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Kaxabu is an Austronesian language of Taiwan with fewer than ten speakers, all of whom are over the age of seventy and mainly use Taiwanese Southern Min in daily life. A number of morphological changes are observed. The affixes 'perfective' and ta-...-i 'hortative' have become fossilized and have been replaced by other more productive lexical or morphosyntactic processes. Reflexes of the Proto-Austronesian monosyllabic suffixes *-en 'UVP', *-an 'UVL', and *-i 'IMP/DEP.UVL' have become clitics while the disyllabic prefixes pa-ka- 'CAUS (STAT)' (reconstructed at the PAN level as *pa-ka-) and ma-ti- 'wear (AV)' now also occur as (function/content) words paka 'cause, make' and mati 'wear'. The aim of this paper is to examine these morphological changes, and more specifically, affix fossilization, which constitutes the last step of grammaticalization in paradigmaticity and deaffixation, which is an instance of degrammaticalization. These two processes are quite opposite and result from two concomitant factors which are causing language change: (i) language obsolescence, which induces fossilization, and (ii) language contact with Taiwanese Southern Min, which causes deaffixation.

Larticle présente les erreurs fossilisables que les étudiants de Licence en Langues Modernes de l'Université Pontificale Javeriana font en phonétique et phonologie dans les niveaux intermédiaires (B2) de français. À partir des concepts clés (phonétique, phonologie, fossilisation et erreur fossilisable), nous analyserons un corpus de productions orales, les réponses à un questionnaire adressé aux étudiants et des entretiens semi-directifs réalisés avec les enseignants des cours. Nous démontrons que les erreurs caractéristiques des hispanophones persistent dans ces niveaux et risqueraient de ne pas être corrigées à moins que des stratégies pédagogiques soient mises en place à fin d'empêcher leur fossilisation. Mots-clés Français; enseignement des langues; phonétique This article presents the fossilizing mistakes made by the Modern Languages students of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in the French phonetics and phonology in the French intermediate course (B2). Based on key concepts (phonetics, phonology, fossilization and fossilizing mistakes) we analyze an oral production corpus, the answers to a questionnaire for students, and semi-structured interviews made to the course teachers. It is shown that typical mistakes by the Spanish-speaker persist among students in this level and are would not be corrected unless some pedagogic strategies are implemented to prevent the fossilization. Keywords French; language instruction; phonetics El artículo presenta los errores fosilizables que los estudiantes de la Licenciatura en Lenguas Modernas de la Pontificia Universidad Javeriana cometen en fonética y en fonología en los niveles intermedios (B2) de francés. A partir de conceptos clave (fonética, fonología, fosilización y error fosilizable), analizaremos un corpus de producciones orales, las respuestas a un cuestionario dirigido a estudiantes y entrevistas semiestructuradas realizadas a profesores de los cursos. Se demuestra que los errores característicos de los hispanohablantes persisten en esos niveles y podrían no ser corregidos a menos que se desplieguen estrategias pedagógicas con el fin de evitar su fosilización. Palabras clave Francés; enseñanza de idiomas; fonética

The distribution of ownership of transition risk associated with stranded fossil-fuel assets remains poorly understood. We calculate that global stranded assets as present value of future lost profits in the upstream oil and gas sector exceed US$1 trillion under plausible changes in expectations about the effects of climate policy. We trace the equity risk ownership from 43,439 oil and gas production assets through a global equity network of 1.8 million companies to their ultimate owners. Most of the market risk falls on private investors, overwhelmingly in OECD countries, including substantial exposure through pension funds and financial markets. The ownership distribution reveals an international net transfer of more than 15% of global stranded asset risk to OECD-based investors. Rich country stakeholders therefore have a major stake in how the transition in oil and gas production is managed, as ongoing supporters of the fossil-fuel economy and potentially exposed owners of stranded assets.The necessary and rapid transition to a low-carbon economy will lead to massive stranded assets, which could risk the stability of financial markets and the economy. Through a global equity network, most risk and responsibility is owned by investors, such as pension funds, in developed countries.

This book is a systematic attempt to address the issue of fossilization in relation to a fundamental question in second language acquisition research, which is: why are learners, adults in particular, unable to develop the level of competence they have aspired to in spite of continuous and sustained exposure to the target language, adequate motivation to learn, and sufficient opportunity to practice?

The preservation of bone or bioapatite over geologic time has presented paleobiologists with longstanding and formidable questions. Namely, to elucidate the mechanisms, processes, rates, and depositional conditions responsible for the formation of a fossil from a once living tissue. Approaches integrating geochemistry, mineralogy, physics, hydrology, sedimentology, and taphonomy have all furthered insights into fossilization, but several fundamental gaps still remain. Notably, our limited understanding of: (1) the timing of processes during diagenesis (e.g., early and/or late), (2) the rate of bioapatite transformation into thermodynamically more stable phases, (3) the controls imparted by depositional environment, and (4) the role of (micro)biology in determining the fate of bone bioapatite (dissolution or preservation). The versatility of fossil bioapatite to provide information on the biology of extinct vertebrates rests on our ability to identify and characterize the changes that occurred to bioapatite during diagenesis. This review will evaluate our current understanding of bioapatite diagenesis and fossilization, focusing on the biogeochemical transformations that occur during diagenesis to the mineral and organic components of bone (excluding teeth and enamel), the analytical approaches applied to evaluate fossilization processes, and outline some suggestions for future promising directions.

The fossil record constitutes the primary source of information about the evolutionary history of extant and extinct groups, and many analyses of macroevolution rely on fossils that are accurately placed within phylogenies. To avoid misinterpretation of the fossil record, especially by non-palaeontologists, the proper assessment and communication of uncertainty in fossil placement is crucial. We here use Bayesian morphological phylogenetics to evaluate the classifications of fossil parasitoid wasps (Hymenoptera, Ichneumonidae) and introduce 'RoguePlots' to illustrate placement uncertainty on the phylogeny of extant taxa. Based on an extensive, newly constructed morphological matrix of 222 characters in 24 fossil and 103 extant taxa, we test three different aspects of models of morphological evolution. We find that a model that includes ordered characters, among-character rate variation, and a state-space restricted to observed states achieves the highest marginal likelihoods. The individual RoguePlots reveal large differences in confidence in the placement of the different fossils and allow some refinements to their classification: Polyhelictes bipolarus and Ichninsum appendicrassum are moved from an uncertain subfamily placement to Pimplinae, Plectiscidea lanhami is transferred to Allomacrus in Cylloceriinae (Allomacrus lanhami, comb. nov.), Lithotorus cressoni is moved from Diplazontinae to Orthocentrinae, and we note uncertainty in the generic placements of Rhyssella? vera and Xanthopimpla? messelensis. We discuss potential artefacts that might result in biased posterior probabilities in Bayesian morphological phylogenetic analyses, pertaining to character and taxon sampling, fossilization biases, and model misspecification. Finally, we suggest future directions both in ichneumonid palaeontology and in the way RoguePlots can improve both assessment and representation of placement uncertainty, both in fossils and other rogue taxa.

The estimation of origination and extinction rates and their temporal variation is central to understanding diversity patterns and the evolutionary history of clades. The fossil record provides the only direct evidence of extinction and biodiversity changes through time and has long been used to infer the dynamics of diversity changes in deep time. The software PyRate implements a Bayesian framework to analyze fossil occurrence data to estimate the rates of preservation, origination, and extinction while incorporating several sources of uncertainty. Building upon this framework, we present a suite of methodological advances including more complex and realistic models of preservation and the first likelihood-based test to compare the fit across different models. Further, we develop a new reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm to estimate origination and extinction rates and their temporal variation, which provides more reliable results and includes an explicit estimation of the number and temporal placement of statistically significant rate changes. Finally, we implement a new C++ library that speeds up the analyses by orders of magnitude, therefore facilitating the application of the PyRate methods to large data sets. We demonstrate the new functionalities through extensive simulations and with the analysis of a large data set of Cenozoic marine mammals. We compare our analytical framework against two widely used alternative methods to infer origination and extinction rates, revealing that PyRate decisively outperforms them across a range of simulated data sets. Our analyses indicate that explicit statistical model testing, which is often neglected in fossil-based macroevolutionary analyses, is crucial to obtain accurate and robust results.

Recent fossil and genetic data poses new questions about the degree of variability of the Late Pleistocene fossils from China and the possible interaction of modern humans with other archaic hominins. This paper presents a general overview of the variability of the dental fossil record from some key Late Pleistocene localities in China. Our study reveals that despite having similar chronologies, not all the samples present the same suite of derived traits. This finding may reflect complex demographic dynamics with several migrations and dispersals and/or a degree of population substructure similar to that described for the African continent. Simple and linear models to explain the origin and dispersals of Homo sapiens seem to be progressively outdated by the new fossil, demographic and genetic evidence. In addition, we warn about genetic admixture as a possible source of morphological variability and we hypothesize that some skeletal features of Homo floresiensis and Denisovans could be related to their hybridization with other hominin groups.

The understanding of fossilization mechanisms at the nanoscale remains extremely challenging despite its fundamental interest and its implications for paleontology, archaeology, geoscience, and environmental and material sciences. The mineralization mechanism by which cellulosic, keratinous, and silk tissues fossilize in the vicinity of archaeological metal artifacts offers the most exquisite preservation through a mechanism unexplored on the nanoscale. It is at the center of the vast majority of ancient textiles preserved under nonextreme conditions, known through extremely valuable fragments. Here we show the reconstruction of the nanoscale mechanism leading to the preservation of an exceptional collection of ancient cellulosic textiles recovered in the ancient Near East (4,000 to 5,000 years ago). We demonstrate that even the most mineralized fibers, which contain inorganic compounds throughout their histology, enclose preserved cellulosic remains in place. We evidence a process that combines the three steps of water transport of biocidal metal cations and soil solutes, degradation and loss of crystallinity of cellulosic polysaccharides, and silicification.