bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Geometric localization of thermal fluctuations in red blood cells
Authors: Evans Arthur A. , Bhaduri Basanta , Popescu Gabriel , Levine Alex J.
Published: February 2017

Significance

Cell shapes are related to their biological function. More generally, membrane morphology plays a role in the segregation and activity of transmembrane proteins. Here we show geometric implications regarding how cellular mechanics plays a role in localizing thermal fluctuations on the membrane. We show theoretically that certain geometric features of curved shells control the spatial distribution of membrane undulations. We experimentally verify this theory using discocyte red blood cells and find that geometry alone is sufficient to account for the observed spatial distribution of fluctuations. Our results, based on statistical physics and membrane elasticity, have general implications for the use of membrane shape to control thermal undulations in a variety of nanostructured materials ranging from cell membranes to graphene sheets.
Manganese scavenging and oxidative stress response mediated by type VI secretion system in
Burkholderia thailandensis
Authors: Si Meiru , Zhao Chao , Burkinshaw Brianne , Zhang Bing , Wei Dawei , Wang Yao , Dong Tao G. , Shen Xihui
Published: February 2017

Significance

As an essential micronutrient, Gram-negative bacteria must concentrate Mn
2+
into the cytosol via active transport systems to meet cellular demands. Whereas inner membrane Mn
2+
transporters have been characterized, an active transporter for translocation of Mn
2+
across the outer membrane has not been described. Here we report a Mn
2+
-scavenging pathway consisting of a newly identified TonB-dependent outer membrane manganese transporter, MnoT, and a type VI secretion system (T6SS)-secreted Mn
2+
-binding protein, TseM. Traditionally, T6SS is recognized as a contact-dependent nanomachine to inject effectors into eukaryotic or prokaryotic cells for virulence or for interbacterial competition. The contact-independent functions of T6SS for metal acquisition and bacteria–bacteria competition, reported here, suggest that T6SS may have been retrofitted by some bacteria to gain additional adaptive functions during evolution.
Film Theory in the United States and Europe
Authors: Buckland Warren
Published: February 2017

Since the 1960s, film theory has undergone rapid development as an academic discipline—to such an extent that students new to the subject are quickly overwhelmed by the extensive and complex research published under its rubric. “Film Theory in the United States and Europe” presents a broad overview of guides to and anthologies of film theory, followed by a longer section that presents an historical account of film theory’s development—from classical film theory of the 1930s–1950s (focused around film as an art), the modern (or contemporary) film theory of the 1960s–1970s (premised on semiotics, Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis), to current developments, including the New Lacanians and cognitive film theory. The second section ends with a very brief overview of film and/as philosophy. The article covers the key figures and fundamental concepts that have contributed to film theory as an autonomous discipline within the university. These concepts include ontology of film, realism/the reality effect, formalism, adaptation, signification, voyeurism, patriarchy, ideology, mainstream cinema, the avant-garde, suture, the cinematic apparatus, auteur-structuralism, the imaginary, the symbolic, the real, film and emotion, and embodied cognition.
Fashion in 20th-Century Literature
Authors: Giorcelli Cristina
Published: February 2017

In the Western world, for centuries, clothes were generally seen as indexes of vanity and seduction, and thus stigmatized. Since the birth of fashion in the second half of the 19th century, however, they have finally come to be regarded as one of the manifestations of a society’s culture, and, as the actual “stuff” of any period’s life, they have gradually figured more prominently in literary works. From modernism to post-modernism, from Blaise Cendrars and F. Scott Fitzgerald to Bret Easton Ellis and William Gibson, fashion and clothes have indeed signified by revealing individualities, suggesting intentions, manifesting a propensity for play and irony, favoring interpersonal encounters, hinting at class and/or gender relations, and showing connections within the social “fabric.” Today, fashion’s prevailing “mix and match” technique—in which references to designers’ own previous creations and to the medium’s past are frequently made—may be inspired or echoed by writers’ ample employment of self-referentiality and intertextuality: in both media attendant discontinuities and aleatory combinations, on the one hand, invite viewers/readers to create their own style/interpretation, and, on the other, establish a diversified continuum, helping to revive the past in new forms.
Jokes and Humor in Intergroup Relations
Authors: Ford Thomas E. , Breeden Christopher J. , O'Connor Emma C. , Banos Noely C.
Published: February 2017

Humor fundamentally trivializes its topic and invites people to think about it playfully and non-seriously. Intergroup humor, humor that disparages a social group or its representatives thus disguises expressions of prejudice in a cloak of fun and frivolity, affording it the appearance of social acceptability. As a result, disparagement humor represents a pervasive mechanism for communicating prejudice particularly since society has become increasingly sensitive to expressions of prejudice and other forms of offensive speech. Indeed, disparagement humor is perhaps more readily available to us now in the digital age than ever before.

Because of its disguise of social acceptability, disparagement humor serves unique paradoxical functions in intergroup settings. It can function as a social “lubricant” and as a social “abrasive.” Disparagement humor directed at social out-groups functions as a social abrasive by threatening the social identity of members of the targeted group, by transmitting negative stereotypes and prejudice, by intensifying prejudice in the service of social dominance motives, and by fostering the release of prejudice against targeted out-groups. It simultaneously serves as a social lubricant for members of the in-group (the non-disparaged group) by enhancing personal and social identities. Finally, it can be co-opted by members of oppressed groups to serve social lubricant functions, including the subversion of prejudice, provided audiences understand and appreciate the subversive intent.
Language Attitudes
Authors: Dragojevic Marko
Published: February 2017

Language attitudes are evaluative reactions to different language varieties. They reflect, at least in part, two sequential cognitive processes: social categorization and stereotyping. First, listeners use linguistic cues (e.g., accent) to infer speakers’ social group membership(s). Second, based on that categorization, they attribute to speakers stereotypic traits associated with those inferred group membership(s). Language attitudes are organized along two evaluative dimensions: status (e.g., intelligent, educated) and solidarity (e.g., friendly, pleasant). Past research has primarily focused on documenting attitudes toward standard and nonstandard language varieties. Standard varieties are those that adhere to codified norms defining correct usage in terms of grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary, whereas nonstandard varieties are those that depart from such norms in some manner (e.g., pronunciation). Standard and nonstandard varieties elicit different evaluative reactions along the status and solidarity dimensions. Status attributions are based primarily on perceptions of socioeconomic status. Because standard varieties tend to be associated with dominant socioeconomic groups within a given society, standard speakers are typically attributed more status than nonstandard speakers. Solidarity attributions tend to be based on in-group loyalty. Language is an important symbol of social identity, and people tend to attribute more solidarity to members of their own linguistic community, especially when that community is characterized by high or increasing vitality (i.e., status, demographics, institutional support). As a result, nonstandard language varieties can sometimes possess covert prestige in the speech community in which they are the speech norms. Language attitudes are socialized early in life. At a very young age, children tend to prefer their own language variety. However, most (if not all) children gradually acquire the attitudes of the dominant group, showing a clear status preference for standard over nonstandard varieties around the first years of formal education and sometimes much earlier. Language attitudes can be socialized through various agents, including educators, peers, family, and the media. Because language attitudes are learned, they are inherently prone to change. Language attitudes may change in response to shifts in intergroup relations and government language policies, as well as more dynamically as a function of the social comparative context in which they are evoked. Once evoked, language attitudes can have myriad behavioral consequences, with negative attitudes typically promoting prejudice, discrimination, and problematic social interactions.
Mediation and Foreign Policy
Authors: Nagel Robert U. , Clayton Govinda
Published: February 2017

Mediation is now the most popular form of conflict management, and it has proven to be an
effective means of resolving inter- and intrastate disputes. This article offers an overview of
mediation in foreign policy. We first highlight which actors tend to perform mediatory roles,
emphasizing the relative strengths and weaknesses of individual, state, and international
organization mediators. Next we discuss the supply and demand of mediation, identifying the key
conditions that promote third parties’ efforts to offer mediatory assistance and belligerents to
accept the help of an intermediary. We then discuss the process and varying methods used by
mediators, highlighting the range of actions from relatively soft facilitative mediation, up to more
manipulative approaches. Finally we discuss the outcomes that mediation tends to produce and the
conditions that influence the effectiveness of this preeminent foreign policy tool.
Stigma and Health
Authors: Nieweglowski Katherine , Corrigan Patrick W.
Published: February 2017

Stigma is a complex process that results from the interaction of stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination. When applied to health conditions (e.g., mental illness, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, obesity), stigma can contribute to a lack of recovery and resources as well as devaluation of the self. People with stigmatized health conditions may be too embarrassed to seek treatment and others may not provide them with equal opportunities. This often results in discrimination in employment, housing, and health care settings. Strategies have been proposed to prompt stigma change with strategic contact between those with the health condition and everyone else likely to have the best effects.
Mammalian Visual System Organization
Authors: Briggs Farran
Published: February 2017

Many mammals, including humans, rely primarily on vision to sense the environment. While a large proportion of the brain is devoted to vision in highly visual animals, there are not enough neurons in the visual system to support a neuron-per-object look-up table. Instead, visual animals evolved ways to rapidly and dynamically encode an enormous diversity of visual information using minimal numbers of neurons (merely hundreds of millions of neurons and billions of connections!). In the mammalian visual system, a visual image is essentially broken down into simple elements that are reconstructed through a series of processing stages, most of which occur beneath consciousness. Importantly, visual information processing is not simply a serial progression along the hierarchy of visual brain structures (e.g., retina to visual thalamus to primary visual cortex to secondary visual cortex, etc.). Instead, connections within and between visual brain structures exist in all possible directions: feedforward, feedback, and lateral. Additionally, many mammalian visual systems are organized into parallel channels, presumably to enable efficient processing of information about different and important features in the visual environment (e.g., color, motion). The overall operations of the mammalian visual system are to: (1) combine unique groups of feature detectors in order to generate object representations and (2) integrate visual sensory information with cognitive and contextual information from the rest of the brain. Together, these operations enable individuals to perceive, plan, and act within their environment.
School Violence
Authors: Capp Gordon , Moore Hadass , Pitner Ronald , Iachini Aidyn , Berkowitz Ruth , Astor Ron Avi , Benbenishty Rami
Published: February 2017

School violence can be understood as any behavior that is intended to harm other people at schools or near school grounds. This may include bullying and victimization, or more severe forms of violence involving weapons. To respond effectively to school violence, school personnel and leaders must understand the influences on their schools that come from individuals, the surrounding community, and cultural and political spheres. Careful and ongoing assessment of the needs of any given school is also a prerequisite to effective intervention. The severity of violence, the exact location of violent acts, and how different groups on a school campus experience violence are all key details to understanding and measuring problems. With this information, schools are then able to choose intervention programs that will utilize a whole-school approach. Sometimes, existing Evidence Based Programs can address the needs of a particular school and surrounding community. Other times, schools need to either modify existing interventions or create their own to address the particular forms of violence that exist in their schools and communities.
Modern Cambodia Since 1863
Authors: Tully John
Published: February 2017

Modern Cambodian history begins with the creation of the French Protectorate in 1863. Until the 15th century, Cambodia was a regional great power, but by the late 18th it faced extinction as a sovereign state. Although the Protectorate ensured the country’s territorial integrity, French ideas of governance and philosophy collided with Cambodia’s ancient traditions. By 1897, the French had prevailed: Cambodia had escaped its predatory neighbors, Siam and Vietnam, but had lost its internal and external sovereignty. After independence in 1953, Cambodia sat on the fault lines of the Cold War. Precariously neutral until 1970, it fell into a new dark age of civil war, foreign invasions, saturation bombing, and mass murder. Liberated from the horrors of Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea (DK) by the Vietnamese in late 1978, the regime the invaders installed suffered a period of international ostracism that lasted until the end of the Cold War in 1991–1992. Cambodia is at peace today, but hopes that it would develop as a free, democratic, and more equal society have proved illusory. Cambodia is one of Asia’s poorest states; a kleptocracy ruled by the durable autocrat Hun Sen via a façade of democratic institutions. The economy, according to Sebastian Strangio, “is controlled by … [a] new quasi-palace elite: a sprawling network of CPP politicians, military brass, and business families arranged in vertical khsae, or ‘strings,’ of patronage emanating from Hun Sen and his close associates.”
Education in Colonial Sudan, 1900–1957
Authors: Seri-Hersch Iris
Published: February 2017

In the first half of the 20th century, Sudan, which included the territories of present-day Sudan and South Sudan, was ruled by a dual colonial government known as the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899–1956). Britain was the senior partner in this administration, Egypt being itself politically and militarily subordinated to Britain between 1882 and 1956. During most of the colonial period, Sudan was ruled as two Sudans, as the British sought to separate the predominantly Islamic and Arabic-speaking North from the multireligious and multilingual South. Educational policy was no exception to this: until 1947, the British developed a government school system in the North while leaving educational matters in the hands of Christian missionaries in the South. In the North, the numerically dominant government school network coexisted with Egyptian schools, missionary schools, community schools, and Sudanese private schools. In the South, schools were established by the Anglican Church Missionary Society, the Roman Catholic Verona Fathers, and the American Presbyterian Mission. Whereas Arabic and English were the mediums of instruction in Northern schools, the linguistic situation was more complicated in the South, where local vernaculars, English and Romanized Arabic were used in missionary schools.

The last colonial decade (1947–1957) witnessed a triple process of educational expansion, unification, and nationalization. Mounting Anglo-Egyptian rivalries over the control of Sudan and the polarization of Sudanese nationalists into “pro-British” independentists and “pro-Egyptian” unionists led the British authorities in Khartoum to boost government education while giving up the policy of separate rule between North and South. In practice, educational unification of the two Sudanese regions meant the alignment of Southern curricula on Northern programs and the introduction of Arabic into Southern schools, first as a subject matter, then as a medium of instruction. Missionary and other private schools were nationalized one year after Sudan gained independence from Britain and Egypt (1956).
The Marine Fisheries of South Africa
Authors: van Sittert Lance
Published: February 2017

The South African fisheries are environmentally bifurcated by the different current regimes on the west (Benguela) and east (Agulhas) coasts. Limited precolonial subsistence use of the littoral zone was supplemented from the mid-17th century by commercial harvesting of marine mammals for international trade and fish to ration imported slave labor. The liberalization of trade after 1814 led to the commercialization of Benguela fisheries by Cape Town merchants drying barrracouta (snoek) for export to ration indentured Indian labor on the sugar plantations of the southwest Indian Ocean and canning rock lobster to feed the urban bourgeoisies of Europe. The mineral revolution in the final quarter of the 19th century created an expanded southern African demand for fish in the new mining centers of the subcontinent, prompting the colonial state to pioneer the demersal fisheries of the Agulhas current, which were monopolized for the first half of the 20th century by British-owned steam trawlers. The motorization of rock lobster fishing in the same period created widespread poverty in the inshore subsistence fisheries. This became an increasingly politicized issue as Afrikaner nationalists laid blame on the British monopoly over the national fish market. Proposed state nationalization of the demersal fishery and reorganization of the inshore fisheries into cooperatives was defeated in 1944 in favor of state financing of private capital through the provision of research, infrastructure, and finance. Afrikaner nationalists after 1948 utilized the latter to engineer the rapid industrialization of the pelagic inshore fisheries and concomitant rise of Afrikaner capital. Falling inshore catches and increasing foreign competition in the demersal fishery led to a crisis in the 1960s that was resolved through the creation and strict conservation of an exclusive economic zone south of the Orange River coupled with the looting of the Namibian colony’s fish resources. The postcolonial states in Namibia (1990) and South Africa (1994) thus inherited severely depleted fisheries resources dominated by white capital and superintended by neoliberal states, severely constraining black capital formation. Both consequently satisfied themselves with blackening the white monopolies and defending their exclusive resource access against escalating insurgencies from the excluded black underclass.
Latino Literature
Authors: Román Elda María
Published: February 2017

Latina/o literature can be understood both in terms of its historical emergence and development as well as its engagement with and representation of history. The formation of a canon called Latina/o literature is a contemporary phenomenon. Institutions that have published, disseminated, and shaped this literature into a discernible entity emerged in the 1970s as extensions of political activist movements. In the 1990s, the establishment of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project also made possible the recuperation and publication of literature written before the 1960s. Studies of Latina/o literature now explore texts dating back to the 16th century, include 19th-century exile and dissident writing, and trace the evolution of Latina/o literature through the 20th and 21st centuries. While most writing and scholarship has been produced about Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans, literature by Dominican Americans, U.S. Central Americans, and U.S. South Americans is increasingly gaining visibility. Since the mid-20th century, most Latina/o literature has been written in English, though many writers incorporate Spanish or Spanglish. This tradition now spans a wide range of themes, experiences, and genres.
American Film since 1945
Authors: Gleich Joshua
Published: February 2017

Over the past seventy years, the American film industry has transformed from mass-producing movies to producing a limited number of massive blockbuster movies on a global scale. Hollywood film studios have moved from independent companies to divisions of media conglomerates. Theatrical attendance for American audiences has plummeted since the mid-1940s; nonetheless, American films have never been more profitable. In 1945, American films could only be viewed in theaters; now they are available in myriad forms of home viewing. Throughout, Hollywood has continued to dominate global cinema, although film and now video production reaches Americans in many other forms, from home videos to educational films.

Amid declining attendance, the Supreme Court in 1948 forced the major studios to sell off their theaters. Hollywood studios instead focused their power on distribution, limiting the supply of films and focusing on expensive productions to sell on an individual basis to theaters. Growing production costs and changing audiences caused wild fluctuations in profits, leading to an industry-wide recession in the late 1960s. The studios emerged under new corporate ownership and honed their blockbuster strategy, releasing “high concept” films widely on the heels of television marketing campaigns. New technologies such as cable and VCRs offered new windows for Hollywood movies beyond theatrical release, reducing the risks of blockbuster production. Deregulation through the 1980s and 1990s allowed for the “Big Six” media conglomerates to join film, theaters, networks, publishing, and other related media outlets under one corporate umbrella. This has expanded the scale and stability of Hollywood revenue while reducing the number and diversity of Hollywood films, as conglomerates focus on film franchises that can thrive on various digital media. Technological change has also lowered the cost of non-Hollywood films and thus encouraged a range of alternative forms of filmmaking, distribution, and exhibition.
Nativism and Religion in America
Authors: Payne Rodger M.
Published: February 2017

Nativism describes an ideology that favors the rights and privileges of the “native born” population over and against those of “foreign” status, however these categories might be defined and ascribed. In the United States, the term has usually been employed to designate hostility against foreign immigration, although nativist arguments have been used against various internal minority groups as well. Although the term is often used as a synonym for the anti-Catholicism of the antebellum era, nativism has usually focused its apprehensions on ethnic and racial differences rather than religious diversity; since religious identity is often interdependent with racial or ethnic heritage, however, any religious divergence from the dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture likewise falls under suspicion. While not all forms of religious intolerance in the United States have been grounded in nativist attitudes and activities, the relationship between antipathy toward immigration and antagonism toward certain religions has been a recurrent and resilient theme in American culture. From the various forms of political and social enmity directed against Catholic immigrants during the antebellum era to the passage of Asian “exclusion acts” and the rise of anti-Semitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and from attitudes toward the civilizing “mission” of the United States to contemporary expressions of Islamophobia, antagonism toward the foreign Other has often been inseparable from expressions of religious chauvinism and xenophobia.

Such chauvinism represents an appropriation of the idea of American exceptionalism by participating in the cultural mythology of the American civil religion, which posits both a divine origin of and special destiny for the United States. Scholars of American religion have long traced this theme of American exceptionalism, particularly as it has been expressed through the way in which Americans have read themselves into the biblical narrative as God’s “new Israel,” as a “shining city on a hill,” or as the location for the realization of the Christian millennial hope of a “new heaven and a new earth.” In less biblical but no less religious terms, the United States has been presented as the reification of a “new world order” (novus ordo seclorum, one of the three Latin mottos included on the Great Seal of the United States) or as offering humanity “the last best hope of earth.” By thus conceptualizing “America” as a type of utopian sacred space, these metaphors have simultaneously created the need for establishing the restrictions that mark one’s inclusion or exclusion in this redemptive process. Through identifying the foreign Other—by ethnicity, race, or religion—nativism has been one way to provide this religious function of defining the symbolic boundaries that keep this new “promised land” pure.
Dispersion Theory and Phonology
Authors: Flemming Edward
Published: February 2017

Dispersion Theory concerns the constraints that govern contrasts, the phonetic differences that can distinguish words in a language. Specifically it posits that there are distinctiveness constraints that favor contrasts that are more perceptually distinct over less distinct contrasts. The preference for distinct contrasts is hypothesized to follow from a preference to minimize perceptual confusion: In order to recover what a speaker is saying, a listener must identify the words in the utterance. The more confusable words are, the more likely a listener is to make errors. Because contrasts are the minimal permissible differences between words in a language, banning indistinct contrasts reduces the likelihood of misperception.

The term ‘dispersion’ refers to the separation of sounds in perceptual space that results from maximizing the perceptual distinctiveness of the contrasts between those sounds, and is adopted from Lindblom’s Theory of Adaptive Dispersion, a theory of phoneme inventories according to which inventories are selected so as to maximize the perceptual differences between phonemes. These proposals follow a long tradition of explaining cross-linguistic tendencies in the phonetic and phonological form of languages in terms of a preference for perceptually distinct contrasts.

Flemming proposes that distinctiveness constraints constitute one class of constraints in an Optimality Theoretic model of phonology. In this context, distinctiveness constraints predict several basic phenomena, the first of which is the preference for maximal dispersion in inventories of contrasting sounds that first motivated the development of the Theory of Adaptive Dispersion. But distinctiveness constraints are formulated as constraints on the surface forms of possible words that interact with other phonological constraints, so they evaluate the distinctiveness of contrasts in context. As a result, Dispersion Theory predicts that contrasts can be neutralized or enhanced in particular phonological contexts. This prediction arises because the phonetic realization of sounds depends on their context, so the perceptual differences between contrasting sounds also depend on context. If the realization of a contrast in a particular context would be insufficiently distinct (i.e., it would violate a high-ranked distinctiveness constraint), there are two options: the offending contrast can be neutralized, or it can be modified (‘enhanced’) to make it more distinct.

A basic open question regarding Dispersion Theory concerns the proper formulation of distinctiveness constraints and the extent of variation in their rankings across languages, issues that are tied up with the questions about the nature of perceptual distinctiveness. Another concerns the size and nature of the comparison set of contrasting word-forms required to be able to evaluate whether a candidate output satisfies distinctiveness constraints.
Copular Constructions in Syntax
Authors: den Dikken Marcel , O’Neill Teresa
Published: February 2017

Copular sentences (sentences of the form A is B) have been prominent on the research agenda for linguists and philosophers of language since classical antiquity, and continue to be shrouded in considerable controversy. Central questions in the linguistic literature on copulas and copular sentences are (a) whether predicational, specificational, identificational, and equative copular sentences have a common underlying source; and, if so, (b) how the various surface types of copular sentences are derived from that underlier; (c) whether there is a typology of copulas; and (d) whether copulas are meaningful or meaningless.

The debate surrounding the postulation of multiple copular sentence types relies on criteria related to both meaning and form. Analyses based on meaning tend to focus on the question of whether or not one of the terms is a predicate of the other, whether or not the copula contributes meaning, and the information-structural properties of the construction. Analyses based on form focus on the flexibility of the linear ordering of the two terms of the construction, the surface distribution of the copular element, the restrictions imposed on the extraction of the two terms, the case and agreement properties of the construction, the omissibility of the copula or one of the two terms, and the connectivity effects exhibited by the construction.

Morphosyntactic variation in the domain of copular elements is an area of research with fruitful intersections between typological and generative approaches. A variety of criteria are presented in the literature to justify the postulation of multiple copulas or underlying representations for copular sentences. Another prolific body of research concerns the semantics of copular sentences. In the assessment of scholarship on copulas and copular sentences, the article critiques the ‘multiple copulas’ approach and examines ways in which the surface variety of copular sentence types can be accounted for in a ‘single copula’ analysis. The analysis of copular constructions continues to have far-reaching consequences in the context of linguistic theory construction, particularly the question of how a predicate combines with its subject in syntactic structure.
The Tangkic Languages of Australia: Phonology and Morphosyntax of Lardil, Kayardild, and Yukulta
Authors: Round Erich R.
Published: February 2017

The non–Pama-Nyugan, Tangkic languages were spoken until recently in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia. The most extensively documented are Lardil, Kayardild, and Yukulta. Their phonology is notable for its opaque, word-final deletion rules and extensive word-internal sandhi processes. The morphology contains complex relationships between sets of forms and sets of functions, due in part to major historical refunctionalizations, which have converted case markers into markers of tense and complementization and verbal suffixes into case markers. Syntactic constituency is often marked by inflectional concord, resulting frequently in affix stacking. Yukulta in particular possesses a rich set of inflection-marking possibilities for core arguments, including detransitivized configurations and an inverse system. These relate in interesting ways historically to argument marking in Lardil and Kayardild. Subordinate clauses are marked for tense across most constituents other than the subject, and such tense marking is also found in main clauses in Lardil and Kayardild, which have lost the agreement and tense-marking second-position clitic of Yukulta. Under specific conditions of co-reference between matrix and subordinate arguments, and under certain discourse conditions, clauses may be marked, on all or almost all words, by complementization markers, in addition to inflection for case and tense.
Politeness in Pragmatics
Authors: Kádár Dániel Z.
Published: February 2017

Politeness comprises linguistic and non-linguistic behavior through which people indicate that they take others’ feelings of how they should be treated into account. Politeness comes into operation through evaluative moments—the interactants’ (or other participants’) assessments of interactional behavior—and it is a key interpersonal interactional phenomenon, due to the fact that it helps people to build up and maintain interpersonal relationships. The operation of politeness involves valences: when people behave in what they perceive as polite in a given situation, they attempt to enactment shared values with others, hence triggering positive emotions. The interactants use valenced categories as a benchmark for their production and evaluation of language and behavior, and valence reflects the participants’ perceived moral order of an interactional context/event, that is, their perceptions of ‘how things should be’ in a given situation. Thus, the examination of politeness reveals information about the broader in-group, social, and cultural values that underlie the productive and evaluative interactional behavior of individuals. As politeness is a social action that consists of both linguistic and non-linguistic elements and that embodies a social practice, the research of politeness also provides insights into the social practices that surround individual language use.

Pragmatics-based research on politeness started in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and has become one of the most popular areas in pragmatics. The field has undergone various methodological and theoretical changes. These include the “first wave” of politeness research, in the course of which researchers either attempted to model politeness across languages and cultures by using universal frameworks, or engaged in culture-specific criticism of such frameworks. In the “second wave” of politeness research, researchers attempted to approach politeness as an individualistic, and often idiosyncratic, interactionally co-constructed phenomenon. A key argument of the second wave is that politeness can only be studied at the micro-level of the individual, and so it may be overambitious to attempt to model this phenomenon across languages and cultures. In the “third wave” of politeness research, scholars attempt to model politeness across languages and cultures, without compromising the endeavour of examining politeness as an interactionally co-constructed phenomenon.

Key phenomena studied in politeness research include, among others, impoliteness, intercultural interaction, cross-cultural similarities and differences of politeness, the gendered characteristics of politeness behavior, and convention and ritual. Politeness research is a multidisciplinary field that is engaged in the examination of a wide variety of data types.
Text-Messaging in Africa
Authors: Deumert Ana
Published: February 2017

The concept of Africa requires reflection: what does it mean to study a social phenomenon “in Africa”? Technology use in Africa is complex and diverse, showing various degrees of access across the continent (and in the Diaspora, and digital social inequalities—which are part and parcel of the political economy of communication—shape digital engagement. The rise of mobile phones, in particular, has enabled the emergence of technologically mediated literacies, text-messaging among them. Text-messaging is defined not only by a particular mode of communication (typically written on mobile phones, visual, digital), but it also favors particular topics (intimate, relational, sociable, ludic) and ways of writing (short, non-standard texts that are creative as well as multilingual). The genre of text-messaging thus includes not only short message service (SMS) and (mobile) instant-messaging (which one might call prototypical one-to-one text messages), but also Twitter, an application that, like texting, favors brevity of expression and allows for one-to-many conversations. Access to Twitter is still limited for many Africans, but as ownership of smartphones is growing, so is Twitter use, and the African “Twittersphere” is emerging as an important pan-African space. At times, discussions are very local (as on Ghanaian Twitter), at other times regional (East African Twitter) or global (African Twitter and Black Twitter); all these are emic, folksonomic terms, assigned and discussed by users. Although former colonial languages, especially English, dominate in many prototypical text messages and on Twitter, the genre also provides important opportunities for writing in African languages. The choices made in the digital space echo the well-known debate between Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: the Africanization of the former colonial languages versus writing in African languages. In addition, digital writers engage in multilingual writing, combining diverse languages in one text, and thus offer new ways of writing locally as well as shaping a digitally-mediated pan-African voice that draws on global strategies as well as local meaning.
Construction Morphology
Authors: Booij Geert
Published: February 2017

Construction Morphology is a theory of word structure in which the complex words of a language are analyzed as constructions, that is, systematic pairings of form and meaning. These pairings are analyzed within a Tripartite Parallel Architecture conception of grammar. This presupposes a word-based approach to the analysis of morphological structure and a strong dependence on paradigmatic relations between words. The lexicon contains both words and the constructional schemas they are instantiations of. Words and schemas are organized in a hierarchical network, with intermediate layers of subschemas. These schemas have a motivating function with respect to existing complex words and specify how new complex words can be formed.

The consequence of this view of morphology is that there is no sharp boundary between lexicon and grammar. In addition, the use of morphological patterns may also depend on specific syntactic constructions (construction-dependent morphology).

This theory of lexical relatedness also provides insight into language change such as the use of obsolete case markers as markers of specific constructions, the change of words into affixes, and the debonding of word constituents into independent words. Studies of language acquisition and word processing confirm this view of the lexicon and the nature of lexical knowledge.

Construction Morphology is also well equipped for dealing with inflection and the relationships between the cells of inflectional paradigms, because it can express how morphological schemas are related paradigmatically.
Suppletion
Authors: Veselinova Ljuba N.
Published: February 2017

The term suppletion is used to indicate the unpredictable encoding of otherwise regular semantic or grammatical relations. Standard examples in English include the present and past tense of the verb go, cf. go vs. went, or the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives such as good or bad, cf. good vs. better vs. best, or bad vs. worse vs. worst.

The complementary distribution of different forms to express a paradigmatic contrast has been noticed already in early grammatical traditions. However, the idea that a special form would supply missing forms in a paradigm was first introduced by the neogrammarian Hermann Osthoff, in his work of 1899. The concept of suppletion was consolidated in modern linguistics by Leonard Bloomfield, in 1926. Since then, the notion has been applied to both affixes and stems. In addition to the application of the concept to linguistic units of varying morpho-syntactic status, such as affixes, or stems of different lexical classes such as, for instance, verbs, adjectives, or nouns, the student should also be prepared to encounter frequent discrepancies between uses of the concept in the theoretical literature and its application in more descriptively oriented work. There are models in which the term suppletion is restricted to exceptions to inflectional patterns only; consequently, exceptions to derivational patterns are not accepted as instantiations of the phenomenon. Thus, the comparative degrees of adjectives will be, at best, less prototypical examples of suppletion.

Treatments of the phenomenon vary widely, to the point of being complete opposites. A strong tendency exists to regard suppletion as an anomaly, a historical artifact, and generally of little theoretical interest. A countertendency is to view the phenomenon as challenging, but nonetheless very important for adequate theory formation. Finally, there are scholars who view suppletion as a functionally motivated result of language change.

For a long time, the database on suppletion, similarly to many other phenomena, was restricted to Indo-European languages. With the solidifying of wider cross-linguistic research and linguistic typology since the 1990s, the database on suppletion has been substantially extended. Large-scale cross-linguistic studies have shown that the phenomenon is observed in many different languages around the globe. In addition, it appears as a systematic cross-linguistic phenomenon in that it can be correlated with well-defined language areas, language families, specific lexemic groups, and specific slots in paradigms. The latter can be shown to follow general markedness universals. Finally, the lexemes that show suppletion tend to have special functions in both lexicon and grammar.
Pidgin Languages
Authors: Parkvall Mikael
Published: February 2017

Pidgin languages sometimes form in contact situations where a means of communication is urgently needed between groups lacking a common code. They are typically less elaborate than any of the languages involved in their formation, and in comparison to those, reduction characterizes all linguistic levels.

The process is relatively uncommon, and the life span of pidgins is usually short – most disappear when the contact situation changes, or when another medium of intergroup communication becomes available. In some rare cases, however, they expand (both socially and structurally), and may even nativize, i. e. become mother tongues to their speakers (when they may be re-labelled “creoles”).

Pidgins are severely understudied, and while they are often mentioned as precursors to creoles, few linguists have shown a serious interest in them. As a result, many generalizations have been based on extremely limited amounts of data or even on intuition. Some frequently occurring ones is that pidginization is a case of second language acquisition, that power and prestige are important factors, and that most structures are derived from the input languages. My work with pidgins has led me to believe the opposite to be true in these cases: pidgins form through a trial-and-error process, where anything that is understood by the other party is sanctioned, this process is one of collaborative language creation (rather than one involving one group of teachers and one group of learners), and much of what finds its way in the resultant contact language do so independently of what the creators spoke prior to their encounter.

As for theoretical implications, pidgins may shed light on which features in traditional languages are necessary for communication, and which are superfluous from the point of view of pure information transmission.
Genealogical Classification in Historical Linguistics
Authors: Wichmann Søren
Published: February 2017

Different methods exist for classifying languages, depending on whether the task is to work out the relations among languages already known to be related—internal language classification—or whether the task is to establish that certain languages are related—external language classification.

The comparative method in historical linguistics, developed during the latter part of the 19th century, represents one method for internal language classification; lexicostatistics, developed during the 1950s, represents another. Elements of lexicostatistics have been transformed and carried over into modern computational linguistic phylogenetics, and currently efforts are also being made to automate the comparative method. Recent years have seen rapid progress in the development of methods, tools, and resources for language classification. For instance, computational phylogenetic algorithms and software have made it possible to handle the classification of many languages using explicit models of language change, and data have been gathered for two thirds of the world’s language, allowing for rapid, exploratory classifications. There are also many open questions and venues for future research, for instance: What are the real-world counterparts to the nodes in a family tree structure? How can shortcomings in the traditional method of comparative historical linguistics be overcome? How can the understanding of the results that computational linguistic phylogenetics have to offer be improved?

External language classification, a notoriously difficult task, has also benefitted from the advent of computational power. While, in the past, the simultaneous comparison of many languages for the purpose of discovering deep genealogical links was carried out in a haphazard fashion, leaving too much room for the effect of chance similarities to kick in, this sort of activity can now be done in a systematic, objective way on an unprecedented scale. The ways of producing final, convincing evidence for a deep genealogical relation, however, have not changed much. There is some room for improvement in this area, but even more room for improvement in the way that proposals for long-distance relations are evaluated.
Phonological and Morphological Aspects of Reduplication
Authors: Urbanczyk Suzanne
Published: February 2017

Reduplication is a word-formation process in which all or part of a word is repeated to convey some form of meaning. A wide range of patterns are found in terms of both the form and meaning expressed by reduplication, making it one of the most studied phenomenon in phonology and morphology. Because the form always varies, depending on the base to which it is attached, it raises many issues such as the nature of the repetition mechanism, how to represent reduplicative morphemes, and whether or not a unified approach can be proposed to account for the full range of patterns.