’t.

 * 9) A node X exhaustively dominates a set of terminal nodes {Y, ..., Z} if and only if X dominates all members of the set, and all terminal nodes dominated by X are members of the set.
 * 10) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Structure-10.jpg]]

Immediacy
￼ We can also notice relationships between how far nodes are from one another in a dominance relationship. Some nodes, such as F, are directly above other nodes, in this case H, while other dominating nodes, such as A, are not directly above. When a node is directly above another node, it immediately dominates that node.

 * 11) A node X immediately dominates a node Z if and only if X dominates Z and there’s no node Y that dominates Z and is itself dominated by X.
 * 12) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Structure-12.jpg]]

A node that immediately dominates another node is called the mother of that other node. A node that is immediately dominated by another node is called the daughter of that other node. Daughters of the same node are called sisters.

Another simple relationship that can be described in terms of domination is constituency.

 * 13) A node X is a constituent of a node Y if and only if Y dominates X.
 * 14) [[Image:Structure-14.jpg]]

Precedence Structures
Precedence is not as simple as dominance, but still quite simple. A node precedes another node if it appears before that node. But there are two distinct kinds of precedence, and one kind depends on the other.

 * 15) A node X sister-precedes a node Y if and only if both X and Y are immediately dominated by the same node and X appears to the left of Y.
 * 16) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Structure-16.jpg]]

￼
 * 17) A node X precedes a node Y if and only if neither node dominates the other and X or a node dominating X sister-precedes Y or a node dominating Y.
 * 18) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Structure-18.jpg]]

Immediacy
Immediacy of precedence can play an important role in the analysis of things like direct vs. indirect objects. Immediacy in precedence is similar to immediacy in dominance, so the definition will be similar.

 * 19) A node X immediately precedes a node Z if and only if X precedes Z and there’s no node Y that precedes Z and is itself preceded by X.
 * 20) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Structure-20.jpg]]

C-command
C-command is probably the most useful structural relationship when it comes to building a theory for how a language works syntactically. A c-command relationship should be easy to grasp if you understand dominance and sister-hood. Basically, a node c-commands another node if it’s sister to that node or sister to a node that dominates that node.

 * 21) A node X c-commands a node Y if and only if the node immediately dominating X also dominates Y.

You can find c-commanded nodes visually by following a simple rule: Go up one then down one or more, and any node you land at will be c-commanded by the node you started at.

 * 22) [[Image:Structure-22.jpg]]

Symmetry
C-command relationships can show symmetry, as well. Symmetry can play an important role in the behavior of certain constituents. Symmetric c-command is essentially a sister relationship. Asymmetric c-command is essentially all other c-commanding situations.

 * 23) A node X symmetrically c-commands a node Y if and only if X c-commands Y and Y c-commands X.
 * 24) A node X asymmetrically c-commands a node Y if and only if X c-commands Y and Y doesn’t c-command X.
 * 25) [[Image:Structure-25.jpg]]

￼

Government
Government is another important relationship. It’s built on top of c-command and so it’s easy to define in those terms. It looks very similar to immediacy relationships.

 * 26) A node X governs a node Z if and only if X c-commands Z and there’s no node Y that c-commands Z and is itself c-commanded by X.
 * 27) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Structure-27.jpg]]

Phrase/Head
Some government relationships only apply between heads or between phrases. We can define two sub-types of governance based on the types of the participating nodes.

 * 28) A node X head-governs a node Z if and only if X c-commands Z, there’s no node Y that c-commands Z and is itself c-commanded by X, and X, Y, and Z are all heads/terminal nodes.
 * 29) A node X phrase-governs a node Z if and only if Z c-commands X, there’s no node Y that c-commands Z and is itself c-commanded by X, and X, Y, and Z are all phrases/non-terminal nodes.
 * 30) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Structure-30.jpg]]
 * 31)

Grammatical Relationships
The last kind of relationship is the grammatical relationships. These aren’t structural relationships at all, but rather semantic relationships that tend to end up taking on the same structural form in language after language. Some of these will be revised in the advanced syntax tutorial.

These relationships depend entirely on the PS rules of a language, in this case English.

 * 32) Subject (S): The NP or CP daughter of a TP.
 * 33) (Direct) Object (O or DO): The NP or CP daughter of a VP headed by a transitive verb.
 * 34) Object of a Preposition: The NP or CP daughter of a PP.
 * 35) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Structure-35.jpg]]

￼ English has type of object called an Indirect Object (IO). Indirect objects can sometimes appear as a normal Object or sometimes as the Object of a Preposition.

 * 36) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Structure-36.jpg]]
 * 37) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Structure-37.jpg]]

￼ Now that we have two kinds of objects that both can be NP daughters of VPs, we need to redefine the term Direct Object, and also define an Indirect Object.

 * 38) Direct Object (v2):
 * a) The NP or CP daughter of VP, with a V[NP __ NP], V[NP __ CP], V[NP __ {NP/CP}], and V[NP __ NP PP]
 * b) An NP or CP daughter of VP that’s sister-preceded by an NP or PP, with a V[NP __ {NP/PP} {NP/CP}]
 * 39) Indirect Object:
 * a) The PP daughter of VP immediately preceded by an NP daughter of VP, with V[NP __ NP PP]
 * b) The NP daughter of VP immediately preceded by V, with V[NP __ NP {NP/CP}]

There’s another kind of object, the Oblique Object, which is usually marked with a preposition, as in:

 * 40) I eat toast [PP with jam].

Oblique Objects can show up in the same positions as Indirect Objects, and sometimes in the position of a Direct Object. What makes an Oblique Object distinguishable from other kinds of objects is whether or not it shows up in the argument feature for the verb. For instance, the verb “eat” has the argument feature [NP __ NP]. If a PP, such as “with jam”, shows up in the sentence, it must be an oblique object, since it’s not indicated in the argument feature.

Binding Theory
Binding theory is an attempt to account for certain phenomena involving pronouns and anaphors by using the structural framework we’ve developed up to this point. To understanding where this theory comes from it’s important first to understand what these kinds of words do that makes them so special and how they’re set apart from normal nouns.

Normal nouns are what’re called R-expressions (“r” for “referencing”). The have meaning derived from their reference to things outside of the words of the sentence, things in the world (e.g. “the tree”, “a car”). Pronouns, on the other hand, derive meaning by referring to other words in the sentence (to R-expressions), or from context, etc. (e.g. “he”, “her”, “they”). Finally, anaphors get their meaning only from R-expressions in the sentence (e.g. “itself”, “ourselves”).

We can find examples of special pronoun and anaphor behavior in these stunningly ungrammatical sentences:

 * 1) *Itself bit the dog.
 * 2) *He saw John. (where “he” refers to John)

So the question is why are these ungrammatical, and to find that out we need to determine what differences we can find between grammatical and ungrammatical examples.

Coreference
The first thing to introduce is a way of indicating whether or not two phrases refer to the same entity in the world. We’ll do this by using a unique subscript letter after the word or phrase for each unique entity.

 * 3) [The dog]i bit [the man]j.
 * 4) [Bob]i gave [Maria]j [the book]k.
 * 5) [John]i thinks that [he]j likes [apple pie]k.
 * 6) [Francine]i saw [herself]i in [the mirror]j.

This indexing allows us to note when two phrases refer to the same entity by identifying the same subscript on each phrase. By possessing the same index, that is, by being coindexed, we can determine that they corefer to the same entity.

Secondly, a simple notion of giving meaning is required. We’ll call a phrase an antecedent if it gives meaning to another phrase.

Binding
We can now explore some examples of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences to find some initial similarities and differences.

 * 7) Johni saw himselfi in the mirror.
 * 8) [Johni’s dog]j saw himselfj in the mirror.
 * 9) *[Johni’s dog]j saw himselfi in the mirror.

By examining the structure we find that the anaphor himself can’t corefer with an R-expressing that’s contained within another phrase that’s in subject position. If we examine the tree diagrams below, we’ll find that in the grammatical situations, the antecedents always c-command the anaphor.

 * 10) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Binding-10.jpg]]
 * 11) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Binding-11.jpg]]
 * 12) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Binding-12.jpg]]

￼ We can now define binding:

 * 13) A node X binds a node Y if and only if X c-commands Y, and both X and Y corefer.

In 7-9, the sentence is grammatical only when the anaphor is bound by its antecedent. If this is general, then we should find cases where an anaphor binds its antecent to be ungrammatical.

 * 14) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Binding-14.jpg]]

￼ Since these are all ungrammatical, let’s make a rule out of this.

 * 15) Principle A: An anaphor must be bound by its antecedent.

Domains
If English were as simple as that we’d be finished with binding, but unfortunately English isn’t that simple. We can easily find examples where an anaphor is bound by its antecedent but the sentence is still ungrammatical.

 * 16) [[Image:Binding-16.jpg]]

￼ In order to account for this we have to introduce the concept of a binding domain. Simply, a binding domain is the clause (TP) that contains the anaphor. What we notice about (16), now, is that the antecedent is outside of the binding domain of the anaphor. We can make a revision to Principle A to include a locality constraint (a rule that involves nearness).

 * 17) Principle A (v.2): An anaphor must be bound by its antecedent within its binding domain.

For now this theory will suffice, but in the advanced syntax tutorial we’ll look at some easy-to-find examples of binding within a binding domain that still ungrammatical, and we’ll see how we can revise our theory to make it fit better.

Binding Pronouns
The behavior of pronouns turns out to be the reverse of anaphors. Consider these sentences:

 * 18) Johni saw himj in the mirror.
 * 19) *Johni saw himi in the mirror.
 * 20) Johni saw that hei was reflected in the mirror.
 * 21) Johni saw that hej was reflected in the mirror.

 * 22) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Binding-22.jpg]]
 * 23) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Binding-23.jpg]]
 * 24) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Binding-24.jpg]]
 * 25) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Binding-25.jpg]]

￼ In (18), the pronoun is unbound (or free), but in (19) the pronoun is bound. Looking at embedded clauses we find that if the pronoun is in an embedded clause, that is, a different binding domain, then the sentence is grammatical regardless of coreference. In the grammatical cases the pronoun is free within its binding domain, and in the ungrammatical cases it’s bound. We can make a second rule from this.

 * 26) Principle B: A pronoun must be free in its binding domain.

Binding R-expressions
The last of the set to deal with, after anaphors and pronouns, is R-expressions, the whole set of nouns and phrases that aren’t anaphors nor pronouns. At first it seems like we shouldn’t need to describe where these can go at all, given our previous rules, but we can find perfectly ungrammatical sentences that don’t break either Principle A or B.

 * 27) *Hei bit Fidoi.
 * 28) *Bobi saw Franki.
 * 29) Hei bit Fidoj.
 * 30) Bobi saw Frankj.
 * 31) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Binding-31.jpg]]
 * 32) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Binding-32.jpg]]
 * 33) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Binding-33.jpg]]
 * 34) [[Image:Intermediate-Syntax-Binding-34.jpg]]

￼ In these situations, what we notice is that the sentence is ungrammatical only when the R-expression is bound. We can make a third rule now.

 * 35) Principle C: An R-expression must be free.

With binding we now have a fairly complete way to describe many of the behaviors of language, in terms of structure, and we can begin to look at some of the things we can do with this knowledge.

Linguistic Universals
One of the biggest concerns of modern linguistics is to discover the fundamental principles that underly all human languages. This will be the motivation for further development of the theories we’ve covered as we’ll see in the advanced syntax tutorial. But even at the level we’re currently working on there are some trends within natural languages that we can explore, which give us insight into things ranging from how cognitive processes formulate sentences to how grammatical features develop over time.

These trends are called Linguistic Universals or Universals of Grammar, and they come in two types: mere statistical trends, and true universals (or “implicational universals”). The statistical trends are just that — trends that appear in patterning that likely come about through historical change under the influence of any number of forces such as ease of cognition. Implication universals, on the other hand, tend to be much more closely followed, and make predictive statements that say if a language has feature X, it’ll almost assuredly have feature Y as well. There are also other ways of dividing universals, namely by the parts of a language that they affect. Phonetic/phonological universals involve the sounds and sound changes that a language goes through, morphological universals involve word structure and morphemes, etc. In this section I’ll be covering the universals that can be related to syntax, and I’ll explore possible ways that these universals can arise from syntax.

Word Order Universals
Word order typology is the classification of languages by how certain types of words are ordered relative to one another in a sentence or constituent. The most common word order typological classification is the order of subjects, objects, and verbs within a sentence. Since there are three types of words, we have six possible configurations: VSO, SVO, SOV, VOS, OVS, OSV. In surveys of natural languages, the first three, with the subject preceding the object, are overwhelmingly used as the normal declarative word order, the latter three comprising lower single digit percentages. We’ll call these two word orders SO and OS, respectively. For each of the word orders we’ll also identify them by the position of the verb, I, II, and III for verb first, second, and third, respectively. A language can then be classified by a combination of both, as SO/I, OS/III, etc. Because SO word order is so overwhelmingly common, SO word order can simply be assumed on bare verb position numbers (e.g. III would mean SO/III not OS/III, etc.).

A second way of classifying languages is by their use of prepositions or postpositions, which we can call Pr and Po, respectively. A third is the order of adjectives and nouns; if a noun comes before its adjectives we can call this N, if a noun comes after its adjectives we can call this A. Looking at the Pr/Po and A/N classifications in relation to I/II/III classification we can find some interesting trends, such as type I languages always also being Pr, type III languages usually being Po, etc. We can now make a list of possible configurations (ignoring the rare OS configurations) and look at their frequency.

 * I-PR-A:	Rare
 * I-PR-N:	Common
 * I-PO-A:	Rare
 * I-PO-N:	Rare
 * II-PR-A: Common
 * II-PR-N: More Common
 * II-PO-A: Rare
 * II-PO-N: Less Rare
 * III-PR-A: Rare
 * III-PR-N: Rare
 * III-PO-A: More Common
 * III-PO-N:	Common

Just from this bit of data, and our knowledge of syntax from before, we notice a trend that would be helpful in constructing a believable language. The common forms, I-PR-N, II-PR, and III-PO, all show, by contrast to other forms or by contrast to sub-forms, a preference for keeping consistent head positioning, i.e. languages prefer to be as consistently head-initial or head-final as possible.

Syntactic Universals
Syntactic universals are more specific than the typical word order universals. They still are visible in the word order of a sentence, but they tend to be much more specialized in scope. For example, question particles in yes/no questions tend to appear after the word they mark, and they tend to appear more in type II and III languages; when they appear in type I languages the particle appears before the word they mark. Auxiliary verbs, too, show interesting syntactic patterning that follows from the generalization about consistent head positioning.

Morphosyntactic Universals
Morphosyntactic universals are in between syntactic universals and morphological universals in that they involve morphological tendencies in relationship to syntactic features. For example, what we find is that morphological items tend to behave similar to heads in PPs, in that if a language has just suffixing, then it should behave like a language with postpositions and be type III, and indeed this turns out to be the case. Indeed, if a language has just suffixes then it has postpositions, if it has just prefixes then it has prepositions.

In the case of agreement between nouns and adjectives, N languages always have agreeing adjectives. More generally, type III languages almost always have case systems. The full complexity of syntax related tendencies among languages is beyond the scope of this section, but you can read more about them here. Some of the implications that we can derive from these universals would make a nice set of grammatical rules. For instance, the tendency for affixes to behave like adpositions might indicate some hidden structure that involves the affixes as the head of some adposition-like phrase, undergoing some sort of historical change from an adposition to an affix, thus giving us an idea of how to evolve a constructed language. The tendency for languages to try to be consistent in their head positioning could result from a historical process that changes parts of speech into one another. Alternatively, to make a truly alien feeling language, these universals could be reversed, making a Po type I language or something similar. Knowing the universals clearly makes it easier to create both a naturalist language as well as interesting alien languages.

References (linguistic universals)
Greenberg, Joseph. "Some Universals of Grammar." 1999. 10 Dec 2007 .

Applying this Knowledge to the Conlanging Process
So far we’ve explored the beginnings of a syntax as a set of formal theories, but this tutorial is meant to be an aid in constructing a language. To see how we can use this knowledge, I’m going to approach the process of constructing a language from two perspectives. The first is construction from scratch, without any preconceptions or ideas about what the grammar of the language should look like. Then I’ll look at how to take some vague ideas and how to expand them into a full language that you can expect such systems to appear in, and in the process I’ll look at how the same tools can be used to formalize an existing language.

Designing a Syntax from Scratch
Design a syntax from scratch is theoretically a simple process. Without any preconceptions about what certain features should look like, we can follow an orderly approach to the process. Indeed, the process is so formulaic that it might even be useful to just write out a list of things to define for the language.

 * 1: Head-initial or head-final
 * 2: Heads and Phrases (i.e. does the language have Ns? NPs? Vs? VPs? etc.)
 * 3: Phrases that are exceptions to (1) or have exceptional alternative forms
 * 4: PS rules

Some things to keep in mind, especially in (2) and (4) is that the structures don’t have to be identical to English. Modern theories tend to attempt to describe every language with the same basic formulation, the more in common the better, but that doesn’t mean your language has to. If you want to put the subject into the VP and move the object out of the VP, sure go ahead and do so. But keep in mind that making exceedingly different rules means that your constituency tests should have equivalent forms. If you do indeed move subjects into VP and objects out, you’ll need to have a situation where you can replace the VP with a stand in, something similar to “do so”, and have it mean the same thing. It’s important to keep in mind why we say languages have the rules we’ve found for them, or developed, as the case may be.

Formalizing Ideas and Making Generalizations
Finding a syntax for preexisting ideas is a bit more complicated than designing one from scratch. Because we already have some “canonical” forms, we have to perform tests on them to discover how they behave. We can perhaps make a list of things to do here to identify the features of the language.

 * 1: Constituency tests to decide what composes the structure and how
 * 2: PS rules to describe the structure
 * 3: Is the structure’s head positioning typical or exceptional?
 * 4a: Generalization of 1-3 as guides for the steps to design a syntax from scratch
 * 4b: Create more ideas and analyze them

Having multiple ideas would make (3) easier to decide. For example, if we have three ideas that end up having the same head positioning, we might want to say that our language should have that positioning as the typical position. Alternatively, if the ideas have different head positioning we can choose whichever we prefer more and make that typical, while making the other one exceptional.

The rules listed above can apply just as well to a description process as well, treating the entire language as one giant idea to be analyzed. Input from less formal grammars can speed up the process of creating a formal grammar.

Finding Problems with the Current Theory
The current theory is very powerful and can account for a great many phenomena in natural languages. Despite this, it still misses an enormous number of sentences that are grammatical, at least in English, and the theory as given can’t account at all for some languages.

English
English was the language we used to base our current theory on, but within English there are some clear counterexamples to the theory we have. Just within noun phrases we have examples of constituency lower than NP but higher than N. For example, “the big brown dog and the little one too”. In this example “one” replaces “brown dog”, suggesting that the “brown dog” is itself a constituent, but given our existing PS rules for English this shouldn’t be possible. We thus have an anomalous constituent:

 * [NP [D the] [AdjP big] [?? [AdjP brown] [N dog]]].

Irish
Irish is a type SO-I language, which means it has VSO word order. With the above grammar, placing the subject as the daughter of a TP makes it impossible to get it between the verb and the object. If we make new structures between V and VP, like we suggested for English, we’ll still find some example sentences that don’t word. For example, Irish has AuxSVO word order whenever an auxiliary verb is used, which makes it hard to have a single rule to account for word order.

Japanese and Latin
Japanese and Latin are what are sometimes called non-configurational languages, which means that they don’t have any significant amount of word order on a clause level. Japanese, for instance, only requires that verbs appear at the end of a clause (Japanese is a type III language), and that verb complements appear immediately before the verb. Latin is often cited as an example of a language with no word order on the clause level at all. Non-configurational languages such as these would require a large number of PS rules, one for each possible word order. With large clauses this could get unwieldy very quickly.

In the advanced syntax tutorial we’ll see how modern linguistics approaches these problems, and look at some experimental ways of describing behavior that would be more useful in the conlanging process.

title: Conlang/Advanced/Grammar/Government


text:
Introduction to Crochet

Table of contents

 * /Getting started/
 * /Stitches/
 * /Working in rounds/
 * /Simple projects/
 * /Bead crochet/
 * /A set of coasters/

Gallery of projects
''Note: The following was imported from Wikiversity. These are materials that can be incorporated into the above pages. ''

Beginner's Materials

 * fat yarn, cord or rope (fancy/frilly/loosely wound yarns are harder to keep track of)
 * large hook that is a suitable size for the yarn (you can generally find a suggested hook size on the yarn package)

Beginning crochet classes and books usually recommend a size H crochet hook and solid color acrylic yarn for practice. Acrylic is easy to work with and inexpensive.

Note: Don't waste your money on fancy yarns until you know what you want to make and how exactly you're going to do it!

Left vs. Right Hand
Crochet can be done with either the right hand or the left hand, with mirror image results. Most beginning crochet instructions and nearly all published patterns are made for right-handed people. So beginners who are able to learn the craft right-handed will find it easier to do so. Left-handers who want to use published patterns can translate the material for left-handed use or use software to translate it.

Things To Keep in Mind
Make note of which way you hook something. Over can give a different result from under. Do it the same way every time for even rows. Keeping an even tension on the yarn helps make the project come out neater. Don't pull it too tight- You probably have to poke the hook back through that hole later. Also, keep track of the number of stitches in a row. If you know how many stitches you should have, it's easier to find out if you missed one.

Gauge/Tension
The way a crocheter holds yarn affects the size of the stitches and the overall size and density of a piece. In United States terminology this is called gauge, with reference to the stitches per square inch on a sample swatch. In British terminology this is called tension, with reference to the effect a tight or loose grip. These are two different ways of looking at the same issue.

Either way, it's important to be aware that professionally published designs will list a tension or gauge rating. Crocheters normally make a sample swatch of about 4" x 4" to test their work against the size requirements of the design. If your tension/gauge is looser than the design, then compensate by trying a slightly smaller hook. If yours is tighter than the design, then use a slightly larger hook. Continue experimenting until you obtain the correct gauge.

A slight difference of 5% or 10% could make the difference between a sweater that fits properly and one that cannot be worn. If your own gauge changes during the project, continue changing hooks to compensate. The same crocheter's tension may be different after a glass of wine or a tense conversation.

Thread or yarn weight
Crochet yarn and thread is sold by "weight", which is a technical term that roughly refers to diameter. The same design can yield substantially different sizes depending on the weight selected. A beginning crocheter does best by following the recommended weight for a pattern.

The Chain
The basic unit of crochet is the slip knot. If you pull the end of the yarn at the working edge of the unfinished project, you should be able to completely unravel it. Think of it as a huge, elaborate slip knot. To see how the basics of crochet work, you don't need to start with a hook. Mark one end of your rope. Make a slip knot. /*add a picture*/ Make a loop at the base of the slip knot using the marked end of the rope. /*add a picture*/ Pull this loop through the loop of the slip knot. /*add a picture*/ Make another loop with the marked end and pull it through the last loop you made. /*add a picture*/ Continue to do this a few more times until you have a chain that looks like a braid on one side. /*add a picture*/

Practice this until you can make a chain without any twists. You are now ready to do this with a hook.

Single Crochet
When working from a chain,insert hook in second chain from the hook. Yarn over, pull through the chain. Yarn over, pull through the other two loops on the hook. When working the second row, chain one, and insert hook in the first stich of the row. Yarn over, pull through the stich. Yarn over pull through the other two loops on the hook. The chain at the start of the row is called the turning chain

Video Stitch Guides: (Right-handed), (Left-handed)

Turning chain
"Turning chain" gets its name because crocheters turn a piece of fabric over at the end of a row. When finishing one row and start another, it is necessary to build height before beginning the regular stitch for the new row. This is done with a turning chain, which is made from one or more chain stitches. For single crochet, a single chain stitch is normally enough for a turning chain.

Double
When working from a chain, yarn over. Insert hook into third chain from the hook. Yarn over. Pull through the chain stitch. Yarn over. Pull through the first two loops on the hook. Yarn over. Pull through the two remaining loops.

When working the second row, chain two, yarn over and insert hook in the second stitch of the row. Yarn over. Pull through the stitch. Yarn over. Pull through the first two loops on the hook. Yarn over. Pull through the two remaining loops

Video Stitch Guides: (Right-handed), (Left-handed)

title: Introduction to Crochet


text:
Talk:E-Commerce and E-Business

The first chapter of this book is selected as textbook and used in the course of English for E-commerce Professionals at Huaqiao University (Quanzhou, Fujian, China). We are looking forward to sharing our ideas with all the contributors and readers of this e-primer. Specifically, we hope we can get in contact with the author, Ms. Andam.

mathe
$$$$what is the e-commerce company

title: Talk:E-Commerce and E-Business


text:
User talk:Joram86

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Good luck! --Panic (talk) 05:35, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

title: User talk:Joram86