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Recent studies demonstrate therapeutic benefits in retinal laser therapy even for non-visible effects of the irradiation. However, in practice, ophthalmologists often rely on the visual inspection of irradiation sites to manually set the laser power for subsequent ones. Since absorption properties vary strongly between sites, this procedure can lead to under- or over-treatment. To achieve safe automatic retinal laser therapy, this article proposes a robust control scheme based on photoacoustic feedback of the retinal temperature increase. The control scheme is further extended to adapt to real-time parameter estimates and associated bounds on the uncertainty of each irradiation site. Both approaches are successfully validated in ex vivo experiments on pigs’ eyes, achieving consistent irradiation durations of 55 ms despite the uncertainty in absorption properties.

Current linguistics is biased towards considering as object of scientific study only verbal language, i.e., ordinary language whose basic entities are words, sentences, and texts. By having this focus, the crucial non-verbal semiotic contributions from acts of bodily communication are left out of consideration. On the face of it, this is a strange situation, because, phenomenologically, when observing a communicating dyad, what appears to the senses is a multimodal semiotic display-the interactants produce acts of total communication, the linguistic part of which has in fact to be disentangled from the integral semiotic behavior. That a human being should in the first place be conceptualized as a 'talking head', rather than a 'communicating body', stems from at least four historically interrelated fountains: ancient Greek philosophy with its emphasis on logos as meaning both rational mind and verbal language/speech as well as with its rejection of rhetoric (including body language); Cartesian dualistic rationalism where the body was the animal, mechanistic part of a human being, unworthy for the Geisteswissenschaften; Saussure's formal structuralism with its defocusing of the individual's performance, parole, and its high focus on societal langue; and Chomskyan linguistics with its neglect of actual, also bodily, performance, and its total focus on an ideal mental grammatical computational competence. With the recent philosophy ('in the flesh') of the 'embodied mind', time has now come for integrating the (linguistic) head with the (other part of the communicating) body and seeing communication as total communication of the whole body. This means that the communicating mind is no longer restricted to its 'rational' aspects but has to be conceived full-scale as integrating also all kinds of 'irrational' factors, like emotions and motivations. Another, no less important, implication of the above is that an individual's 'language faculty' is to be understood rather as a faculty of total communication-verbal OPEN ACCESSEntropy 2010, 12 391 and non-verbal semiotic behavior is an integrated, multi-modal whole of total communication performed by whole human organisms. Cybersemiotics offers itself here as the meta-theoretical, transdisciplinary framework within which this new paradigm of total communication can be developed.

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The present paper investigates, within the cognitive and functionalist paradigm, word order in Danish by applying to a comprehensive collection of data Hawkins' (1994) Per formance Theory of Order and Constituency (= PTOC), in effect a formalist theory whereby word order and (autonomous-syntactic) constituency are seen as determined, not by internally motivated movement operations as in standard generative-transformational grammar (Chomsky's Minimalism) but by (external) performance factors like processing ease. In the main section of the paper, Section 1, I accordingly investigate Danish word* The present paper is an expanded version of my presentation to the 1996 Syntactic Processing and Word Order Symposium, devoted to John A. Hawkins' Performance Theory of Order and Constituency, held at the Department of General and Applied Linguistics, University of Copenhagen. The paper has profited greatly from reactions by the audi ence, especially Hartmut Haberland, John Hawkins, and Lars Heltoft. I am very much endebted to John Hawkins for many valuable comments and criti cisms in connection with my paper, and for moral support of my project in general. I have also had fruitful discussions with Henrik Aagesen, Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen, Lisbeth Falster Jakobsen, Peter Harder, and Erik Kafe. Special thanks go to Jan Daugaard who has generously supplied me with compilations of corpus examples -with out his help the present study would have been impossible. Equally many thanks to Niels Reinholt Petersen for his invaluable and untiring help in connection with the statistics. Finally, a word of gratitude is due to Peter Harder (co-editor of ALH) for his advice in connection with the present exposition. The research reported was financed by a grant from the Carlsberg Foundation for the years 1996-97 which is hereby gratefully acknowledged. Downloaded by [University of Connecticut] at 08:45 13 October 2014 130 OLE NEDERGAARD THOMSEN order with respect to processing ease as defined by syntactic complexity; however, competing semantico-pragmatic (complexity) factors are also dealt with; both kinds of factors show out to be significant. The general introduction (Section 0), therefore, pleads for an integration of formal and functional insights ("complementarity-based linguistics"). Section 2 is a general conclusion summarizing the paper by underlining the two empirical main results obtained in the course of the study, viz.: i. the content-syntactic structure of a sentence is 'weighed' with respect to its syntactic complexity as input to expression-syntactic word ordering (= PTOC): the principle of Early Immediate Constituents is observed; ii. not only quantitative syntactic weight but also semantico-pragmatic complexity (e.g. word class membership of head word) may be significant factors in ordering. Thus, not only 'contentive arbitrarily '(= PTOC) but also 'contentive motivation'(= cognitivefunctionalism) is at play in word ordering in Danish. General introduction: some theoretical preliminaries The domains of competence and "...