Countries of the United Kingdom

The United Kingdom (UK) comprises four countries: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Within the United Kingdom, a unitary sovereign state, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales have gained a degree of autonomy through the process of devolution. The UK Parliament and British Government deal with all reserved matters for Northern Ireland and Scotland and all non-transferred matters for Wales, but not in general matters that have been devolved to the Northern Ireland Assembly, Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales. Additionally, devolution in Northern Ireland is conditional on co-operation between the Northern Ireland Executive and the Government of Ireland (see North/South Ministerial Council) and the British Government consults with the Government of Ireland to reach agreement on some non-devolved matters for Northern Ireland (see British–Irish Intergovernmental Conference). England, comprising the majority of the population and area of the United Kingdom, remains fully the responsibility of the UK Parliament centralised in London.

Country radio

Country radio refers to radio stations that play country music. Most country radio stations are commercial radio stations, with some exceptions which are public radio stations. Most country radio stations usually play only music which has been officially released to country radio by record labels. The largest owners of country music stations in the United States include iHeartMedia, Cumulus Media, CBS Radio, and Townsquare Media. There are more radio stations in the United States specializing in country music (about 2,100 stations) than any other format, out of a total of about 15,000 radio stations in the US. Country radio stations are very influential in the country music industry, compared to other genres of music.

References

Hastings Line

The Hastings Line is a secondary railway line in Kent and East Sussex, England, linking Hastings with the main town of Tunbridge Wells, and from there into London via Tonbridge and Sevenoaks. Although primarily carrying passengers, the railway serves a gypsum mine which is a source of freight traffic. Southeastern operates passenger trains on the line.

The railway was constructed by the South Eastern Railway in the early 1850s across the difficult terrain of the High Weald. Supervision of the building of the line was lax, enabling contractors to skimp on the lining of the tunnels. These deficiencies showed up after the railway had opened. Rectifications led to a restricted loading gauge along the line, requiring the use of dedicated rolling stock.

Served by steam locomotives from opening until the late 1950s, passenger services were then taken over by a fleet of diesel-electric multiple units built to the line's loading gauge. Diesel locomotives handled freight, also built to fit the loading gauge. The diesel-electric multiple units served on the line until 1986, when the line was electrified and the most severely affected tunnels were reduced from double track to single.

Formal language

In mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language is a set of strings of symbols that may be constrained by rules that are specific to it.

The alphabet of a formal language is the set of symbols, letters, or tokens from which the strings of the language may be formed; frequently it is required to be finite. The strings formed from this alphabet are called words, and the words that belong to a particular formal language are sometimes called well-formed words or well-formed formulas. A formal language is often defined by means of a formal grammar such as a regular grammar or context-free grammar, also called its formation rule.

The field of formal language theory studies primarily the purely syntactical aspects of such languages—that is, their internal structural patterns. Formal language theory sprang out of linguistics, as a way of understanding the syntactic regularities of natural languages. In computer science, formal languages are used among others as the basis for defining the grammar of programming languages and formalized versions of subsets of natural languages in which the words of the language represent concepts that are associated with particular meanings or semantics. In computational complexity theory, decision problems are typically defined as formal languages, and complexity classes are defined as the sets of the formal languages that can be parsed by machines with limited computational power. In logic and the foundations of mathematics, formal languages are used to represent the syntax of axiomatic systems, and mathematical formalism is the philosophy that all of mathematics can be reduced to the syntactic manipulation of formal languages in this way.

Language (disambiguation)

Language is the human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, and a language is any specific example of such a system.

Language may also refer to:

Publishing

Music

Other uses

See also

Language (journal)

Language is a peer-reviewed quarterly academic journal published by the Linguistic Society of America since 1925. It covers all aspects of linguistics, focusing on the area of theoretical linguistics. Its current editor-in-chief is Gregory Carlson (University of Rochester).

Under the editorship of Yale linguist Bernard Bloch, Language was the vehicle for publication of many of the important articles of American structural linguistics during the second quarter of the 20th century, and was the journal in which many of the most important subsequent developments in linguistics played themselves out.

One of the most famous articles to appear in Language was the scathing 1959 review by the young Noam Chomsky of the book Verbal Behavior by the behaviorist cognitive psychologist B. F. Skinner. This article argued that Behaviorist psychology, then a dominant paradigm in linguistics (as in psychology at large), had no hope of explaining complex phenomena like language. It followed by two years another book review that is almost as famous—the glowingly positive assessment of Chomsky's own 1957 book Syntactic Structures by Robert B. Lees that put Chomsky and his generative grammar on the intellectual map as the successor to American structuralism.