We apply ideas related to the strength of polynomials to provide new cases of unirational hypersurfaces. It is famously known that hypersurfaces that are smooth in very high codimension are unirational, and a simple corollary then implies that any polynomial of sufficiently high strength will give rise to a unirational hypersurface. Our main result shows that unirationality is preserved under a substitution of high collective strength. In particular, we prove that polynomials of sufficiently high secondary strength are unirational. Along the way, we introduce a "transfer principle," showing that polynomials of high collective strength have Fano schemes defined by polynomials of high collective strength. This gives an alternate proof of a result of Xi Chen on unirationality of Fano schemes, and proves a weakened form of the de Jong-Debarre Conjecture. Combined with some ideas of Starr, this implies a version of Kazhdan and Ziegler's result about the universality of complete intersections of polynomials.

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The study seeks to establish whether pause frequency and pause duration could inform us about the size of linguistic units stored in the mental lexicon. Pauses are seen as a reflection of cognitive effort in lexical retrieval. The basic assumption is that a particular concept starts activating related concepts in a conceptual network via spreading activation. Pausing is assumed to be rare when spreading activation is at work, i.e. in the recall of multiword, or prefabricated, structures. The results show that pausing was significantly more frequent in connection with lexical search in computed as compared to prefabricated structures, thus indicating that prefabricated structures are stored and retrieved as wholes. The most important implication of the study is that the results give further support to John Sinclair's proposed 'idiom principle' , according to which strings that would appear to be analyzable into segments nevertheless constitute single choices.

The present study focuses on the use of the three pragmatic expressions (you know, you see, and I mean) by female and male British English speakers. The aim of the study is two-fold: first, to establish actual differences in usage between men and women over a number of functions of the three pragmatic expressions; second, to find out whether such differences could be correlated to same-sex as opposed to mixed-sex interaction. The results of my investigation show that there are gender-specific differences in the use of pragmatic expressions. Some of the more salient differences were that the women tended to use pragmatic expressions between complete propositions to connect consecutive arguments, whereas the men preferred to use them either as attention-drawing devices or to signal repair work. The two groups also showed differences from the point of view of absolute frequencies, so that, generally speaking, the men used the expressions about 25% more often than the women and in some contexts up to twice as much. The results also point to the use of pragmatic expressions being largely dependent on whether the conversation takes place in a same-sex or in a mixed-sex environment, so that they tend to be used more sparingly in mixed-sex as compared to same-sex interaction.