bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Educational Challenges in Italian Social Work
Authors: Genova Angela , Mura Bruna , Bilotti Andrea
Published: October 2024

This chapter investigates the main challenges for social work development toward social justice, social change, and possible future transformation in the coming decades, in the context of Italian social welfare. It discusses three main controversial features: (a) the history of the educational process, (b) the recent statement of ethical and deontological principles in relationship with social worker practices, and (c) the recent regulatory framework for tackling poverty in Italy. The political nature of social work in Italy and the influence of the state, power, and politics on social work education are discussed, showing ambiguous trends in professional development. On the one hand, the state had a crucial role in professionalizing social work in Italy. On the other hand, in the past two decades the social work profession has been subject to a process of bureaucratization that is challenging the professional identity of social workers. This calls for further research into this trend towards de-professionalization. The role of advocacy, social action, and participation in a social movement currently appears, in this context, diminished in the profession in Italy. This demonstrates conceptual and practical failures in developing social work toward social justice and future transformation.
Care-Experienced Social Workers as Relational Activists in the United Kingdom
Authors: Rodgers-Gray Trevor , Starr Michael , Melville-Wiseman Janet
Published: October 2024

Contributions in Part VI of the handbook provide hope that social work is part of the world that is making considerable progress and that there are consistent and continuing efforts by various stakeholders in developing educational standards and practice standards in social work. This concluding section of the handbook contains 11 well-researched and timely contributions covering diverse countries and political contexts. Advancing social work education, curricula, practice teaching, and pedagogy is an important mission that needs to be taken up by professional associations and by the state in every country, especially in developing and less developed countries.
Governmentalizing the “Social Work Subject”
Authors: Whelan Joe
Published: October 2024

Social work within liberal welfare states is reflective of a particular welfare ideology and is constituted as a residual social service. In Ireland, social work attains legal-rational status through professionalization and corporate governance, which now defines what both is and isn’t social work in a way that eschews social justice as a core part of the profession. This has led to an “epistemic schism” and, resultingly, a form of “epistemic injustice” which demotes social justice and service-user knowledge in favor of instrumentalism. In the absence of social justice, the question arises of what practice concepts social work in Ireland mobilizes to governmentalize its “subjects.” In exploring this question, the chapter argues that governmentalization takes on a theological character through the mobilization of deeply embedded social technologies. For those newly entering the profession, this may lead to the “unfulfilled promise of social justice.”
Power, Politics, and Social Work Education
Authors: Baikady Rajendra , Gao Jiangao
Published: October 2024

The central goal of this chapter is to understand the political nature of social work academics in India and China. This chapter is based on the findings of a larger international study involving social work educators from both India and China. The chapter is divided into two parts—the first half outlines the origin, development, and growth of social work in India and China; the second half addresses the following questions: What shapes social work in India and China? Is social work political or apolitical? What are the nature of social work and the functions of political social work in India and China?
Asymmetrical Relationships in International Developmental Social Work Practices
Authors: Higashida Masateru
Published: October 2024

The relationships and politics among stakeholders can be crucial in determining the nature of practices related to international social work and development. This chapter briefly overviews the historical background and conceptual development of international social work. From the perspective of international developmental social work, it focuses on the asymmetrical relationships between insiders and outsiders in practice, including different positionalities and potential power dynamics among the stakeholders. While the relationship among stakeholders, including insiders and outsiders, is likely to be asymmetrical, it is not static but dynamic, changeable, and hybrid. Finally, this chapter highlights the significance of the reflective perspective, dialogue, and the co-creation of knowledge for the practice of critical international developmental social work.
Politicized Social Work and Value Conflicts
Authors: Jeevasuthan Subramaniam , Sivakumaran Shamila
Published: October 2024

Since the commencement of the Ceylon School of Social Work in Sri Lanka in 1952, values have impacted social work paradigms, aims, and expectations of social work and welfare program beneficiaries and directed the change agent. These values and paradigms are largely created by those in positions of power, resulting in a standard, or norm, that is not applicable across groups, leading to value-practice inconsistencies. Since the country’s founding, an ethnic, middle-class majority has defined societal aims and expectations for its citizens, with social workers serving as brokers, advocates, and assemblers. The ethnic majority (Sinhalese) has been the focus of policies and actions by successive regimes that employ social control measures. Using critical analysis, this study will demonstrate the conflicts between values in social work rhetoric and practice, within the context of power and control, on micro and macro levels in Sri Lankan social work context.
Reinventing Social Work Education in a Superdiverse Global Society
Authors: Baikady Rajendra , Przeperski Jaroslaw , S. M. Sajid , Islam M. Rezaul
Published: October 2024

The concluding chapter of the handbook brings fresh perspectives on political social work and policy practices by social workers. It also provides a deeper understanding of issues related to defining political social work, developing a curriculum for political social work, encouraging the political participation of social work students and educators, and encouraging policy advocacy among social work practitioners. The discussion in this handbook centers on the phenomena of power, politics, and social work. Fifty well-researched and evidence-based contributions from different regions and regimes examine the status of social work education, practice, and research in relation to different political systems and explore how social work educators, students, and practitioners can use the political system to create social change. Several chapters in this book provide a closer look at the relationship between social work and government and how social workers can be a powerful tool in bringing about social transformation and addressing societal issues in contemporary global society.
Making Sense of Power and Politics in Everyday Practice through the 3 Ps
Authors: Charfe Lowis , Eichsteller Gabriel
Published: October 2024

The Danish social pedagogical concept of the 3 Ps enables students to critically reflect on how professional, personal, and private aspects of the self are interwoven and what this means for their practice. Power and politics are important dimensions of the 3 Ps, stimulating critical reflection on how students use their professional power to address social inequality, how their personal ethos enables them to work in an authentically anti-oppressive way—conscious of their power and privilege—and whether they hold views that would compromise their relational support and should therefore be kept private. Drawing on concrete practice examples, the chapter illustrates how the 3 Ps enable social work educators to help students and practitioners navigate the uncertainties and complexities they encounter in everyday practice, with a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of power and politics not as oppositional forces but as important perspectives that instill human rights.
Power, Politics, and Social Work in England
Authors: Harris John
Published: October 2024

Social work in England, as elsewhere, is often seen as a straightforward response to self-evident human needs and/or as the outcome of “professional projects” pursued by social workers. In contrast to such views, in this chapter social work is regarded as a contingent activity, conditioned by and dependent upon the political context from which it emerges and in which it engages. This is evident in and illustrated by consideration of how power and politics have shaped the development and delivery of state social work in England, initially as part of the postwar social democratic welfare state and then through its transformation under the impact of neoliberalism. As part of the postwar social democratic consensus on welfare, English social work was a state-mediated profession, embedded in the state’s organizational structures, shaped by central government’s legislation and policies, and delivered by local government. Over the past 40 years, social work has been transformed and become part of a changed political settlement about the nature of and arrangements for providing social work within neoliberal discourse. Analysis of these two historical moments in English social work, and the discursive shift that has taken place, shows that the political contexts, and their accompanying welfare regimes, have been key in shaping the manner in which social work has been constituted and enacted. The current neoliberal discursive formation constructs social work through markets, managerialism, and shifting responsibility from the state to the individual citizen.
Corporal Punishment
Authors: Moen Ole Martin , Sterri Aksel B.
Published: October 2024

Corporal punishment is punishment by means of the infliction of bodily pain. In this chapter we discuss the ethical permissibility of corporal punishment, focusing on the method of judicial caning as this is carried out in Singapore. We compare the overall effects of this type of corporal punishment to incarceration in three domains: the welfare of individual convicts (section 14.1), fairness across different categories of convicts (section 14.2), and the welfare of society at large (section 14.3). We argue it is a mistake to assume that it is more humane to inflict psychological pain over long stretches of time (as in the case of incarceration) than to inflict intense bodily pain over a very short period of time (as in the case of corporal punishment). We conclude that although there are downsides to corporal punishment that should be taken very seriously, this method of punishment also has a number of upsides.
The Definition of Punishment
Authors: Thomsen Frej Klem
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the different ways in which punishment can be defined and the choices doing so requires. It argues that contrary to conventional philosophical aspirations there may not be a definition of punishment fit for all purposes, but that we can avoid conceptual confusion and normative malleability by precisely defining the sense of punishment at stake in a given context. The chapter first introduces a classical definition of punishment and the difficulties it encounters. In order to frame the analysis, the chapter then briefly considers the more abstract topic of what it means to define a concept such as punishment, and what our definitional desiderata might be—that is, what it can mean for one definition of punishment to be superior to another. On the basis of these preliminaries, the chapter considers six central questions that arise when defining punishment: 1) Must punishment be in response to wrongdoing? 2) Must punishment be of the culpable? 3) Must the punisher be an authority? 4) Must punishment impose hard consequences? 5) Must punishment be intentional? 6) Must punishment communicate censure? For each of these questions, the chapter reviews arguments for both affirmative and negative responses. A brief final section then summarizes, considers the implications of adopting various definitions, and concludes.
Responsibility and Defenses
Authors: Morse Stephen J.
Published: October 2024

This chapter addresses the role of responsibility in sentencing. After a brief review of the history of sentencing justifications and practices, the chapter turns in detail to the justifications for state blame and punishment, which are the goals of criminal justice in general and sentencing in particular. The chapter then addresses current mitigating factors and how they are applied in both capital and non-capital sentencing. Constitutional constraints on sentencing are also considered. The last section provides an immodest proposal for sentencing that tries to balance the need for individualization with social safety and to cabin judicial discretion to further the goal of equality.
Mens Rea
Authors: Baron Marcia
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on one particular mens rea issue: heat of passion, or the “temperature” of the crime. To what extent and in what way should it be a mitigating factor? A standard view is that one who kills in the heat of passion has lost control. This chapter argues that “loss of control” is a slippery and not very helpful notion, and that once it is disambiguated, and the notion that the action was (quasi-)involuntary is excised from it, what remains is essentially an idea (developed more fully below) that we find in a well-known nineteenth-century case, Maher: a killing in the heat of passion—insofar as mitigation is in order—“is the result of…temporary excitement, by which the control of reason was disturbed, rather than of any wickedness of heart or cruelty or recklessness of disposition.” Importantly, that temporary excitement was generated not primarily by the defendant, but by the situation. A killing in the heat of passion is thus less fully attributable to the agent than is a cold-blooded killing. Also relevant is that the passion (though not the action based on it) was justified, given the provocation.
Juvenile and Very Old Offenders
Authors: Yaffe Gideon
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses the grounds for leniency in our punishments to both juvenile and elderly offenders. The chapter argues against three attractive explanations, often presupposed in the popular press, for why the distinctive neuroscientific and psychological features of children support leniency in their punishment. As an alternative, the chapter argues that we should be lenient towards children because of their circumscribed political entitlements, particularly that they lack the vote. Since by contrast the elderly are enfranchised, this is not the reason to be lenient, when we should be, to them. It is argued that in the case of elderly offenders we should be lenient in our punishment only if they in fact have psychological defects that diminish their responsibility, defects of a sort that diminish the responsibility of anyone suffering from them regardless of age.
Criminal Records and the Labor Market
Authors: Petersen Thomas Søbirk
Published: October 2024

The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, we shall present and critically discuss two central objections to the current and commonest use of criminal records in the labor market. The two objections are: that such use is harmful to the well-being of ex-offenders, their relatives, future possible victims of crime; and that the use of criminal records necessarily involves wrongful discrimination. It will be argued that while the harm objection is indeed convincing, the objection from discrimination is not convincing at all. Second, the aim is to present details of a proposal designed to mitigate the harm that ex-offenders, their relatives, and future possible victims of crime may be subjected to as a result of the use of criminal records in the labor market. This proposal is called “Relevant Matching.” Relevant Matching will be defended against the following five objections: i) the Relevant Matching proposal is difficult and expensive to apply; ii) it is not crime-preventive enough compared with the preventive effects of the current use of criminal records in the labor market; iii) it is morally problematic, because employers have a right to know who they are hiring, including details of the applicant’s criminal records; iv) it is a form of morally problematic double punishment; and v) it involves unequal treatment of job applicants (i.e., those with a criminal record and those without).
Guilty Pleas
Authors: Holmen Sebastian Jon
Published: October 2024

In most criminal justice systems, many defendants who plead guilty to committing a crime receive a sentence reduction. This chapter discusses the claim that such guilty plea discounts exert coercive pressure on defendants to an extent that makes their decision to plead guilty involuntary. It argues that the conception of coercion that proponents of the concern rely on is flawed. Other approaches to sustaining the objection are then examined that draw heavily on the philosophical literature on coercion, but it is argued that none of them imply that guilty plea discounts are generally coercive. Finally, the chapter demonstrates why one can consistently claim that guilty plea discounts are usually not coercive while maintaining that trial penalties usually are coercive.
Punishment and Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Ryberg Jesper
Published: October 2024

Suppose that computer scientists and engineers have developed a brand-new algorithm which is designed to determine sentences in individual criminal cases. Suppose, furthermore, that it seems that this algorithm is actually very good at doing this job. Would it then be justified to replace human sentencing judges with the sentencing algorithm? The answer to this question obviously depends upon many things. However, in this chapter focus is placed narrowly on the question of how we should compare human judges and the algorithm with regard to how well each is doing the job of determining the severity of the appropriate sentences. It is argued that, due to both theoretical and practical reasons, we do to a large extent currently lack the penal ethical resources to answer this question. The impetus behind these considerations is the assumption that the question may well become urgent in a not very distant future and that, in the absence of the requisite ethical considerations, there is a significant risk that decisions on this matter will be made on insufficient or even ethically arbitrary grounds.
Self-Defense Theories
Authors: Pereboom Derk
Published: October 2024

This article concerns theories of criminal justice grounded in the right to self-defense. The self-defense theories for treatment of criminals that are of special interest are those that stand to secure ecumenical support by crucially relying only on a fairly uncontroversial right of self-defense, more precisely a right to harm in self-defense and defense of others. The ecumenism is secured by avoiding reliance on controversial justifications such as classical retributivism and those that fall prey to a powerful use objection. The theory for criminal jurisprudence that the author defends features incapacitation justified by the right to self-defense and defense of others conceived in this way together with limited additional general deterrence that does involves use of persons, but not use of persons merely as means.
Silence and Transitional Justice
Authors: Eastmond Marita , Mannergren Selimovic Johanna
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the role of silence in transitional justice. Silence is more than the absence of speech since silence in human societies can serve numerous purposes in human interaction, social meanings, and political implications. Moreover, silence conveys difficult experiences and sensitive messages more effectively than speech, which also assists in rebuilding trust and restoring relations. The chapter also elaborates on the broad range of possibilities silence offers as a means of communication in war-torn communities. It cites that silence and its semantic and performative potential opens up critical enquiries into the disjunctures between the transitional justice paradigm and the lived experiences of transitions.
Byron’s Celebrity Revisited
Authors: Mole Tom
Published: October 2024

This essay considers approaches to Byron that focus on the poet’s celebrity. It examines why accounts of Byron’s celebrity emerged when they did, what varieties they have taken, and how they have informed approaches to other individuals. It then considers what these approaches contribute to our understanding of Byron, why they might be worthwhile, and what future avenues of research might be pursued. The essay traces a productive convergence around the year 2000 between developments in Byron Studies and an increasingly sophisticated approach to celebrity culture emerging in Cultural Studies. It then traces how critics of Byron’s celebrity have widened the discussion to include his readers and the broader cultural phenomenon of ‘Byronism’. The essay concludes that revisiting Byron’s celebrity allows us to locate him more securely within the emerging discourse of celebrity history and in relation to the fame culture of his time.
Byron and the Critics in the New Millennium
Authors: Pomarè Carla
Published: October 2024

This chapter surveys the main trends that have surfaced in the field of Byron Studies, intertwining with the developments of literary theory. The dialogue across linguistic, literary, and disciplinary boundaries explored here has provided new approaches to three thematic clusters in Byron criticism. First is the relationship between Byron’s personality and his work, focusing on cultural constructs such as Byron’s masks, his mobility, ‘Byromania’, his takes on gender and race, and his concern for the body as a site of meaning. The second cluster deals with Byron’s ‘thought’, exploring his links with philosophical scepticism, his use of Romantic irony, the religious unorthodoxy or spiritual overtones of his works, and his notion of history and controversial political views, as well as reading him through the lens of the critique of anthropocentrism. The last cluster consists of new formalist approaches to Byron’s writing, covering its generic hybridity, overt intertextuality, and polyglossic qualities.
Byron and Italian Literature
Authors: Rawes Alan
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses Byron’s formal and thematic engagements with Italian literature, especially the work of Alfieri, Casti, Dante, Pulci, and Tasso, in Beppo and Don Juan, ‘The Lament of Tasso’, The Prophecy of Dante, and Marino Faliero. It focuses particularly on Byron’s adoption of the ottava rima form and his exploration of Italian literature for alternative futures for the Byronic Hero. It argues that the Byronic Hero exposes various fundamental problems with the Western tradition of heroism, problems Byron looks to Italian literature to resolve. In Beppo, Casti offers him a comedic path. Tasso offers the idea of poetry as an escape, though this escape proves ultimately flawed. Dante suggests the idea that religious faith might resolve Byron’s issues with heroism, and also posits a libertarian rechannelling of the Byronic Hero’s heroism, but this is problematized by Alfieri. Byron does not, then, resolve the crisis in heroism that his hero figure exposes, but these works, in their engagements with Italian literature, represent a profound exploration of masculine heroism in Western culture.
Don Juan in the Ottoman East Dis/Continuities in Cantos V–VIII
Authors: Saglia Diego
Published: October 2024

As with the English Cantos, those set in Constantinople and Ismail constitute a discrete narrative sequence within Don Juan, one whose apparently seamless plot progression is criss-crossed by continuities and discontinuities in relation to the poem’s previous instalments. Discontinuities particularly concern the position of these cantos in the poem’s compositional history during the fraught period of 1821–22, as well as a representation of the Ottoman East which knowingly reprises and relentlessly subverts familiar orientalist topoi. In keeping with Don Juan’s pervasive medley mode, Cantos V–VIII are built on an interplay of dis/continuities forcing readers uninterruptedly to identify and decode multiple, ever-varying lines of argument about excess, consumption, eroticism, and war, and held together by a central thread of reflections on power. Investigating the thematic and structural peculiarities of this section of Don Juan, this chapter suggests that we read it as a unit within the poem that consistently engages with questions of authority and control through a distinctive interweaving of figurative protocols, historical-ideological materials, and metaliterary references.
Byron and the Victorians
Authors: Wootton Sarah
Published: October 2024

Lord Byron is a unique and ubiquitous presence in Victorian literature. The cultural impact and transnational reach of this Romantic icon is unparalleled. Byron became a touchstone for Victorian writers eager to cultivate a Byronic posture or define themselves against the populist cult of Byronism. Even commentators who cut their critical teeth on censuring Byron praised his poetry and commended his championing of political causes. This chapter revisits the remarkable history of Byronism in the Victorian period by re-focusing attention away from notable detractors and devotees to writers who, while immersed in Byron’s poetry, sought to challenge the codifying effects of the Byronic. Placing a spotlight on the writings of Byron’s immediate heirs – Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Brontë among them – uncovers a dynamic and multivalent influence that extends outwards beyond echoes and borrowings to stylistic hybridity and experiments with form. How instrumental is the ‘elastic shape’ of Byron’s poetry, as Virginia Woolf would come to regard it, to Barrett Browning’s ‘novel in verse’, Aurora Leigh (1856), and Brontë’s ‘poetic’ novel, Wuthering Heights (1847)? This chapter considers Victorian authors who formulated an enduring yet adaptive sense of the ‘Byronic’, and especially of Byron’s poetry steering their writing into the hinterlands between poetry and prose, with far-reaching implications for how we understand his legacy.
Isn’t It Byronic Reading Byron in the Social Media Age
Authors: Taylor Joanna E.
Published: October 2024

This chapter aims to assess what is understood as ‘Byronic’ in the social media age, with data from Twitter as a test case. It demonstrates an approach to low-tech digital humanities to construct multi-scalar readings of, first, responses to Byron from the platform and, second, the poems that emerge as key texts from the dataset. The chapter argues that tweets about Byron continue a long tradition of anthologizing his poetry for popular consumption. Specifically, by tracking tweets tagged with the hashtags #byron and #lordbyron between 2016 and 2021, it demonstrates surprisingly that, for many readers on Twitter in this period, Byron was a nature poet more than anything else. The chapter finds that quotations shared on Twitter were more than simply extracts dissevered from Byron’s poetry, biography, or context; they had the potential to stand as metonymies for a Byronic poetics that created a bridge between nineteenth- and twenty-first-century environments.
Themes in Vowel Harmony
Authors: Ritter Nancy A. , van der Hulst Harry
Published: October 2024

This chapter outlines the structure of the volume and reviews the central questions that are posed in the study of vowel harmony with reference to the chapters in the handbook where these questions are addressed. We first consider a possible definition of vowel harmony (VH) and then discuss a variety of aspects of this phenomenon such as what counts as a possible domain of VH, whether VH is directional or bidirectional. We then turn to the typological distinction between root-controlled vs. dominant/recessive VH, followed by various formal mechanisms that have been proposed to analyze VH. We conclude with reviewing phonetic correlates of harmonic features, matters of historical change and methods for data coverage.
Minor Vowel Harmony
Authors: Smith Norval
Published: October 2024

Processes involving minimal leftward harmony are sometimes referred to as umlaut, although this term often implies that the trigger of the harmony is not visible (on the surface at least). One thing the two processes dealt with here have in common is that the harmonic effects proceed one syllable rightward—a kind of rightward umlaut. In both cases the harmonic cause and effect are surface-visible. They differ in that in one case an assimilation of an underlying syllable is involved, while in the other an epenthetic vowel carries the harmonic effect. Both cases involve Scottish languages—Germanic Scots dialects and Celtic Scottish Gaelic dialects.
Phrasal Vowel Harmony
Authors: Downing Laura J. , Krämer Martin
Published: October 2024

This short chapter surveys phonological and morphosyntactic parameters conditioning cross-word vowel harmony (VH) and illustrates select parameters by providing details of the VH systems of Gua, Vata, Kinande, Somali, and Wolof. It concludes with arguments for why cross-word harmony must be considered a phonological, not a phonetic, phenomenon. VH is typically claimed to be word bound, and the ‘word’ is usually taken to refer to the phonological word, not the grammatical word, since compounds are often disharmonic. Indeed, VH has been claimed to rarely cross lexical word boundaries, either within compounds or within phrases. However, it is not difficult to find languages where VH applies in a domain larger than the prosodic or grammatical word.
Vowel Harmony in Pre-Generative Phonology
Authors: Kenstowicz Michael J.
Published: October 2024

This chapter surveys descriptions of vowel harmony (VH) in three pre-generative frameworks: Boasian Descriptivism, American Structuralism (AS), and Firthian Prosodic Analysis (PA). In the absence of any general discussion of harmony in these traditions, the chapter examines their analyses of individual languages with an eye to what they reveal about the underlying approaches, with a focus on AS and PA. For AS, the segmental phoneme is the basic unit of phonological representation, entailing a conception of harmony as a segmental alternation. For the languages surveyed (Yawelmani Yokuts, Hungarian, Turkish), VH is stated at an abstract morphophonemic level. In PA a phonological expression is factored into segment-like phonematic units overlaid by stretches of phonetic features termed prosodies. VH is analyzed by specifying the edges of these prosodic domains. The chapter discusses PA analyses of three canonical harmonies (Turkish, Akan, Igbo) as well as a consonant-induced prosody in Tigre.
Vowel Harmony in Government Phonology
Authors: Polgárdi Krisztina
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines Government Phonology (GP), a principles-and-parameters approach to phonological representations employing monovalent elements and relationships of government and licensing. In GP analyses of vowel harmony (VH), spreading of the harmonic element results from a governing relation between nuclei adjacent on the independently motivated level of nuclear projection. The chapter covers three issues in detail. Concerning the typology of VH, Element Theory predicts the existence of palatal/I, labial/U, and lowering/A-harmony in terms of spreading; ATR harmony as head agreement; and backing, unrounding, or raising harmony as reduction. Restrictions on the domain of harmony are accounted for utilizing the distinction between synthetic and analytic morphology, together with blocking in non-derived environments, as well as employing licensing constraints defining possible element combinations. The behavior of neutral vowels as transparent or opaque is proposed to follow from whether they contain the harmonic element in their representation.
Data-Driven Approaches to Vowel Harmony
Authors: Knowles Rebecca , Sanders Nathan
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores fundamental ideas and challenges in using statistical and computational methods for the analysis of vowel harmony from text corpora. These methods are centered on the quantification and visualization of the degree and type of harmony in a language, which can be used for cross-linguistic comparison, measuring historical change in harmony, and unsupervised identification of previously unknown harmony patterns. Models using these methods can differ greatly in robustness, interpretability, and generality. A successful and appropriate model requires consideration of many factors, including the types of corpora to be analyzed, the effect of morphological structure and phonological alternations on harmony, and the potential for anomalous patterns in proper names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, and similar types of words. The chapter includes a general overview of data-driven approaches, important considerations in selecting and using data sources, linguistic considerations and how different models handle them, and work on data-driven visualizations of harmony.
Vowel Harmony in Language Acquisition
Authors: Goad Heather , Ozburn Avery
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the acquisition of vowel harmony (VH) by first- and second-language learners as well as the use of VH as a cue for word segmentation by pre-verbal infants and children at early stages of word production. Across studies, it is found that VH is acquired early. This holds independent of the features involved (back, round, height, or advanced tongue root), the nature of the trigger (root or stressed vowel), whether the language is agglutinative or not, and whether harmony is categorical or variable. Most errors involve overapplication, indicating that VH is productive for learners; underapplication errors are observed for first-language learners, but are largely due to incomplete acquisition of the vowel system. Although VH is articulatorily advantageous, spontaneous emergence of harmony among first-language learners is surprisingly rare, in contrast to total vowel agreement, which is commonly attested for learners of languages both with and without VH.
Vowel Harmony in Chadic Languages
Authors: Pearce Mary , Lovestrand Joseph
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on Chadic languages, which typically demonstrate feature spreading within a word. The result can be partial or total agreement between the vowels of a word, as well as palatalization or labialization of consonants across the word. In the latter case, these processes are often referred to as prosodies. Central Chadic languages have the most robust prosody systems, to the point where it is claimed that some languages have no contrastive vowel qualities. However, the majority of Chadic languages have only height harmony and/or fronting and rounding harmony (rarely advanced tongue root-type harmony) across an inventory of five to seven vowels, and some have no vowel harmony at all. From a historical perspective, it can be argued that the oldest Chadic systems had a minimal number of contrastive vowel qualities, and that larger inventories of vowels are derived from an interaction of these few vowels with prosodies of palatalization and labialization.
Vowel Harmony in Turkic Languages
Authors: Washington Jonathan North
Published: October 2024

This chapter describes in detail the patterns of vowel harmony (VH) attested throughout the modern Turkic language family, with reference to historical varieties, surveying areas which have received attention in the literature, and highlighting areas where questions remain. A representative overview of the range of phenomena attested throughout the family is presented, referencing relevant literature. Two main types of productive VH are attested in Turkic languages: anteriority harmony and rounding harmony, both perseverative. The former is attested in nearly every Turkic language, where it is fully iterative or unbounded, and the latter is attested less widely and with varying implementations. Less common patterns include non-iterative anticipatory umlaut and a sporadically attested partially iterative perseverative height-harmony phenomenon. While generally a question of formalisation and analysis, VH targets, or harmonizing vowels, may be treated as archiphonemes, defined descriptively as vowels with particular harmonization patterns, or structurally as featurally underspecified vowels.
Vowel Harmony in Tungusic Languages
Authors: Li Bing , Smith Norval
Published: October 2024

This chapter presents a description of vowel harmony (VH) in Tungusic languages, based on the hypothesis that earlier Tungusic and most modern Tungusic languages are characterized by retracted tongue root (RTR) harmony, drawing empirical data from Even, Orochen, Evenki, Solon, Nanaj, Classical Manchu, and varieties of Modern Manchu, including Sibe. It is clearly demonstrated that on the RTR hypothesis VH in Tungusic languages can be better understood both synchronically and diachronically. It also considers the possibility that VH in Jurchen could be described on the basis of the RTR hypothesis. Rounding harmony of different patterns and the shift in pattern in Tungusic are also investigated.
Vowel Harmony in Basque
Authors: Hualde José Ignacio
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses processes similar to vowel harmony in the Basque language. Basque does not have any true vowel harmony processes, if by this term we mean regular iterative processes affecting all vowels within a word or similar morphological domain. Nevertheless, in different Basque varieties we do find several processes of vowel assimilation across consonants that are worth discussing in this respect. These include the raising of /a/ to /e/ after a high vowel, the raising of /e/ to /i/ before a high vowel, especially when this results in a domain where all vowels in the word are high, and the rounding of /i/ before /y/.
Vowel Harmony in Greek
Authors: Revithiadou Anthi
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines harmony processes in Greek, a non-harmonic language that exhibits two intriguing yet somewhat marginal patterns of vowel assimilation in specific dialects. The first pattern, documented in Inner Asia Minor Greek, involves the spreading of features from a suffixal vowel to a root/stem vowel. Interestingly, this process is restricted to nouns and evolved due to significant contact-induced changes influenced by Turkish. The second pattern, observed in the southeastern branch, is sonority-driven and involves the copying of a high-sonority pen-initial vowel to a word-initial nucleus. In both assimilation patterns, the harmonizing features originate outside morphologically (root/stem) or phonologically (initial-syllable) privileged positions, and require licensing from such privileged positions to establish an uninterrupted span of identical features, presumably for reasons of perceptual ease.
Vowel Harmony in Armenian
Authors: Vaux Bert , Addy Suhairi Ariwan
Published: October 2024

This chapter outlines the harmony system of the Goris dialect of Armenian. This variety displays a number of interesting features, including variable transparency vs. opacity of neutral vowels, locally optional bidirectional harmony targeting weak (reduced or epenthetic) vowels, with [round] harmony parasitic on [back] harmony, and complex ordering interactions between vowel harmony and other phonological processes such as vowel reduction and epenthesis. The chapter proposes that the dialect exhibits three distinct harmony processes. Suffix/enclitic harmony propagates contrastive [back] values rightward, affecting suffixes, connectives, and enclitics. Weak vowels optionally undergo weak back harmony and parasitic round harmony. These processes are locally optional, and bidirectionally propagate [back] and [round] within the lexical word (prefix–root–suffix, excluding clitics); [round] spreading is parasitic on [back] harmony.
Vowel Harmony in Caucasian Languages
Authors: Butskhrikidze Marika
Published: October 2024

This chapter aims at giving a survey on vowel harmony (VH) in the Caucasian languages. We found that VH is attested only in the East Caucasian languages and that there is no in-depth study of this phenomenon. Based on the fragmentary data discussed in individual language grammars/journal articles, one can conclude that VH exists to some extent in almost all languages of the Lezgic group. Four Lezgic languages receive special attention: Lezgian, Tabasaran, Aghul, and Khinalug. Both progressive and regressive labial, palatal, and height harmony are attested in both nouns and verbs. The data of these four languages indicate that VH is predominantly stem-controlled. It is sensitive to stress placement and can be blocked by secondary consonantal articulations. Further investigation is needed to determine if VH results from contact with the Azeri language or language-internal developments.
Kant on Property
Authors: Varden Helga
Published: October 2024

This chapter provides an entrance into central discussions regarding Kant’s account of property. The first section shows how Kant engages and transforms important, related proposals from Hobbes and Locke as well as how the ‘libertarian’ and ‘liberal republican’ interpretive traditions differ in their readings on these points. Since Kantian theories for a long time didn’t focus on Kant’s Doctrine of Right but instead followed Rawls’s lead by developing Kantian theories grounded on Kant’s (meta-) ethical writings, the second section focuses on property discussions found in the Rawlsian tradition. The final section shows how important contemporary work in the Kantian tradition goes beyond Rawlsian, libertarian, and liberal republican concerns of distributive justice among free and equal citizens, to include questions central to, for example, the philosophy of care, feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, philosophy of sex and love, and environmental philosophy.
Kant on the Highest Good
Authors: Englert Alexander T. , Chignell Andrew
Published: October 2024

Kant’s accounts of the Highest Good and the moral argument for God and immortality are central features of his philosophy. But both involve lingering puzzles. This chapter first explores what the Highest Good is for Kant and the role it plays in a complete account of ethical life. It then focuses on whether the Highest Good involves individuals only, or whether it also connects with Kant’s doctrines about the moral progress of the species. In conclusion, it looks into three ways of articulating the moral argument for God and immorality that take our commitment to the Highest Good as their point of departure.
Kant on Religion
Authors: Winegar Reed
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines Kant’s philosophical views regarding religion, including both rational theology and revealed religion. It illustrates Kant’s views regarding the content of religious belief, including both the concept of God and the contents of biblical scripture, by focusing on the importance of symbolism in Kant’s overall treatment of religion. Some commentators have interpreted Kant’s appeals to symbolism as furthering a deflationary or ‘as if’ approach to the contents of religious belief. However, this chapter illustrates that Kant’s appeals to religious symbolism serve both inflationary and deflationary aspects of his religious thought. Finally, the chapter suggests how we might still benefit from a proper appreciation of Kant’s general insight into the importance of symbols for our cognitive and practical lives.
Kant on the Pure Forms of Sensibility
Authors: Gomes Anil , Stephenson Andrew
Published: October 2024

For Kant, the human cognitive faculty has two subfaculties: sensibility and the understanding. Kant’s explanation of the possibility of synthetic a priori cognition turns on the claim that each of these faculties has its own pure forms. Sensibility has space and time; the understanding has the categories. In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant argues that space and time are the pure forms of sensibility for human cognizers. But he explicitly leaves open the possibility of there being creatures like us, with both sensibility and understanding, who nevertheless have different pure forms of sensibility. What is the status of the claim that we cannot know whether space and time are the pure forms of sensibility for all discursive cognizers? How does Kant argue for it, and how does it relate to his doctrine of transcendental idealism? This is our topic in this chapter. We suggest that it is not the content of Kant’s argument in the Transcendental Aesthetic which explains his restriction but the method by which he conducts his investigation. And we conclude with some reflections on how this proposal fits with the methodology of the Critical Philosophy more generally.
Kant on the Regulative Role of Reason
Authors: Breitenbach Angela
Published: October 2024

This chapter defends a teleological reading of the regulative role of reason as a broadly end-setting capacity. On this reading, reason in its regulative role sets the systematic unity of cognition as the end of our cognitive activities, and seeks to bring about this unity. The chapter argues for this reading by showing that it accounts for two distinct characterizations we find in Kant of the systematic unity of cognition: one hierarchical, the other holistic. On the hierarchical conception, the systematic unity of cognition is the complete hierarchy of cognitions, with the most general cognitions at the top of the hierarchy and the most particular ones at the bottom. To set the systematic unity of cognition as a goal, on this first conception, is to seek to complete the hierarchy of cognitions. On the holistic conception, the systematic unity of cognition is a unity that is determined by an idea of the whole. To set the systematic unity of cognition as a goal, on this second conception, consists in seeking to make determinate the idea of the whole. While the hierarchical conception has been foregrounded in the literature, the chapter argues that the holistic conception is key to a proper understanding of the regulative role of reason. Kant accounts for this role by integrating the hierarchical in the holistic conception. This teleological reading shows how he can do so, and it implies that the regulative role of reason is a practical capacity, broadly construed.
Kant on Evil
Authors: Merritt Melissa
Published: October 2024

The chapter examines Kant’s thesis about the ‘radical evil in human nature’ developed in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. According to this thesis, the human moral condition is corrupt by default and yet by our own deed; and this corruption is the origin (root, radix) of human badness in all its variety, banality, and ubiquity. While Kant clearly takes radical evil to be endemic in human nature, controversy reigns about how to understand this. Some assume this can only be a synthetic a priori claim about the necessity of radical evil (and thus one requiring a transcendental deduction). However, Kant indicates that while radical evil is inevitable it is not, for that, strictly necessary. The best way to understand this is through a teleological approach that explains how we inevitably bring this corruption upon ourselves in the course of our development. The chapter thereby joins other teleological accounts, but distinctively argues that Kant draws on Stoic natural teleology (specifically the doctrine of oikeiōsis), which he knows through Seneca and Cicero. This background allows us to make sense of the structure of Kant’s argument in ways that shed fresh light on the philosophical content of the thesis about radical evil. It also allows us to see that another hotly debated issue—namely, whether radical evil should be understood in ‘psychological’ or ‘social’ terms—is spurious: we see that these are flip sides of one coin, and are better placed to register the broader ethical significance of this result.