Concision is about more than writing like Hemingway or following Strunk & White’s edict to eliminate unnecessary words. Instead, concision relies on writers recognizing the myriad redundancies in English, a reflection of its evolution from the collision of Latin, French, and Old English in the decades following the Norman Conquest. Moreover, redundancies also litter English in the form of redundant modifiers, throat-clearing, and metadiscourse. By recognizing these words and phrases, writers can quickly pare sentences to their essentials, without fretting over the havoc deletions can wreak on the meaning of their sentences.

Text comprehension and picture comprehension can be synthesized into a common conceptual framework which differentiates between external and internal descriptive and depictive representations. Combining this framework with the human cognitive architecture including sensory registers, working memory, and long-term memory leads to an integrated model of text and picture comprehension. The model consists of a descriptive branch and a depictive branch of processing. It includes multiple sensory modalities. Due to a flexible combination of sensory modalities and representational formats, the model covers listening comprehension, reading comprehension, visual picture comprehension, and sound comprehension. The model considers text comprehension and picture comprehension to be different routes for constructing mental models and propositional representations with the help of prior knowledge. It allows us to explain the effects of coherence, text modality, split attention, text–picture contiguity, redundancy, sequencing, and the effects of different types of visualization.

This chapter completes our critical exploration of Popper’s key work, the Logic of Scientific Discovery and how it applies to corpus linguistics. In this chapter we address the question of how easily linguistics may be viewed as a science, in Popper’s terms. We also consider important critiques of Popper’s work and use those to both clarify and, where necessary, adapt the framework.

This chapter extends the ideas of complex data by looking into cybersecurity through network and graph data.

The SVCs have a cluster of grammatical traits not derivable exclusively from UG, some of which have been misrepresented/misunderstood in the UG literature. The first functional void of UG is proposed which limits the lexicalization of a semantic relation R to only those cases where R connects first-order entities. All the characteristic properties of SVCs result from this functional void collaborating with the proposed Serial Verb Parameter (SVP) in the theory of the UG–iconicity interface. It also explains a wide range of related cross-linguistic facts, from phrasal SVCs to compounds, the parametric variations between Chinese and Gbe languages in (dis)allowing ditransitive V1, why the resultative SVC acts in a particular set of ways different from other types and the subtle disparities between head-initial and head-final SVCs, as well as the full range of variations among Kwa languages in object- and verb-fronting. The relation between the linearization pattern of UG and the iconicity-induced word order of SVCs is shown to pattern with the “high” and “low” neural pathways underlying fear, with implications on the nature of redundancy in biologically based systems and suggestive of an evolutionary connection between these two linearization mechanisms in language.

Synthesising different collapse mechanisms for indeterminate beams and frames is considered via the prospect of their salient bending moments (without solving for their exact values) as candidate positions for the formation of plastic hinges. The method of Instantaneous Centre is introduced for calculating the relative motion of sub-structures within frames, including those with pitched roofs under distributed loading.

Maxwell's Rule conveys a statement of rigidity for a given truss framework. When the number of bars or supports is reduced, the truss will inevitably lose rigidity and collapse as a mechanism. This consequence can also be captured by Maxwell's Rule in a modified statement, which leads to a discussion about its interplay with states of self-stress, illustrated using the simplest pin-jointed arch.

We suggest (Proposition 5) that a community is functionally assembled when there is at least one species representing each functional type that is adapted to the habitat. We suggest (Proposition 6) that a community is fully assembled when each functional type has the maximum number of species that can coexist. Much biological diversity lies in the lower tail of the log-normal distribution, yet ecologists frequently trim this tail of rare species to construct models. The rising tide of species extinctions requires us to revisit this procedure, and to consider how to include conservation of rare species in models for community assembly. This requires us to recognize that there are two types of “rare” species in ecological data sets: those that are merely rare in samples and those that are designated as globally rare and at risk of extinction. Most communities arise from pre-existing communities, so when filters change there is often inertia in community response, and this inertia is related to traits. The principles laid out in this book provide a guide not only to theoretical understanding but for the challenges of ecological restoration.

We give a short introduction to some classical information-theoretic quantities: joint entropy, conditional entropy and mutual information. We then interpret their exponentials ecologically, as meaningful measures of subcommunities of a larger metacommunity. These subcommunity and metacommunity measures have excellent logical properties, as we establish. We also show how all these quantities can be presented in terms of relative entropy and the value measures of the previous chapter.

Chapter 9 builds on the concepts of effect traits to provide a tool for connecting biodiversity effects to multiple ecosystem processes and services, through species traits. First, an overview of the multiple effects of different traits, and organism types, on different ecosystem processes is provided. Then, two main hypotheses are proposed to explain how traits influence ecosystem processes: the mass ratio hypothesis (the dominant trait in the community, mainly associated to CWM) and the complementarity hypothesis (the variation in trait values in the community, mainly associated to FD). A detailed discussion is provided on how to disentangle the roles of CWM and FD in affecting ecosystem functions, for which specifically designed experiments are often needed (particularly to tease apart the mathematical non-independence between CWM and FD). These tools are further discussed in the light of classical approaches decomposing biodiversity effects into different components (net diversity effect, selection effect and niche complementarity).

Chapter 5 provides concepts and tools to characterize the functional trait structure of communities. Various indices are introduced, mainly community weighted mean (CWM) and various functional diversity (FD) indices. The power and the limitations of CWM are discussed. Various indices of FD, which expresses the extent of trait differences between organisms, are introduced to simplify their use and interpretation. The broad classification into ‘families’ of indices, i.e. functional richness, functional evenness and functional divergence, is discussed. A selection of indices, with their ability to provide a measure of FD at different scales (alpha, beta and gamma diversity), is discussed, together with other emerging components such as functional redundancy and functional rarity. A discussion on existing R tools, with their potential tricks and problems, is provided, also with examples available in the R material accompanying this chapter.

In this chapter we attempt to separate the communal and the individual levels of language representation and explore how linguistic regularities emerge at each of them. We sample one communal and ten individual corpora of language use from the same ELF environment and examine to what extent syntactic structure, priming and chunking influence linguistic choice in each corpus by looking at the variation between contracted and full forms (it is/it’s). We find clear differences in how these three factors work across the corpora and attempt to interpret them in relation to the properties of individual languages, language change and the role of ELF.

The expansion in subject matter of copyright, design and trade marks has made cumulation of protection a more common occurrence, even if the problem has long been recognised as a challenge for intellectual property law. EU law has no consistent approach to overlapping subject matter. In some cases, cumulation is permitted (and perhaps even mandatory). In others, it is looked upon with disfavour. However, it is clear that when regimes clash and cumulation rejected, trade mark law appears the one most likely to be regarded as pre-empted. This chapter considers reasons why this might be so, and finds most possible reasons wanting. However, this analysis does offer some important insights into the nature and challenges of trade mark law in Europe.