“The amazing thing about this love story”: A corpus-based study of thing as a function word in English and lo-nominalizations in Spanish [1]

Belén Labrador
University of León

Abstract

1. Introduction

This paper reports on a corpus-based study of two different structures in English and Spanish where an adjective is involved and emphasis is made on its abstract quality by means of two different delexicalized constructions, namely,  generic noun thing as a function word in English and abstract lo-nominalizers in Spanish. These two patterns can be compared on the basis of a perceived similarity in their semantic and pragmatic functions (Chesterman 1998: 1).

This research was prompted by the observation of a recurring mistake made by Spanish EFL students who produced ungrammatical expressions that lacked the head of the noun phrase (NP) in English in cases where the generic noun thing should have appeared, e.g. * “the amazing of this love story” instead of “the amazing thing about this love story”. Even in guided writing exercises, when required to produce a sentence beginning with: “I don’t think money...”, the most common response was: “I don’t think money is the most important in life” and other similar statements; very few of them actually wrote: “I don’t think money is the most important thing in life”. The fact that the word thing was missing in the examples can be attributed to negative transfer from their mother tongue, – students were translating literally from Spanish ‘lo asombroso’ [the amazing] or ‘lo más importante’ [the most important].

Similarly, but this time from English into Spanish, some unidiomatic or unnatural instances of the use of cosa as a function word were traced in some Spanish translations from English written by Spanish students, for example ‘la única cosa peor’ or ‘la peor cosa’, which are literal translations from English “the only worst thing” and “the worst thing” were used instead of ‘lo único peor’ and ‘lo peor’ which sound more native-like in Spanish. Translations were obviously influenced by the source language in these cases, which can be considered to be instances of translationese (Toury 1980, Gellerstam 1986), i.e. linguistic features that distinguish translated texts from texts written originally in a particular language.

Both structures exist in both languages but there seem to be some significant differences regarding their frequency and use. In Spanish there is number and gender distinction in articles and adjectives, and, in the case of the definite article, there is a three-fold distinction in gender, i.e. masculine, feminine and neuter, which enables neuter lo in abstract nominalizations. Due to this morphological versatility, lo-nominalizations are easily applicable to a great deal of adjectives. Nominalization of adjectives by means of the definite article is also grammatical in English, e.g., where articles and adjectives are invariable in number and gender, e.g. ‘the same’.

While we can find the pattern: article + adjective + generic thing or cosa as a function word in both English and Spanish, it is not as common a resource in Spanish, probably due to the economy principle (Martinet 1955). Some other cognates or assumed equivalents of thing as a function word in other languages do not seem to behave in a similar way either: In a contrastive study of the word thing between English and Norwegian, Stig Johansson found a “striking degree of non-correspondence in relation to its Norwegian cognate ting” (Johansson 2007: 78).

That said, our initial hypothesis, and the starting point of this study is that one of these two structures is more productive and frequent in one language while the other is more productive and frequent in the other language and that they fulfil similar semantic and pragmatic functions with similar rates of frequency and are similarly widespread in terms of the type of adjectives involved and the extent of their use. This corpus-based study will investigate enough data to support or refute this assumption and will hopefully shed some more light on the use of these expressions and other cross-linguistic equivalents.

2. Theoretical background

2.1 Lo-nominalization vs. standard nominalization

One of the structures that constitute the object of this study, an adjective as head of the NP preceded by the definite article (neuter in the case of Spanish) can be defined as one type of nominalization. A first distinction that can be made when addressing the concept of nominalization is between a) standard deadjectival lexical nominalization – deadjectival nouns, like ‘honestidad’ [honesty], which denote qualities, that is, abstract substances that can be quantified, and b) lo-nominalizations, like ‘lo honesto’ [‘the honest thing’], which express properties, a property being defined as the condition or state of being a certain way (see Levinson 1978 for a distinction between properties and qualities and Villalba 2009: 9 for the semantics of nominalizations). The former, standard deadjectival lexical nominalization, is actually the only type of nominalization usually considered in English grammars. Carter and McCarthy define nominalization as: “The process of using a noun phrase to express the meaning more typically associated with an item from another word class” (Carter and McCarthy 2006: 271) or “Nominalization involves forming a noun from other parts of speech, most commonly from verbs or adjectives” (Carter and McCarthy 2006: 911), e.g. from ‘bright’, ‘brightness’. One of the examples they give is: “I was dazzled by the extreme brightness of the lights” coming from “I was dazzled by the extremely bright lights” (Carter and McCarthy 2006: 333). Standard nominalization is also said to be one of the typical features of specialized languages (Ferguson 1995, Dudley-Evans and St. John 1998), which some authors consider a tendency to be avoided – for example, Billig, in the field of critical discourse analysis, warns of “the inherent dangers of passivization and nominalization – how such forms enable writers/ speakers to express less information than using active forms” (Billig 2008: 796–7).

However, in a broad sense, and from a contrastive perspective including both English and Spanish, nominalization includes these two different categories which could also be referred to as cases of a) derivation – a noun is derived from another part of speech, i.e. an adjective or a verb (‘honesty’ from ‘honest’) and cases of b) partial conversion – “where a word of one class appears in a function which is characteristic of another word class” (Quirk et al. 1985: 1559). The term conversion can be used only loosely here in the sense that it is as if there was a change of word class of the adjective (but only in certain co-texts – preceded by neuter lo), without changing the physical form of the word. Strictly speaking, there is no real change of word class, as this nominalization of the adjective only takes place under this particular circumstance of co-occurrence with the neuter definite article, i.e. it is an adjective being used as the head of the NP. Or, as Huddleston and Pullum put it: “Conversion of an adjective into a noun is to be distinguished from the use of an adjective as a fused modifier-head, as in Is it the new version or the old? Or The tax will disadvantage the poor” (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 1642). As examples of true conversion they give “comic” (person/ periodical) and “regular” (soldier/ customer) among others.

The first of these two types of nominalization, standard deadjectival lexical nominalization, lies outside the scope of this study. Our contrastive concern has to do with lo-nominalizations or cases of partial conversion of an adjective acting as the head of an NP and preceded by the definite article.

2.2 From nominal ellipsis to nominalization

Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 415–418) call this second type of nominalization “Fusion of internal modifier and head” and among the cases they describe are superlatives, e.g. “I went up that skyscraper in Boston but the tallest is in Chicago”, ordinals e.g. “the first student wanted to take linguistics but the second didn’t”, adjectives denoting colour, provenance, composition, age and size, for instance, “Knut wanted the French caterers but I wanted the Italian”, and modifier-heads with special interpretations where they distinguish two types – a first subtype denoting categories of human being, characteristically used generically, the French or the Dutch and a second subtype with an abstract rather than a concrete interpretation in examples like “This is verging on the immoral”, “we are going to attempt the utterly impossible”.

Drawing on Huddleston and Pullum (2002) and some other linguists (Losada 1996, Leonetti 1999), we can split nominalization with a definite article into several categories, namely a) anaphoric, b) generic, c) abstract and d) full.

Anaphoric nominalization or “individualizing nominalization” (Losada 1996: 124) is actually ellipsis in Spanish but usually corresponds to substitution in English. It is context-dependent in the sense that the elided nouns have been previously mentioned or they are known to both speaker and hearer; they are implicit and are easily recoverable from the context, as in example 1 (Losada 1996: 124). The adjective and the article in Spanish agree in gender and number with this elided noun whereas English prefers the use of one/s or possessive expressions to avoid repetition of the noun.

The second type, generic nominalization, comprises a limited range of adjectives that allude to a quality that characterizes a group of people, as in example 2 (Losada 1996: 119) and the definite article and adjective carry number and gender information in Spanish. The NPs refer to some people in a generic way; they do not refer to a particular antecedent anaphorically and the adjective is still in a process of nominalization, as it keeps its original properties (Leonetti 1999: 820).

Abstract lo-nominalization refers to cases of fusion of the internal modifier, the adjective, and the head, the noun and it alludes to an indefinite thing or group of things which has/ have a particular characteristic, as in example 3 (Losada 1996: 123).

And finally, by full nominalization I refer to those cases where there is no fusion of head with modifier, but the head (the noun) derives from an adjective, i.e. cases of full conversion, like the following deadjectival nouns, both in Spanish: e.g. sabio [wise man], diario [daily newspaper], científico [scientist], político [politician], técnico [technician] and in English: e.g. a chemical, an intellectual, a comic, a regular.

From a contrastive perspective, some problems arise when translating some of these deadjectival nouns from English into Spanish and vice versa, in those cases where nominalization has taken place in one language but not in the other. Therefore there is a one-to-many correspondence: either convergence (several words in L1 are equivalent to one word in L2), e.g. derecho (noun)  and correcto (adjective) > right (noun or adjective); ayuno (noun) and rápido (adjective) > fast (noun or adjective) or divergence (several words in L2 are equivalent to one word in L1), e.g. scientist (noun) and scientific (adjective) > científico (noun or adjective); politician (noun) and political (adjective) > politico (noun or adjective).

If we consider these four categories along a cline ranging from the least delexicalized noun and the least nominalized adjective to the most delexicalized noun and the most nominalized adjective, we can see increasing nominalization of a narrow range of adjectives from a mere nominal ellipsis of almost any adjective. In anaphoric nominalizations, the specific noun which has been omitted is easily recoverable from the nearby co-text, as it has been previously mentioned and there is a wide range of adjectives that can be used as the head of the NP; in generic nominalizations, the collective noun omitted is recoverable from the expression itself in the sense that it usually refers to ‘people’ or a similar collective noun and the number of adjectives that can be nominalised are more limited; in abstract lo-nominalization a ‘dummy’ noun is omitted – a more delexicalized noun such as ‘thing’ used as a functional word and only certain adjectives can be used and finally, a handful of restricted adjectives can be fully nominalised; they are the only true cases where the adjective has become a noun. There is nominalization rather than nominal ellipsis.

In this paper the focus is on the third type (i.e. third circle in Figure 1) – abstract lo-nominalizations, where there is no morphological variation in Spanish as only the specialized nominalizer neuter ‘lo’ article occurs along with a singular neuter adjective.

3. Object of study

As has been seen so far, because of the nature of the English adjective and its inability “to behave inflectionally like a noun (that is, to vary in terms of number and case)” (Quirk et al. 1985: 1559) any discussion about nominalization in English compared to Spanish is not going to be that straightforward. What is clear is that it is inaccurate, in either language, to classify all instances of nominal ellipsis as nominalization (Leonetti 1999: 819). Similarly, Valera (2004) states that the term ‘conversion’ is loosely (and inexactly) used in cases where there is not full conversion and ends his paper by pointing out that:

“If, after reviewing these processes, we still prefer to group all these operations under the category conversion, it seems that it will be for practical convenience rather than for theoretical coherence” (Valera 2004: 33).

However, and after acknowledging this fact, I think that the term ‘nominalization’ can indeed be used in a broad sense for the sake of clarity and practical convenience, as it is a widely used term, even though, strictly speaking, it may not be the most precise.

The object of this study is the interlinguistic relationship between two nominal patterns that have two main semantic features in common: a delexicalized noun (either explicit or implicit) and an adjective profiling an abstract quality. In the case of the NP with an implicit/ elided noun, I will refer to it as ‘nominalization’ in this paper.

3.1 Lo + adjective

The Spanish pattern of interest in this study is the lo-nominalization, that is, a nominalized adjective preceded by neuter article lo and not the other morphological variants (masculine and feminine, both singular and plural, i.e. el, la, los, las), which can also take part in nominalizations.

Lo-nominalizations have been described as involving three different interpretations (Bosque and Moreno 1990: 20–21, Leonetti 1999: 832–833): ‘partial’, ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’. Drawing on these authors, the following classification can be made:

A) Partial or referential nominalization: it denotes a part or aspect of a particular thing, although the whole thing may be implicit, and the adjective remains invariable in form (it does not agree with the noun in gender or number), as in example 4:

B) Qualitative or emphatic nominalization: it has to do with a superlative quality or property. In this case, the adjective agrees with the noun morphologically, not with the neuter definite article, as in example 5:

C) Quantitative nominalization: reference is made here to a certain quantity and the adjective remains invariable, as in example 6:

As the translations illustrate: the first refers to a part of the subject which can be characterized by the property denoted by the adjective; the second involves degree over the scale denoted by the adjective predicated of the subject; the third implies some quantity in relation to the predicate.

The research reported upon here is limited to partial or referential abstract lo-nominalization as this was the basis for the mistakes in EFL learners’ production which prompted the study.

3.2 Generic noun thing

The second pattern studied here in relation to referential abstract lo-nominalization is the English generic word thing, (preceded by a definite article and an adjective), which acts as a ‘dummy’, functional or “shell noun”, (Johansson 2007: 78) simply occupying the slot of the head of the NP, i.e. having only a syntactic function and void of semantic function. Actually, thing, which is a noun (thus a member of an open class of words) is extremely flexible and versatile in its uses and is said to be more a function word than a content word (Fronek 1982). 

To a certain extent, and with a certain frequency, these two different constructions from two different languages seem to converge in their semantic and pragmatic functions, which is why they can be thought of as assumed equivalents.

4. Methodology

This is a corpus-based study which draws on data extracted from 3 different corpora. Two of them are monolingual, Cobuild’s Bank of English (BoE) and CREA, the Spanish corpus by the Spanish Royal Academy. The third one is a translation corpus, composed of original English texts and their corresponding translations into Spanish. It is called P-ACTRES (for more information see Izquierdo et al. 2008). P-ACTRES amounts to almost 2.5 million words, but only the subcorpora including books, both fiction and non-fiction, have been used, which amounts to approximately 2 million words, one in each language.

These corpora have been used at different stages in the analysis, to find a sample of either “the + adjective + thing” in English or ‘lo + adjective’ in Spanish.

The first step consisted of searching for all the occurrences of ‘the + adjective + thing’, and their corresponding translations into Spanish in P-ACTRES. BoE was also searched for this pattern in order to validate the sample obtained in P-ACTRES.

The next step was to select a sample of ‘lo + adjective’. First a list of the 1,000 most frequent words in CREA was extracted. Then the adjectives from that list were selected. Some past participles that function as adjectives were included and some adjectives such as plural adjectives, feminine adjectives and quantifiers were excluded because their combination with ‘lo’, though possible, does not lead to partial or referential nominalization but to another type of nominalization beyond the scope of this study. The following stage involved using these adjectives, preceded by the definite article ‘lo’ as the input of queries both in CREA and P-ACTRES. Finally, the source chunks that had been translated as each combination of ‘lo + adjective’ were recorded.

5. Analysis

5.1 The + adj + thing

In the first stage of the analysis, 24 different adjectives were found to participate in the construction ‘the + adjective + thing’ in P-ACTRES in a total of 104 occurrences. It is true that a larger number was found in the selected subcorpus of BoE (UK, 2000–2005, all domains, Books), which is to be expected due to the difference in size. For the purpose of this study, those combinations which did not reach a minimum of 4 occurrences in BoE were left aside; out of a total of 2,073 combinations only 36 of them remained (‘the key thing’ and ‘the fourth thing’ have been included in Table 1 simply to show that they were also present in P-ACTRES, they are not included in the total count).

As illustrated in Table 1:

• None of the most frequent combinations in BoE is missing in P-ACTRES and vice versa – all combinations in P-ACTRES except one (‘the stupid thing’) occur in the selected subcorpus of BoE.
• The position of the combinations in terms of frequency is quite similar – the top three are exactly the same and the order remains quite similar for the other collocations down the scale.
• If we look at the nature of the adjectives, some regularities can be observed: six of them are superlatives –  best, worst, strangest, slightest, closest, easiest; one has a comparative meaning – same, four of them are ordinals – first, fourth, next, last; 2 have a quantitative meaning – whole, only; six have a qualitative meaning – right, wrong, odd, great, key, real, funny.
• The number of hits indicates that there are eight common combinations, with more than four occurrences in P-ACTRES and over a hundred in the Bank of English, and a larger number of less frequent combinations and even a series of hapax legomena.
• The similarities found across the two corpora, both in the collocations themselves and in their order in terms of frequency, serves to confirm the reliability of the sample from P-ACTRES.

Following validation of the sample from P-ACTRES, the next stage involved observing the ways these 104 occurrences of ‘the + adj + thing’ had been translated in P-ACTRES. Sometimes only one translational option was used – a prototypical example being ‘the best thing’, always rendered as ‘lo mejor’ (literally ‘the best’). In some other cases, a wider range of translational options were used, for example the translations of ‘the only thing’ include four different solutions (‘la única cosa’ [the only thing], ‘lo único’ [the only], a specific noun as head of the NP and modulation).

As illustrated in Figure 2, the analysis of translations shows that in almost 50% of the cases, all these combinations were translated into Spanish as ‘lo + adjective’, as in example 7.

Other Spanish resources used as translations included:

Definite article + adjective + a specific noun as head, instead of a generic noun like ‘thing’ or ‘cosa’, as in example 8. The high percentage of this translational option may be due to the general tendency to make things more explicit in translation – the universal feature of translation known as ‘explicitation’, first defined by Vinay and Darbelnet as the process of introducing information into the target language which is present only implicitly in the source language, but which can be derived from the context or the situation (Vinay and Darbelnet 1958: 8).

Modulation, “a shift in point of view, focus or cognitive category in relation to the ST” (Molina and Hurtado Albir 2002), as in example 9.

In terms of frequency, after modulation comes transposition, which “consists of replacing one class of words by another without changing the meaning of the message“ in words of Vinay and Darbelnet (1995: 94). Here are included cases of transposition into PPs; actually all of them are instances of the Spanish expression ‘de verdad’ (literally ‘of truth’) and they are all translations from ‘the real thing’, as in example 10. And also ‘la cosita’ as a translation of “the little thing”, where a suffix in Spanish, the diminutive –ita carries the meaning of the English adjective.

Interestingly, the literal translation of the pattern ‘the + adj + thing’ in Spanish is rare: Only 9 instances of ‘la + adj. + cosa’ were found in P-ACTRES – 7 instances of ‘la única cosa’, as in example 11 and 2 of ‘la misma cosa’.

Finally, some cases of omission were found, where the pattern ‘the + adj. + thing’ in English has not been translated into Spanish, as illustrated in example 12. In these cases, it is not because of lack of quality in the translation but due to the fact that the expression does not really add any necessary meaning to the text and, curiously enough, its omission results in more idiomaticity than a forced translation would. 

5.2. Lo + adj

The concentric circles in Figure 3 represent the sample selected out of the large monolingual Spanish corpus, CREA. By manually observing the list of the 1,000 most frequent words in Spanish, all the adjectives (some of them past participles in form) that could possibly take part in the pattern ‘lo + adj’ were selected. Deverbal adjectives like ‘visto’, ‘dicho’ or ‘debido’ were included as well. These forms can be used in verbal phrases, e.g. ‘he visto’ but they also take on adjectival functions in contexts where they fill a slot usually occupied by an adjective. In this sense, ‘lo visto’ [the seen] has the meaning of ‘la cosa vista’ [“the thing seen” = what was/ has been seen] in the same way as ‘lo mejor’ [the best] has the meaning of ‘la cosa mejor’ [the best thing].

On the other hand, a number of adjectives were discarded because their use in this pattern did not result in partial or referential nominalization but in qualitative or in quantitative nominalization (see section 3.1). All feminine or plural adjectives as well as quantifiers were rejected for this reason (e.g. buena, pocos, bastante).

Following this selection of the most frequent adjectives that express partial or referential nominalization when used in combination with ‘lo’, the resulting collocations (‘lo’ + each of these selected adjectives) were used as input for search queries in P-ACTRES.

Collocations with a minimum of 4 occurrences in CREA have been included. As can be seen in Table 2, the most frequent collocation in CREA is also the most frequent collocation in P-ACTRES: lo mismo [the same].

In general, there is a great deal of overlap in the type of collocations, although not as much in their position by frequency; however, those that do not occur in P-ACTRES are among the least frequent combinations in CREA. This is not surprising, as more frequent words are more likely to occur in a smaller corpus than less frequent words. There are, however, two significant exceptions – ‘lo general’ (6^th in CREA) and ‘lo real’ (19^th in CREA), which seem to be avoided by translators in Spanish, maybe because they favour other translational options to the detriment of these resources, typical in Spanish.

The fact that there is not less overlap in the order of the same collocations across corpora in Table 2 as compared with Table 1 can be explained at least with reference to a basic difference in the two comparisons – in English we were comparing original language (BoE) with original language (P-ACTRES) and in Spanish we are comparing original language (CREA) with translated language (P-ACTRES). Nevertheless, both in P-ACTRES and in CREA, the five most frequent collocations are the same in the two columns.

The next step was to trace the source in original English of each instance of target ‘lo + adj’ in translated Spanish. A wide range of sources was found: ‘the + adj + thing’ is situated around the middle of the scale, with a percentage of 8.85% of the occurrences; ‘the + adj’ is even more frequent (especially due to the high frequency of occurrences of ‘the same’) and ‘the + a specific noun’ usually preceded by an adjective, etc., but the most common source of all was adverbials, as can be seen in Figure 4. Examples 13 to 24 illustrate this range of resources.

6. Conclusions

A series of conclusions can be drawn from this analysis offering insights  in different fields:

As for the type and degree of the relationship between ‘the + adj + thing’ and ‘lo + adj’, we can conclude that they are certainly comparable to some extent: Both structures share a common function, as evidenced through translation as a tertium comparationis, but they also differ in their form, lexical constitution and frequency, which is of interest to Contrastive Analysis:

• First, the empirical data supports our intuition based on the grammatical restrictions of each language: one of the structures is certainly more frequent and productive in English (‘the + adj. + thing’) and the other in Spanish (‘lo + adj.’).
• This bidirectional analysis has also revealed an asymmetric relationship between the two structures studied, in the sense that 46% of the cases ‘the + adj + thing’ is translated into Spanish as ‘lo + adj’, which means that they are quite similar from a semantic and pragmatic point of view (i.e. fully equivalent in almost half the cases), whereas a scarce 9% of ‘lo + adj’ in translated Spanish comes from ‘the + adj + thing’, which suggests that ‘lo + adj’ is a highly productive and multifunctional structure; ‘the + adj + thing’ is a  less frequent pattern, with fewer different functions and its range of adjectives is narrower.

As for the adjectives involved in the patterns, there are a few prototypical adjectives (the same thing, the whole thing, the only thing, the right thing, the last thing, the real thing, lo mismo, lo mejor, lo contrario, lo único, lo cierto, lo general) and a lot of peripheral adjectives in terms of frequency. Among the most frequent adjectives in both patterns are: same, only, first, best and worst. This is important in the teaching of both English and Spanish as foreign languages, especially in lexical syllabi, as they give preference to the teaching of the most frequent lexical items and phrases.

As for the translational options most commonly used, they have been found to depend on the pattern (e.g. in almost 50% of the times ‘the + adj. + thing’ is translated into Spanish as ‘lo + adj’.) but also on the adjective  –  ‘the best thing’ has always been rendered as ‘lo mejor’ (literally ‘the best’) in the sample studied; however, ‘the real thing’ usually becomes ‘de verdad’ (literally ‘of truth’) in Spanish. Providing translation students with guidelines and an inventory of idiomatic translations of these combinations would be useful for them.

Finally, there are two frequent expressions in original Spanish, ‘lo general’ and ‘lo real’, which have not been found in translated Spanish; for some reason or other, translators fail to use two common collocations, thus not fully exploiting the range of possibilities that exist in the target language – a lack of variety and a more homogeneous and uniform type of language can be an indicator of the ‘simplification hypothesis’ (see Rabadán et al. 2009 for a study of this indicator of simplification and Baker 1993 and Laviosa 1996 for the simplification hypothesis and other indicators). This can be further explored in the area of translation quality assessment as these two collocations are plausible candidates as anchor phenomena (defined by Rabadán as: “grammatical resources that are perceived as being cross-linguistically equivalent but that tend to convey partially divergent meanings”, Rabadán 2008: 107).  Overuse or underuse of a certain element or structure in translations as compared with original language shows deviance from the general tendency, i.e. less idiomaticity and poorer quality. The general idea is that the more a certain translation resembles non-translated, original Spanish in the use of anchor phenomena, the higher it will rate for quality. Further research needs to be carried out based on these findings to account for the absence in translated texts of these two frequent collocations in original Spanish text.

A final conclusion is that exploring error-prone contrastive problems by means of parallel and comparable corpora can shed some light on the way in which certain functions are naturally expressed in two different languages and how they are translated from one into another. Insights such as these are certainly helpful in foreign language teaching and translation training.

Sources

Collins Wordbanks Online: https://wordbanks.harpercollins.co.uk.

CREA: http://corpus.rae.es/creanet.html.

P-ACTRES: http://actres.unileon.es/.

Notes

[1] Research for this paper has been funded by the regional government of Castilla y León, Spain [LE025A09] and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology [FFI2009-08548].

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