VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Topics in the syntax of Qur'ānic Arabic

Many features of Qurʾānic Arabic do not fit within the grammar of Classical Arabic as described by medieval grammarians. This calls for a specialised grammar of Qurʾānic Arabic, which should be composed based on a descriptive investigation of the Qurʾān as a self-contained corpus. Studies have lately been conducted on some aspects of the phonology, morphology and syntax of the language of the Qurʾān; however, the work – particularly in syntax – is far from complete. The present thesis seeks to contribute to the recent research of the grammar of Qurʾānic Arabic, especially its syntax. Each part systematically describes the linguistic feature around which it revolves. Emphasis is put on aspects that are unique to the Qurʾān, some of which have hitherto been unexplored in research, as opposed to extra-Qurʾānic Arabic.
The first part explores the semantics and grammatical function of the word nafs in the Qurʾān. After identifying its two core meanings, “person” and “soul”, and the semantic fields related to them in the Qurʾān, the part focuses on nafs as a grammatical element. It shows that nafs expresses individual reflexivity (e.g., “yourself”) and that ʾanfus mostly expresses individual or collective reflexivity (e.g., “yourselves”) and in certain verses may express reciprocity (“each other”). It is also maintained that nafs may optionally be used when a pronoun is expected (e.g., ʾiḏ baʿaṯa fīhim rasūlan min ʾanfusihim vs wa-bʿaṯ fīhim rasūlan minhum).
The second part provides a detailed analysis of the restrictive, exceptive and adversative usages of the particle ʾillā. Each of these usages is further put in a broader linguistic perspective. Noteworthy case studies are further discussed, as well as the treatment of ʾillā in traditional grammatical thought, especially developments reflected by the differences between Sībawayhi’s al-Kitāb and post-Sībawayhi grammatical works.
Although each topic requires a distinctive treatment according to its own criteria of analysis, all linguistic investigations above share a common methodological approach. A crucial part of this method is the awareness of intra-Qurʾānic parallels, which ought to be integral to all research on Qurʾānic Arabic. No less important should be consulting pre-modern Qurʾān commentaries and other classical and modern Islamic works on Qurʾānic Arabic and pre-Islamic material.

Keywords: Arabic linguistics
Qur'an
Qur'anic Arabic grammar
Qur'anic Arabic
Arabic grammar
syntax
Arabic grammatical tradition
intra-Qur'anic parallels
Arabic
Islam
Advisor: Sinai, N
Essays in international trade and economic geography

This thesis studies how the spatial distribution of economic activity matters for the transmission of, and is in turn affected by different shocks.
In Chapter 2, I show that the agglomeration-congestion cost trade-off studied by urban economists alters both the distributional effects of, and gains from trade. Correspondingly, I demonstrate that openness to trade affects the spatial distribution of economic activity across cities of different densities. First, I show that the export intensity of firms and sectors is higher in denser locations. I propose an open economy economic geography model that rationalizes these stylized facts. When testing the underlying mechanisms proposed by the model, I find that the higher export intensity in denser places is driven by differences in productivity across firms, differences in factor intensities across sectors and trade-specific gains from agglomeration that lead to lower variable export cost in denser places. In line with the model predictions, I further find that a decrease in trade cost, proxied by exogenous changes in export market access, leads to a reallocation of economic activity to denser places. In currently on-going work I am exploring whether ignoring the increase in aggregate congestion costs from the rise in spatial concentration leads to an overestimation of the gains from trade.
In Chapter 3 I study how an exogenous population shock affects the spatial distribution of population. To this end I exploit the end of movement restrictions for black South Africans at the end of Apartheid to generate an exogenous population shock. Until 1991, black South Africans were severely restricted in their location choices and many were forced to live in homelands. Following the abolition of apartheid, they were free to migrate. Given the general gravity structure of migration, a town closer to the homelands is expected to receive a larger inflow of migrants than towns further away. Using this exogenous variation, I find that on average there is no endogenous reallocation of population following this exogenous immigration. When separately looking at rural and urban places, I find that there is a displacement of incumbents in the former while there are additional inflows in urban areas.
Chapter 4 provides evidence for the importance of trading opportunities for settlement location during the Iron Age. It finds that regions in the Mediterranean that are better connected across the open sea have more economic activity proxied by the number of archaeological sites. This correlation becomes particularly strong around 750 BC when the Phoenicians started to regularly cross the open sea. Analysis at the global level corroborates the finding that more connected locations have a higher population density in 1 AD. Overall, I find that trade and migration shocks have important effects on the long-run distribution of population and economic activity in space.

Advisor: Rauch, F
Venables, A
Varieties of onset: onset and conflict dynamics in civil war

How do civil wars begin? And does the type of onset impact how conflicts unfold? While the study of why civil wars start has been a central focus in the literature on civil war, the study of how civil wars start has received limited attention so far. In this thesis, I contribute to this scholarship with a novel conceptualisation of civil war onset as a varied political event. I argue that different types of onset represent different forms of political challenge to state sovereignty and, as such, set countries in distinct conflict trajectories.
Theoretically, I propose a novel typology to account for the variation across onsets. I identify four ideal-typical forms of civil war onset: peripheral challenge, state disintegration, coup, and insurrectionary protests. I then build on this original typology and develop a path-dependent explanation for several macro-level wartime dynamics, including warfare, intensity, and conflict duration, that originate in the form of onset. In that sense, the types of civil war onset reflect different initial conditions that set conflicts onto patterned trajectories. Given how civil wars begin, I expect that some conflicts will be more likely to be fought through symmetric modes of warfare, some will be more severe, or last longer than others.
Empirically, I build a novel dataset of civil war, DatOnset, that accounts for the variation in the form of onset in all civil wars between 1944 and 2020, and validate the proposed classification through an extensive expert survey. Next, I use the typology of civil war onset empirically in two complementary ways. First, I replicate several landmark studies of the causes of civil war and provide evidence that the correlates of onset that we know about are clustered by types of onset. Second, to test my theory of civil war trajectories, I conduct cross- national regression analysis using the typology of onset as the main independent variable. I find clear empirical patterns in how civil wars unfold, which originate in the form of conflict onset. Lastly, I complement the cross-national findings with original archival material from Burundi’s civil war (1993-2006) to describe in depth the dynamics at play during onset in the form of state disintegration. I demonstrate that state disintegration onsets occur in highly fragmented political landscapes, paired with weak institutions, and the existence of private militias mobilised by political elites.
Overall, the thesis makes several important contributions. Among these, distinguishing between civil wars based on the type of onset provides clear scope conditions and insightful case selection strategies, which is essential for robust comparative analyses of civil wars.

Keywords: onset
civil war
typology
conflict
rebellion
Drought tolerance and its evolution in conifers including UK commercial species

This work seeks to contribute to our understanding of conifer tree responses to drought. Research in this field has historically privileged the study of the changing anatomy, physiology, and metabolism of trees under adverse environmental conditions. The main reason for this lies in the size and complexity of conifer genomes, which posed limitations to genetic studies in this important plant group. Recently, fast-evolving sequencing technologies have unlocked conifer “mega-genomes” and made a considerable number of genetic resources available for researchers. Here, we investigate the genetic mechanisms governing the responses to soil water deficit of diverse conifer species, that are relevant to the UK forestry market but are faced with human-made climate change. We explored how dynamic expression of key genes involved in abscisic acid (ABA) biosynthesis and catabolism may relate to the isohydry paradigm. Several frameworks have been proposed, that include a range of traits and definitions to explain diverging water regulation responses falling along the isohydric spectrum. We developed new evidence for the role of selected candidate genes, in particular 9-cis-epoxycarotenoid dioxygenases (NCEDs), based on their expression in conifer species with contrasting responses. These may be the master regulators of contrasting ABA accumulation profiles in conifer foliage. We also characterised genes encoding putative NCEDs in detail, comparing three key conifer species and model angiosperms, through in silico analyses, and produced a recombinant protein from P. sitchensis (PsNCED1) to enable functional characterisation in vitro. We found a high degree of 1D-3D sequence conservation, indicating that conifers may have evolved a rate limiting step for ABA biosynthesis. This information forms a basis for new gene functional studies on conifers, which is important in the context of newly developing forest management programs. Finally, we studied P. sitchensis and its natural hybrid with P. glauca, P. lutzii. P. sitchensis is widely exploited in the UK timber market and represents a large portion of planted forests. We selected an array of cultivars, including hybrids, and tested their phenotypic variability in relation to drought stress. Although similarly conservative, cultivars deployed variable drought responses that differed in their use of water. Exploring drought adaptability by use of hybrids is one approach for developing resilient forests, which will be of interest to tree breeders looking for alternative planting materials. We believe that this work will contribute to bridge the gap between phenotypic and genomic studies in conifers and will help establish better breeding practices.

Keywords: forestry
gene expression
conifer
abscisic acid
isohydry
drought
Deep learning for industrial applications

Improvement of industrial quality control processes is paramount to support the ever-growing world population. A key part of this process has traditionally relied on classical vision techniques. With the recent success of deep learning in many areas of vision, it is envisioned that its application to this process may bring about significant improvements. The aim of this thesis is to develop and validate how a deep learning based solution may be incorporated into this process.
To this end, we considered how a deep learning solution can be integrated into a widely-used process architecture, and specified a system design that we implemented and validated in the lab.
We then identified data labelling to be a potential bottleneck in extending the solution to other applications, which led us to develop few-shot methods to address this. First, we introduced a method for interpolating batch normalization parameters across class-specialized networks for few-shot image classification. This significantly reduces overfitting compared to fine-tuning and allows for efficient adaptation, which we benchmark against CIFAR10 and ImageNet32. Second, we proposed a cosine-similarity-based method for online few-shot detection. Cosine similarity is used to produce detection scores of unseen exemplars against test candidates without retraining the network. We demonstrate this on the few-shot variant of ImageNet and VOC.

Advisor: Prisacariu, V
Miracles in medieval Chinese Buddhism: an analysis of Daoxuan's Ji shenzhou sanbao lu 集神州三寶感通錄 (Collected Record of Miracles Relating to the Three Jewels in China)

Daoxuan 道宣 (596–667CE) was an influential religious and political figure in early Tang dynasty (618–907) Buddhism. He is best known for his exegetical work in the monastic codes (Skt. Vinaya; Ch. lü 律), primarily through his seminal commentaries on Dharmaguptaka Vinaya (Ch. sifen lü 四分律 ) texts. Daoxuan did not, however, only work with the monastic codes. He was also a dedicated Buddhist apologist, a scrupulous cataloguer, and a prolific compiler of biographies as well as Buddhist miracle tales. Later in his life, Daoxuan had many experiences of the miraculous—events that would have informed many of his texts. The scholarly literature on Daoxuan has traditionally explored his influence on the monastic codes in China, often ignoring those recorded miraculous events in his life that might have influenced him. This thesis asks the question: what can we say about Daoxuan’s own experience of religious life in China, or of his own religiosity? More broadly, this thesis also asks the question: how did the medieval Chinese cultural context affect Daoxuan’s opinions and writing?
The following study endeavours to answer these questions through close analysis of Daoxuan’s compilation of miracle tales, the Ji shenzhou sanbao gantong lu 集神州三寶感通錄 (Collected Record of Miracles Relating to the Three Jewels in China; hereafter Record of Miracles) completed in 664, as well as other related sources. By studying the Record of Miracles, this thesis will delve into how Daoxuan’s interest in the supernormal influenced his work, and from there will extrapolate more far-reaching conclusions regarding the medieval Chinese Buddhist context. Special attention will be directed at Buddhist material culture, namely miraculous objects such as relics and images as well as sacred places such as monasteries and pagodas.

Keywords: Daoxuan
Chinese Buddhism
Miracle tales
miracles
Advisor: Kieschnick, J
ter Haar, B
Computational aspects of modular forms and p-adic triple symbol

In this thesis we study a p-adic symbol for triples of modular forms which was proposed to the author by Henri Darmon. Our main achievements are as follows. We prove the various symmetry properties of this p-adic triple product. We develop and successfully implement an efficient algorithm for calculating it; in the case in which all the forms have weight greater than two we require an auxiliary non-vanishing hypothesis. And we illustrate the application of our algorithm with numerous examples. A curious consequence of our work, relating to our non-vanishing hypothesis, is an efficient method to calculate certain Poincare pairings in higher weight.
Our symbol is intimately related to p-adic L-functions for triples of modular forms. However, we do not study at all continuity properties of our p-adic triple symbol. Indeed, any well-behaved variation of our symbol in the first variable is likely to be extremely subtle to study, and there may well be no way at all of making sense of this.

Keywords: p-adic Abel-Jacobi map
slope projection
ordinary projection
p-adic triple symbol
nearly overconvergent projection
Poincaré pairing
Advisor: Lauder, A
Agenda, Einfluss, Reichweiten: Buchdruck und Frömmigkeit in Lübeck um 1500

Gutenberg’s invention of printing with movable type was an innovation in many respects. However, its impact, particularly in the early years, has not been comprehensively investigated. Hardly any example is better suited to answer this question than Lübeck early print production. In 1474 Lübeck, as the economic and cultural centre of the Hanseatic region, became the first printing city in northern Germany. Its production is characterised by an exceptionally high proportion of religious writing and an equally high proportion of literature in the Middle Low German vernacular. These works were aimed at a steadily expanding audience, especially a pious lay public, which at that time was increasingly striving for religious participation. Based on Lübeck, its print production and current discourses on religious practice, this study addresses two questions: the interaction between printed text and its context, as well as the role the printers played in this relationship.
Using five representative literary examples, the author first identifies the printers’ self-formulated agenda and examines their scope for action, then traces the reciprocal influence of printed literature and current trends in religious practice - namely the rosary and Mary's compassion -, and concludes by asking about the geographical and social reaches of early printed literature. Her holistic approach, including all levels of the printed book from the text to the edition to the individual copy, allows for a meticulous tracing of the interactions between early print production and contemporary developments at the intersection of materiality and mediality. With its combined historical-literary approach the thesis not only offers a contribution to Middle Low German literary history and a new perspective on the Hanseatic region as a cultural network, but reveals the impact of early printing with the printers as agents on the threshold between the Middle Ages and Early Modern times.

Keywords: St Bridget
media history
early print
passion of Christ
incunabula
Northern Germany
agency
printers
compassion of Mary
rosary
Middle Low German
Lübeck
Hanse
religious practice
materiality
Advisor: Lähnemann, H
Braganza: a failed domestic transplant?

In Braganza v BP Shipping, the Supreme Court confirmed that some powers under a contract were subject to an implied term which required them to be exercised in a manner compliant with the Wednesbury test familiar to all public lawyers. In particular, this meant that any use of such a power could only be made after considering all relevant factors and disregarding all irrelevant factors.
This paper first analyses the conceptual basis of the implied term in Braganza. It concludes that that the duty to act rationally is implied by law, regardless of party intention, where a discretion is limited to finding or evaluating facts, and implied in fact in all other cases. It then assesses the wisdom of transplanting Wednesbury wholesale into Contract Law, especially given the contextually flexible approach to the intensity of rationality review in modern Administrative Law. Two underlying points of difference between the systems require some adjustment to the Wednesbury test as applied to contractual cases: first, Contract Law’s general acceptance of a party acting in pure self-interest, and second, Contract Law’s preference for clear rules to govern parties’ primary obligations in contrast to Administrative Law’s use of flexible standards. Given these differences, the scope for variable intensity review in Contract Law should be limited to two categories of case: first, where an additional implied term exists that a contractual discretion only be exercised for a specific purpose, and secondly, where the power in question is a power to find or evaluate facts.

Keywords: commercial law
law
improper purpose
administrative law
discretion
Wednesbury unreasonableness
rules and standards
decision-making duties
contract law
legal certainty
nature of
The mythopoetics of debt: exploring the works of Ismail Kadare

This thesis examines the novels of the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. It studies four novels: Les Tambours de la pluie [Kështjella], Qui a ramené Doruntine ? [Kush e solli Doruntinën], Le Général de l’armée morte [Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur], and Le Palais des rêves [Pallati i Ëndrrave]. The methodological angle of this thesis is two-fold. It investigates the formal devices of repetition, circularity and intertextuality in these texts, but it does so with the aim of exploring one central thematic complex: the idea of Albanian identity as it is imagined and refracted through a variety of perspectives in the novels. This dual methodological perspective―textual and thematic―also means that the aim of this thesis is two-fold. It makes a contribution to scholarship on Kadare by demonstrating a formal and thematic coherence within some of his major works. It also makes a contribution to a wider context of critical and scholarly discourse on the Balkans. First, the intervention I make in this field is characterised by the decision to follow Kadare in his predominantly national, rather than a more broadly regional, perspective. In his works, this national perspective is self-reflexive. As his novels show in their rewriting of historical events and salient elements of folk morality, a reflection upon national identity is part of the national identity of Albania.
Second, and in continuity with this emphasis on self-reflexivity, the perspective that this thesis presents on cultural themes is always textual: it examines how themes are embedded in stories and how they become reinterpreted by narrative. Across this corpus of texts, and from the perspective of a movement from history to modernist abstraction, this thesis shows a fundamental continuity in Kadare’s artistic concern with questioning Albanian identity.

Keywords: debt
Ismail Kadare
national identity
Albanianness
mythopoetics
Advisor: Due, R
Beyond compliance? The socio-legal consequences of section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015

When s 54 of the Modern Slavery Act was adopted in 2015, it was widely lauded as a breakthrough and a positive step towards holding businesses to account for labour exploitation in global supply chains. But the provision is not prescriptive and light on enforcement. It drew criticism for a lack of enforcement mechanisms and mandatory requirements. But prompted by calls to go ‘beyond compliance’, corporations scrambled to comply. This paradox raises empirical questions about the effects and implications of the provision. As a case study of light-touch regulation, what generalisations, if any, can be drawn from the effects of s 54?
This thesis empirically examines the response of actors involved in s 54’s implementation, dissemination, and compliance. It casts doubt on the assumptions of regulatory ineffectiveness with complex, qualitative accounts of the wide-ranging effects of s 54 within corporations, in the UK and beyond. S 54 refocused corporate attention on social responsibility and altered corporate perceptions of legal, reputational, and practical risk. It produced ripple effects across industries and ‘trickle down’ demand for advisory services in global supply chains. S 54 is transnational. It has had effects on the UK’s trade relations and responds to international norms such as the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. In 2021, the Modern Slavery Amendment Bill was introduced to ‘strengthen’ the requirements of s 54, signalling a recursive move towards mandatory requirements. Theoretically, s 54 represents the ‘double movement’ in action, and a testament that a ‘weak’ law can create opportunities for ongoing dialogue and progress.

Advisor: Pirie, F