bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Shakespeare’s Tragedy and Roman History
Authors: Bishop Tom
Published: November 2016

The inheritance of Roman history was pervasive in Shakespeare’s day, but complex and ambiguous. Shakespeare’s plays respond to this legacy in increasingly sophisticated ways, not only in those plays based directly on the history of Rome. The Roman plays, especially those drawn from Plutarch, show a distinctive and historically novel interest in the relation between individual action and constitutional change in periods of political crisis.
Tragedy and the Satiric Voice
Authors: Lees-Jeffries Hester
Published: November 2016

This chapter sets Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, and King Lear in the context of classical and early modern satire—most notably the satiric vogue of the 1590s. It explores the language of disease (especially syphilis) and purgation, and considers the relationship between tragedy and satire, which is often focused on the figure of the malcontent. In particular, it suggests that satire is inherently undramatic, however theatrical the figure of the railing malcontent, such as Thersites, may initially appear.
‘The action of my life’
Authors: Mukherji Subha
Published: November 2016

This essay will put pressure on moments at generic thresholds—in particular, that between tragicomedy and tragedy—as a way of understanding the stakes in Shakespeare’s interrogation of genre, and its implications for representation and response. The boundaries of tragedy are no less problematic than those of comedy. How does the notion of tragicomedy trouble these edges further? But it is neither tragedy nor tragicomedy alone that effects Shakespeare’s ethical and affective questioning of his art. As his career progresses, each genre helps the other sharpen its own claims on mimetic responsibility. A consideration of his tragic art in relation to tragicomedy—both in his consciously mixed-mode plays and in his inscription of what look like generically incompatible moments within his tragedies—illuminates the urgency of these experiments.
Queer Tragedy, or Two Meditations on Cause
Authors: Edelman Lee , Menon Madhavi
Published: November 2016

This chapter argues that the tragedy of Othello consists in the fact that the play cannot find a cause for desire. From Plato and Aristotle, who insist that good drama should have a cause, we have inherited a desire to find explanations. But, as Jacques Lacan reminds us, the search for a cause is already an announcement of failure—we search for a cause only when there is none to be found. The queerness of tragedy lies in its failure to muster up a cause that explains the excess to which it is generically prone.
Romeo and Juliet as Event
Authors: Bartolovich Crystal
Published: November 2016

How are art, love, and politics related to each other in Romeo and Juliet? Building on Adorno’s cautious linking of the lyric poem to society, and on Badiou’s inclusion of love (along with politics, art and science) among his truth procedures, this chapter explores the play’s association of love with art, paying special attention to the pilgrim sonnet. It then goes on to discuss the Friar as a (failed) political mediator between the individual ‘event’ of Romeo and Juliet’s love and the broader transformation of society. The chapter then argues that the anonymous, illiterate serving-man (from whom Romeo learns about the Capulet feast) points us towards the many accidents of birth that demand political redress in Verona. There is more waste of life, love, and talent than is represented simply by the deaths of Romeo and Juliet. Only when we recognize this general waste, and our own responsibility to redress it, can we do justice to the play’s imbrication of love, politics and art.
Coriolanus
Authors: Schalkwyk David
Published: November 2016

Shakespeare’s tragedy traces the tensions within a developing constitutional republic that is still reliant on the prowess of militaristic individuals for survival. Coriolanus is fully a tragedy because it traces the negotiation, contestation, and constitution of power through the character of a single hero whose abilities are both crucial to the survival of the republican state and deeply inimical to it. The chapter traces the ways in which the conflict is negotiated through the constitutive power of language, and argues that Coriolanus provokes our admiration through his Stoic determination to preserve his own integrity and arouses our pity through his final acquiescence in the fact that no man can be “author of himself”.
Performing Shakespearean Tragedy, 1660–1780
Authors: Holland Peter
Published: November 2016

As much as we may look for continuities across historical divides, the Interregnum and the closing of the theatres produced many kinds of fracture in the ways Shakespeare’s tragedies were performed. This chapter uses four case studies—Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear—to explore the history of tragic performance in the period between 1660 -1780, and to reveal the complexities of the cultural contexts within which the re-making and re-presenting of Shakespeare on stage took place. From the various treatments of Juliet's awakening in adaptations by Otway, Cibber and Garrick, through the ways in which performance and published texts of Hamlet differed, to the record of what Macbeth wore and what he said before he died, and to the emotions that performances of King Lear were intended to evoke in their audiences, we can trace the changes in audience taste that remade Shakespearean tragedy on the stage.
Screening the Tragedies
Authors: Jackson MacDonald P.
Published: November 2016

Jonathan Miller’s BBC TV production of King Lear and Michael Elliott’s version for Granada TV, starring Laurence Olivier, illustrate contrasting approaches to the small-screen medium, with Miller recording lengthy takes of characters artfully choreographed within bare sets, and Elliott employing a montage technique to view individuals in expressive close-ups. The near-monochrome BBC costumes suggest the world of Jacobean politics, whereas Granada’s pastel colours suit the ‘Once upon a time’ quality of Shakespeare’s opening. The cinematic adaptations by Peter Brooke and Grigori Kozintsev better convey the play’s vastness, bleakness, and grandeur, Brooke filming in the snow-bound tundra of Northern Jutland, Kozintsev in a primitive rock-strewn Russian landscape, through which peasants trudge. Brooke’s style is New Wave, his vision unsparing. Kozintsev draws on both traditional epic convention and Christian-humanist tradition. Several other screen versions merit attention, notably Akiro Kurosawa’s Ran and Brian Blessed’s undervalued movie with himself as Lear.
Macbeth on Changing Screens
Authors: Rowe Katherine
Published: November 2016

The afterlife of Macbeth on screen has been lively and often brilliant, occasioning more than a century of adaptations, appropriations, and revivals around the world, across an array of broadcast, recorded, and networked media. Students, scholars and fans exploring this robust and diverse corpus face a number of obstacles to any attempt at generalization or a systematic survey. This chapter sketches key challenges to that analytic work and points to useful resources that might support it, surveying a handful of adaptation strategies that span global variations of Macbeth in multiple languages and periods. These provide fruitful signposts for further study, as new engagements with Macbeth proliferate across various media.
The Tragedies in Italy
Authors: Bassi Shaul
Published: November 2016

This chapter describes the cultural translation of Shakespearean tragedy in Italy as a long and difficult process that took place alongside the equally protracted establishment of the country as a unified state in the nineteenth century. Shakespeare came to Italy initially mediated by translations and critical interpretations made in France and Germany; and to begin with literary debates about his work took precedence over theatrical performances. Reworking Shakespeare for Italian culture meant retranslating Italian plots and materials, as a number of the plays have Italian settings. It also meant dealing with tragedy as a genre (tragedy) that, since Dante’s DivineComedy, had been at best secondary. As well as reviewing the plays’ own performance history, various kinds of adaptation (including opera, music and painting) and the leading role played by actors in promulgating Shakespeare (such as Tommaso Salvini, Eleonora Duse, and Carmelo Bene) are analysed.
The Tragedies in Germany
Authors: Höfele Andreas
Published: November 2016

From around 1750, Shakespeare became a crucial force in German literary and intellectual history. His tragedies were the model invoked in the battle against French Classicism, the model emulated by Germany’s own young Sturm und Drang dramatists of the 1770s, and the model that most nineteenth-century attempts at a national drama strove to reproduce, but failed to match. This was the model that was discussed in aesthetic and dramatic theory from Hegel onwards. ‘The Tragedies in Germany’ focuses on the role and importance of Shakespeare’s tragedies in the intellectual and political history of a country of which a poem once famously said: ‘Deutschland ist Hamlet!’
French Receptions of Shakespearean Tragedy
Authors: Drouet Pascale , de Carles Nathalie Rivère
Published: November 2016

The philosopher Alain synthesized the French approach to Shakespeare when he announced: ‘If Hamlet fell down to Earth, naked, without its procession of admirers, the critics would mock it, not without the semblance of a reason.’ Contrasting the quest for the essence of a work of art as opposed to its mere existence, he emphasized an enduring dualism in the French reception of Shakespearean tragedy. Between Voltaire’s rejection and the Romantics’ adoration of the ‘black sun’, Shakespeare generated a dialogue in French art. Starting with the critical reception, this chapter shows how Shakespearean tragedy became the instrument of a reflection on Liberty. The stage dynamic of destruction and regeneration in the treatment of Shakespearean tragedies produced a call for new liberated approaches to French dramatic language. Shakespeare thus became a laboratory where translators, adaptors, stage directors, and actors would put their trade to the test of a protean script and free themselves from the strictures of national tradition.
Shakespearean Tragedy in Eastern Europe
Authors: Drábek Pavel
Published: November 2016

Eastern Europe is a problematic geopolitical concept comprising anywhere from 7 to 20 countries—culturally, ethnically and historically different. What they share is a Communist past. This essay discusses the diverse historical heritage of Eastern Europe, and theorizes the semantics of the post-Communist tragic hero and the modern trends in Shakespearean tragedy using examples from Croatia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia.
Shakespearean Tragedy in Russia
Authors: Givens John
Published: November 2016

Shakespeare’s place in Russian culture is traced from the eighteenth century, when Catherine the Great herself adapted two of the dramatist's plays, to present day productions responding to the cultural and political realities of Putin’s Russia. Particular attention is paid to Shakespeare’s rise to prominence among the writers of Russian Romanticism; to Shakespeare’s influence on the father of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin; to his dominance in mid-nineteenth century Russian culture, when a complete edition of his plays was translated into Russian and writers wrote stories based on Shakespearean themes; to modernist takes on Shakespeare at the turn of the twentieth century; and on to the improbable appropriation of Shakespeare for the cause of revolution by the young Soviet state.
Unsettling the Bard
Authors: Houlahan Mark
Published: November 2016

This article examines the cultural influence of William Shakespeare’s tragedies on Australasia and the Pacific. To this end, it analyses a range of live and filmed performances, along with the adaptive responses of writers, audiences, and critics to the tragedies. It begins by considering the presence of Shakespeare’s Complete Works on Captain James Cook’s Endeavour when it sailed the Pacific in 1769–1770 before turning to the first recorded Australian Shakespeare: a staging of Henry IV in Robert Sidaway’s Sydney theatre in 1800. It then looks at other works such as those by Charles and Ellen Kean, Ngaio Marsh, and John Bell as well as works that have become part of Australasian literature, including Randolph Stow’s Lear-themed 1958 novel To the Island. It also discusses a number of adaptations of Shakespearean tragedy and concludes with a commentary on Australasian and Pacific responses to tragedy that were generated by—or reflecting the perspectives of—indigenous populations.
Shakespearean Tragedy in India
Authors: Trivedi Poonam
Published: November 2016

The genre of tragedy, which was introduced to Indian cultures through colonial hegemony, challenged the norms of Sanskrit and other indigenous literatures. This essay explores the tensions that arose with the entry of this ‘newness’, by tracing the reception, influence and assimilation of tragedy in some of the major Indian literatures viz. Bengali, Marathi, Kannada and Hindi. The most influential examples of tragedy were those of Shakespeare, and their modes of structure and characterization, as well as the world view they incorporate, have been debated, adapted, and accepted in different ways by critics, playwrights, and now film makers, through the several stages of Indian colonial and postcolonial cultural history spanning more than a century and half. Among this diversity of approaches to Shakespearean tragedy, the interpolation of a female avenger into many adaptations is singled out as a specifically Indian act of cultural translation.
Character in Shakespearean Tragedy
Authors: Smith Emma
Published: November 2016

While Hamlet is often taken as the highpoint of Shakespearean characterization, this chapter considers different models of characterization: character as a product of genre in Othello; as embodied in actors in Antony and Cleopatra; or as inscrutable and rebarbative in Coriolanus.
The Pity of It
Authors: Hillman David
Published: November 2016

This chapter considers the role of affect in Shakespearean tragedy: its simultaneously excessive, irreducibly complex, and (self-) destructive qualities, showing how they are at once transformative and formative qualities; it considers understandings of affect in early modern culture and its ambivalent reception in this world; its inherently performative dimensions; and its place in audiences’ relationships with these plays.
A Word from the Editors
Authors: du Plessis Paul J. , Ando Clifford , Tuori Kaius
Published: November 2016

This chapter sets out the larger framework of the volume. It describes and contrasts different ways of undertaking Roman legal history, and explains the approach of the present volume. The chapter urges that a rich contextualisation of law in the circumstances of its production and subsequent interpretation accords with deeply held Roman beliefs about the nature of law. It sets ancient and modern notions of the autonomy of law (and the forms of legal historical study that autonomous law might seem to require) in conversation with the autonomy of law as political project in practice. The hard-won social and institutional authority of the Roman jurists is situated in comparative relation to political contests in early modern England among sources of law. Finally, the chapter explain compromises and choices made in the editorial process.
Legal Writing and Legal Reasoning
Authors: Babusiaux Ulrike
Published: November 2016

The writings of Roman jurists from the first until the third century AD show different methodological approaches to law. These differences do not only occur between different jurists, but can be found within the work of one juridical author. Since the nineteenth century, the historical analysis of these writings has tried to reveal common structures and methodological assumptions that may lie behind different types of these legal writings. This task is complicated by the state of transmission of the writings that have essentially been passed down on us within the Justinian Compilation, i.e. in an abbreviated or even mutilated form. Keeping in mind the possible alterations, one can nevertheless try to unite different writings under a common heading. This chapter explores the different groups into which the works of these jurists may be classified from the viewpoint of a narrative analysis of law.
Rhetoric and Roman Law
Authors: Kacprzak Agnieszka
Published: November 2016

This chapter surveys the methods of constructing rational arguments taught in the schools of rhetoric and their impact on juridical argumentation. It surveys: the place of rhetoric in legal education; the basic tools of rhetorical invention, i.e. rhetorical syllogism and induction, general schemes of inference on which singular arguments depended (topoi), and types of questions on which court debates could concentrate (status); the difficulties one is likely to encounter when trying to identify traces of rhetorical teaching in legal sources. It is the contention of this chapter that such attempts are hardly successful, since rhetorical theory codifies, classifies, and to a lesser degree analyses types of argumentation people intuitively use, rather than create them. The mere fact that a jurist applied some pattern of reasoning as described in rhetorical handbooks is insufficient evidence to conclude either that he had some sort of rhetorical education or that he knew rhetorical theory.
Republican Civil Procedure
Authors: Metzger Ernest
Published: November 2016

Those who study civil procedure favour traditional doctrinal research as the best way to determine the general outlines of litigation. Yet within those outlines Roman litigants decided a great deal for themselves, and accordingly the law requires a “human record” to make sense. This is where traditional sources are put aside. How the law dealt with reluctant defendants is difficult to determine with the aid of doctrine alone: none of the legal devices seems to suit. But when one gathers wider evidence and considers the actual manner in which parties prepared themselves for litigation, the suitable remedy makes itself apparent.
Police Functions and Public Order
Authors: Fuhrmann Christopher J.
Published: November 2016

This chapter surveys and analyses major trends in Roman law enforcement and approaches to public order. Chronological coverage runs from the early Republic through later Antiquity, but especially concentrates on the late Republic and early Principate. The overall focus is on society’s responses to perceived challenges to public order, and the state institutions which engaged in policing in Rome, Italy and the provinces of the Roman Empire. While non-institutional self-help was important, emperors, governors, city magistrates, and other power-holders frequently turned to institutional policing to counter crime and threats to social order or state power. Scrutinizing Roman attempts to reinforce public order highlights often overlooked ambitions of the Roman state.
Public and Private Criminal Law
Authors: Riggsby Andrew
Published: November 2016

The chapter surveys various typological divisions of Roman law that invoke terminology such as “criminal” and the like—based on explicit ancient categorisation; sets of procedural features; organization of juristic texts; and/or substantive features—and suggests that the implicit analogies to modern criminal law are not useful. The various Roman categories are less well defined than is usually imagined, and the various means of categorisation are often at cross-purposes. Even the most plausible composite Republican-era category is significantly narrower than the “criminal”, and at any rate the composition would be under-motivated. Imperial law develops a superficially more similar jurisdiction over time, but it is increasingly shaped by factors that have little to do with any particular conceptualization of the subject matter.
Crimes against the Individual
Authors: Bryen Ari Z.
Published: November 2016

This chapter addresses two “crimes” against the individual: violation of his public face (iniuria), and violation of his household (stuprum and adulterium). More than mere prohibited offences, these two types of harm came, during the crises of sovereignty of the late Republic and early Principate, to be potent loci for thinking about the ideal citizen, his political relationships, and the nature of the Roman state. Though these categories were linked together through doctrinal law, their impact is evident in a variety of texts from this period, and so demonstrate the ways in which “law” and “society” were deeply linked at the levels of the fundamental cognitive structures that enabled the Romans to make sense of their lived and historical experience.
Family
Authors: Dixon Suzanne
Published: November 2016

The Roman family was defined at law as a unit controlled by the all-powerful pater familias, its membership determined by relationship through the male line (agnatio). Both formal law and family relations altered between the fifth-century-BC XII Tables and the sixth-century-AD legal compilations ordered by the Eastern Emperor Justinian. In particular, Christianity and married women’s developing capacity to acquire and transmit property drove significant changes in power relations within the family. Scholarly perspectives on Roman law and the Roman family have also changed to take into account the religious and ethnic diversity of the Roman Empire and the social realities behind the rigid legal categories of the law. This chapter surveys these strands of scholarship.
Epigraphy
Authors: Begio Tommaso
Published: November 2016

This chapter deals with the role of legal epigraphy within the study of Roman law and Roman society. After an introductory definition of this discipline, in which some of its peculiarities are stressed, it follows a brief description of the different types of epigraphic legal documents, to finish then with a florilegium of this kind of documents. The aim of the work is to stress, through the analysis of a few sources (but not only through well-known sources), the essential contribution, that inscriptions offer us to gain a more complete and more nuanced view of the system of Roman law in all its complexity.
Contracts, Commerce and Roman Society
Authors: Fiori Roberto
Published: November 2016

The Roman law of contract has developed itself around the idea of obligation. At the beginning of its history, transactions were possibly differentiated only at an economical level, while from the juristic point of view only the obligatiomattered, so that the judicial remedies were general actions. This was probably a legacy of archaic law and society—which valued community more than the individual—some features of which were retained until the end of the Republic. However, changes in civil procedure caused the arising of a contractual system based on typicality, and this had the further consequence that the transactions not received into the system were considered atypical, their protection being provided by the reuse of the ancient general actions under new form. At the end of the Principate, changes in society and civil procedure reduced the importance of typicality, and some characteristic features of classical contract law were lost.
Introduction
Authors: Adler Matthew D. , Fleurbaey Marc
Published: November 2016

What are the methodologies that we should employ for designing and evaluating governmental policy, in light of the profound effects that policies have on the level and distribution of individuals’ well-being? The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary treatment of this question—drawing from welfare economics, moral philosophy, and psychology. Part I covers policy-assessment methodologies, both established and emerging. Part II reviews philosophical conceptions of well-being, and the literature on “subjective well-being” in psychology and economics. The chapters in Part III focus specifically on well-being measurement, proposing or empirically illustrating various approaches to constructing a comprehensive individual-level indicator of well-being—or, alternatively, defending a “multidimensional” approach that eschews such a measure. Part IV reviews a variety of challenges for policy assessment. This introductory chapter describes the Handbook structure and the role that each chapter plays therein and highlights a number of key Handbook themes.
Extended Preferences
Authors: Adler Matthew D.
Published: November 2016

This chapter presents a methodology for constructing an interpersonally comparable measure of individual well-being, the “extended preferences” approach. It builds upon John Harsanyi’s work. The key idea is that an ethical deliberator makes (or at least is capable of making) judgments concerning the well-being levels of histories and well-being differences between histories—where a history is a hybrid bundle consisting of possible attributes an individual might have, plus possible preference (“tastes”) regarding such attributes. These judgments are represented by a well-being measure. If the deliberator adopts a preference-based conception of well-being, the functional form of that well-being measure can be partly inferred from the utility functions representing the tastes incorporated in histories. That is: the deliberator partly infers what the well-being numbers she assigns to histories must be, given her deference to individual tastes. The chapter also compares the extended-preferences approach to competing methodologies for measuring well-being, in particular the equivalent-income concept.
Measuring Poverty
Authors: Pogge Thomas , Wisor Scott
Published: November 2016

This chapter documents a participatory approach to developing a new, gender-sensitive measure of deprivation that improves upon existing measures of poverty and gender equity. Over three years, across 18 sites in Angola, Fiji, Indonesia, Malawi, Mozambique, and the Philippines, men and women in poor communities engaged in a range of qualitative discussions and quantitative evaluation exercises to help develop the Individual Deprivation Measure. The IDM tracks deprivation in 15 dimensions, uses interval scales within dimensions, and can easily be administered in most impoverished areas. It represents a significant advance in multidimensional measurement by focusing on individuals rather than households, by covering all important dimensions of poverty, by being gender-sensitive in the selection and coding of dimensions, and by being appropriately sensitive to the depth of deprivation. The IDM demonstrates the possibility of establishing objective tools of social valuation through a process of public reason.
Happiness-Based Policy Analysis
Authors: Dolan Paul , Fujiwara Daniel
Published: November 2016

Happiness data have an important role in policy. They can be used to monitor social progress over time in the same way that GDP figures are currently used. They can also be used in the subjective well-being valuation (SWV) approach to value nonmarket goods for the purposes of cost-benefit analysis, the primary policy evaluation tool in many governments. This chapter focuses on the latter of these two uses of happiness surveys, where a significant literature has grown over the last decade. It discusses the main problems associated with traditional valuation methods that rely on people’s preferences and the ways in which it has been suggested that SWV can overcome some of these difficulties. SWV also has its problems, and the chapter discusses these, provides suggestions for how results from SWV should be interpreted, and highlights where solutions to the problems in the SWV method have been proposed in the literature.
The Coevolution of Religious Belief and Intuitive Cognitive Style via Individual-Level Selection
Authors: Stagnaro Michael N. , Rand David G.
Published: November 2016

This chapter introduces a novel theory for the coevolution of religious belief and intuitive cognition. The theory bridges the byproduct and functionalist perspectives on the evolution of religion, without requiring selection at the level of the group. It starts with the byproduct position that cognitive mechanisms yielding advantages unrelated to belief gave rise to early protoreligious beliefs, and associated empirical evidence that intuition supports belief while deliberation breeds skepticism. It argues that once byproduct-induced early beliefs became prevalent within a community, those who questioned would face sanctions from committed believers (for example, out of fear that those who questioned belief would anger the gods/ancestors, bringing harm to the community). This sanctioning of belief questioning creates individual-level selection pressure to believe and, thus, individual-level selection pressure for intuitive cognition and against deliberative cognition. In this way, religious belief and intuitive cognition can be maintained by natural selection, without creating group-level benefits.
Adolescence and Religion
Authors: Alcorta Candace S.
Published: November 2016

Throughout the world adolescence is deemed the appropriate life stage to “learn religion.” Nearly three-quarters of societies conduct adolescent rites of passage transmitting sacred rituals and beliefs. Neurophysiological changes that occur during adolescence render this an “experience-expectant” period for the transmission of religious schema and values. Brain regions critical to emotional, social, and symbolic processing mature, creating a plastic neural substrate for imbuing social and symbolic schema with emotional meaning and reward value. Religion in general, and adolescent rites of passage in particular, are optimally adapted for this task. Music-based ritual and emotionally evocative elements of religion optimize reinforcement learning. The costly and autonomically arousing ordeals of many rites ensure fear conditioning. Such learning shapes maturing neural networks, impacting choices and behaviors. Evolutionary anthropologists view religion as a costly signal of group commitment. Adolescent rites of passage are a powerful proximate mechanism for creating and maintaining cooperative, cohesive groups.
The Roots of Intergroup Conflict and the Co-optation of the Religious System
Authors: Kiper Jordan , Sosis Richard
Published: November 2016

This chapter reviews the cultural evolution of religious terrorism since the late nineteenth century and explores how terrorists have effectively exploited religious systems to pursue their political goals. Religious systems are adaptive complexes that efficiently respond to rapidly changing socioenvironmental conditions and successfully motivate prosocial and sacrificial behavior by engaging evolved psychological capacities. Ongoing religious terrorism differs from previous waves of terror by manipulating religious systems in order to frame political conflicts, organize combatants, and render collective violence as sacred. By taking an evolutionary perspective of religious terrorism, scholars can begin to shed light on the ultimate and proximate mechanisms of collective violence and the manner in which religion contributes to contemporary terrorist activity.
Material Culture
Authors: Cooney Gabriel
Published: November 2016

Material culture is central to all aspects of archaeology and yet it continues to be argued that things have been under-theorized in archaeological theory. The focus on this chapter is on developments in the study of material culture since the ‘material culture turn’. A range of current approaches—material culture studies, materiality, symmetrical archaeology, material engagement theory, and entanglement—are examined. Three approaches that focus on the relations between people and things through the interconnectivity of their respective lives; the chaîne opératoire, object biography, and life history (behavioural archaeology) are also discussed. The convergence between different theoretical approaches and the challenge of integrating the richness and variety of theoretical insight into practice is addressed.
Continental Philosophies
Authors: Moran Dermot
Published: November 2016

Phenomenology and hermeneutics were hugely influential methodologically in 20th-century European philosophy. They were also taken up in the human sciences more generally, but only relatively recently (from the 1980s on) incorporated into archaeological theory. Phenomenology emphasizes the human subjective and intersubjective encounter with landscape, nature, artefacts, and the whole ‘life-world’. Beginning from the careful description of life in the everyday, contemporary world, attentive to the shape of time, space, history, and culture in that world, phenomenology can also disclose aspects about the material worlds of past cultures, describing the embodied encounters of people with landscapes, monuments, and artefacts from the past.
Voice Alternations (Active, Passive, Middle)
Authors: Guasti M. Teresa
Published: November 2016

Acquisition of the passive voice has been studied since the sixties; these earlier results have provided evidence for difficulties in both comprehension and production at 4–5 years of age with differences depending on the shape of sentences and the type of verbs involved. This led to an interpretation expressed in the A-chain deficit hypothesis, whereby children are challenged by movement of the internal argument to the subject position. More recent studies, using new techniques and new insights, have shown an earlier mastery of some passives (age 3), have narrowed down the scope of difficulties focusing more thoroughly on specific sources of challenge and this has promoted new interpretative hypotheses.
A-Movement in Language Development
Authors: Becker Misha , Kirby Susannah
Published: November 2016

This chapter provides an overview of the literature on children’s acquisition of constructions involving A(rgument)-movement: passive, unaccusative verbs, raising-to-subject, and raising-to-object. Considering A-movement within a derivational theoretical framework (GB/Minimalism), we provide some historical and theoretical context for treating these constructions under the same operation. In all cases, the surface position of an NP is incongruous with its syntactic configuration for receiving its thematic role. For each construction we discuss empirical evidence concerning children’s knowledge of the construction (including, where available, cross-linguistic data), and the major theoretical debates that have arisen around them, notably Maturation. We suggest that variability in experimental outcomes, both within and across constructions, can be linked to methodological choices and not likely to lack of linguistic knowledge.
Acquisition of Questions
Authors: Thornton Rosalind
Published: November 2016

The last 40 years of research on the acquisition of questions within the generative framework is reviewed, starting with Brown’s (1968) predictions for the form of wh-questions in English. Evidence from children’s answers to questions is taken to support children have access to the syntactic computation required for question formation. This leads to an examination of children’s non-adult productions; questions with no I to C movement, why-questions, whose-questions as well as long-distance questions with wh-copying and questions with partial movement. We also review evidence from English and other languages that demonstrates children adhere to linguistic constraints on wh-movement.
Mood Alternations
Authors: Deen Kamil Ud
Published: November 2016

This chapter provides an overview of the development of mood in child language. The chapter begins with a discussion of the various overlapping terms used in the field: mood, modality, modal verbs, realis, irrealis, epistemic, deontic, etc. The chapter moves on to survey naturalistic and experimental research in the area, as well as data from several well-known languages. These data suggest that children are initially predisposed to mark modal distinctions in some manner or the other, in line with the Primacy of Mood Hypothesis.
Null Subjects
Authors: Valian Virginia
Published: November 2016

Some languages have obligatory overt subjects in all person and tense combinations (e.g., English); some have optional overt subjects in all combinations (e.g., Italian; Chinese); some are mixed (e.g., Hebrew, Shipibo). Parameter setting is less workable an explanation for language variation than is a feature approach. Children in non-null subject languages produce more subjects than do children in null subject languages; children of all language types gradually produce more subjects, especially pronominal subjects, as development proceeds; children are most likely to produce subjects that fit a prosodic template, have high information content, or are in shorter utterances; children produce fewer subjects than obligatory objects. No current acquisition theory—purely competence, purely performance, or hybrid—explains all the behavioral phenomena.
The Acquisition of Binding and Coreference
Authors: Baauw Sergio
Published: November 2016

In this chapter the acquisition of pronouns and reflexives is discussed. It reviews several accounts of the so-called Delay of Principle B Effect, the absence of this effect in some languages, and the structural factors that influence its appearance in child language. It also discusses children’s alledged target-like performance on reflexives in several languages with different type of reflexives. The chapter concludes that provided a balanced experimental design is used, the experimental results point at early mastery of Principle A and B, and that children’s difficulties with the interpretation of pronouns and reflexives are to be found at the interfaces between syntax and discourse or semantics, and may be due to limited (syntactic) processing resources.
Lexical and Grammatical Aspect
Authors: van Hout Angeliek
Published: November 2016

The topic of this chapter is the acquisition of lexical and grammatical aspect. Given wide cross-linguistic variation in aspect expression, the learnability issues center around form-meaning associations: how do learners determine the meaning of a certain aspectual form? Focusing on the literature on telicity and on the perfective-imperfective distinction, two main results stand out. Predicate telicity is easier than compositional telicity. The completion entailment of perfective is acquired at different ages across different languages, somewhere between 2.6 and 5. One novel direction of research asks whether aspect is acquired easier in some languages than in others. The answers will uncover possibly universal aspectual primitives and heuristics that guide children with their task of acquiring temporal meanings.
Statistical Learning, Inductive Bias, and Bayesian Inference in Language Acquisition
Authors: Pearl Lisa , Goldwater Sharon
Published: November 2016

Bayesian models of language acquisition are powerful tools for exploring how linguistic generalizations can be made. Notably, Bayesian models assume children leverage statistical information in sophisticated ways, and so it is important to demonstrate that children’s behavior is consistent with both the assumptions of the Bayesian framework and the predictions of specific models. We first provide a historical overview of behavioral evidence suggesting children utilize available statistical information to make useful generalizations in a variety of tasks. We then discuss the Bayesian modeling framework, including benefits of particular interest to both developmental and theoretical linguists. We conclude with a review of several case studies that demonstrate how Bayesian models can be applied to problems of interest in language acquisition.
Prosodic Phenomena
Authors: Ota Mitsuhiko
Published: November 2016

Prosodic phenomena such as stress, tone, and intonation have been the focus of much developmental research as well as theoretical work in phonology. This review presents an overview of research that explores the relationship between the development of prosodic phenomena and linguistic models of phonological structure, particularly, metrical stress theory and autosegmental phonology. The review surveys what is currently known about the developmental course of stress, tone, and intonation in infants and children, introduces research that investigates the role of organizational principles of phonological structure in the acquisition of these prosodic phenomena, and discusses the evidence and arguments for this approach toward understanding phonological acquisition.
Processing Continuous Speech in Infancy
Authors: Goyet Louise , Millotte Séverine , Christophe Anne , Nazzi Thierry
Published: November 2016

The present chapter focuses on fluent speech segmentation abilities in early language development. We first review studies exploring the early use of major prosodic boundary cues which allow infants to cut full utterances into smaller-sized sequences like clauses or phrases. We then summarize studies showing that word segmentation abilities emerge around 8 months, and rely on infants’ processing of various bottom-up word boundary cues and top-down known word recognition cues. Given that most of these cues are specific to the language infants are acquiring, we emphasize how the development of these abilities varies cross-linguistically, and explore their developmental origin. In particular, we focus on two cues that might allow bootstrapping of these abilities: transitional probabilities and rhythmic units.
History of Memory
Authors: Markowitsch Hans J. , Staniloiu Angelica
Published: November 2016

The historical roots of memory research—mainly from the period between 1870 and 1920—are described with emphasis on human memory. First, data from experimental psychology are reviewed; thereafter principal contributions from the old traditions of psychiatry and psychoanalysis are given and then relations between brain tissue damage and memory deficits are outlined. Experimental as well as clinical studies of that time already provided evidence for theoretical ideas on memory systems, which resemble those en vogue today. Furthermore, significant and still valid findings were reported on the contribution of bottleneck structures of the limbic system for mempry encoding. Among these, the mammillary bodies, thalamic nuclei, and the medial temporal lobe were most consistently mentioned. Furthermore, early findings from psychiatric patients revealed similar forms of dissociative states as found presently and indicated that these disease conditions occur much more in young than in older adults.
The Caribbean
Authors: Lacoste Véronique
Published: November 2016

This chapter provides a linguistic description of the English varieties found in the anglophone Caribbean. It briefly reviews major socio-historical processes involved in Creole genesis and in the emergence of local standard Englishes in this region, with a focus on the concept of the Creole language continuum. The linguistic overview includes phonological and morphosyntactic features which have been described as being typical of standard and nonstandard varieties of Caribbean English. The emphasis is placed on the breadth of linguistic diversity that exists within ‘the standard to nonstandard English’ range of the continuum (i.e., varieties furthest away from basilectal Creoles), while recognizing the complexity of the linguistic overlap between these varieties on the continuum.
Dependency Theory
Authors: Mahoney James , Rodríguez-Franco Diana
Published: November 2016

This article focuses on dependency theory and its influence on scholarly work in the field of international development. After tracing the roots of dependency theory, the article considers its relationship to the international economy, multinational capital, the local bourgeoisie, and the state. It then discusses dependency theory as a set of general concepts and orientations for formulating theories and explanations, as well as a set of directly testable and falsifiable hypotheses. It also emphasizes the utility of dependency theory for explaining the historical trajectories of development in Latin America, sustained robust economic growth in South Korea and Taiwan, globalization, and recent strong growth in China and some of its raw material suppliers. The article shows that dependency theory has mixed results as a testable theory but has been quite successful when used as a theoretical framework.
Suhrawardī’s (d. 1191)
Authors: Walbridge John
Published: November 2016

A fundamental problem in the interpretation of Suhrawardī’s Illuminationist philosophy is the difficulty of understanding the relationship between his masterwork, The Philosophy of Illumination, and his so-called Peripatetic works, written in the style of Ibn Sīnā. This chapter demonstrates that The Intimations of the Tablet and the Throne gives a Peripatetic account of philosophy but raises the issues that come under criticism in the Philosophy of Illumination and that are then dealt with in detail in Suhrawardī’s massive Paths and Havens. The chapter examines several specific issues: essential definition, hylomorphism, the intentionality of the concept of existence, the Platonic Forms, and reincarnation.
Al-Rāzī’s (d. 1210) Commentary on Avicenna’s
Authors: Shihadeh Ayman
Published: November 2016

This chapter argues against the prevalent reductionist reading of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s criticism of Avicennan doctrines in his philosophical works as a mere theologically motivated refutation. It proposes that when read in context, his famous commentary on Avicenna’s Pointers (Ishārāt) emerges as a confluence of the two classical genres of exegetical commentary (sharḥ, tafsīr) and aporetic commentary (shukūk), and as such perfectly typifies its author’s method of critical investigation. Al-Rāzī contrasts this method with both the uncritical traditionalism promoted by mainstream Avicennists and the fixation on refutation among contemporary counter-Avicennists. To support this new reading, the chapter examines two discussions in the commentary: one on Avicenna’s theory of prime matter and corporeity, and another on his concurrentist account of creation.
Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d. 1274)
Authors: McGinnis Jon
Published: November 2016

This chapter surveys the metaphysics of the great Shia philosopher and theologian Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (1201–1274) as it appears in his Ḥall mushkilāt al-Ishārāt, his commentary on Avicenna’s al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt. While the chapter treats issues from throughout the commentary, the primary focus is the discussions from nimāṭ 4 and 5. These sections include such central philosophical topics as ontology, causation, and cosmology in which are integrated such key theological doctrines as God’s existence, divine simplicity, God’s causal relation to the cosmos, and the age of the cosmos. A secondary theme of the present chapter is al-Ṭūsī’s response to the commentary of the renowned Ashʿarite theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (1149–1209) and some of the latter’s more trenchant criticisms of Avicenna’s al-Ishārāt.
by ʿAḍūd al-Dīn al-Ījī (d. 1355), and Its Commentaries
Authors: Dhanani Alnoor
Published: November 2016

ʿAḍud al-dīn al-Ījī’s Mawāqif fī ‘ilm al-kalām and its commentaries were the most studied kalām texts of the Sunnī madrasa curriculum after the fourteenth century CE. On one level, the Mawāqif exemplifies what has been termed the “Avicennization of kalām.” On a deeper level, it reaffirms a commitment to the principles of classical Ashʿarī kalām and contests central falsafa positions, even as it utilizes falsafa terminology and concepts. This chapter examines this aspect of the Mawāqif through its discussion of key questions in Islamic intellectual history.