bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Violence, Pacifism, and the Use of Force
Authors: Davis G. Scott
Published: February 2021

This chapter lays out the historical development of Niebuhr’s thought on war and peace in the context of American history and religious thought. It argues that in his early thought he accepts the received wisdom concerning early Christian non-violence, a position that led him to join the “Fellowship of Reconciliation” in 1928. With the Japanese incursions into China in the early 1930s, however, his position began to shift in ways captured in his early exchange with his brother, H. Richard Niebuhr. By the time he delivered the Gifford Lectures, at the very beginning of the Second World War, he has rejected pacifism and begun to develop the positions associated with ‘Christian Realism’. This extended into the early period of nuclear deterrence, though with increasing qualification. By the early 1960s, the perceived lack of restraint led Paul Ramsey to turn to the Catholic just war tradition to articulate a Reformation doctrine of principled love that could clarify which uses of force were acceptable and which had to be rejected. The tradition of Niebuhr persists, however, in such thinkers as John Carlson, whose Christian realist account of war and peace draws directly from Niebuhr and his legacy.
Economic Justice
Authors: Snarr C. Melissa
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses the history and contemporary relevance of Reinhold Niebuhr’s work on economic justice with explicit attention to its gendered and raced dynamics. From his early focus on state socialism and Marxist theory to his later criticism of Marxist religion and eventual embrace of New Deal-style reforms, Niebuhr evolved from a tragic to ironic view of history that emphasized the interplay of freedom, liberty, and justice. While Niebuhr under-analysed the gendered and raced dynamics of the economy that could have made more complex his theorizing of the relationship between private and public morality, he still offers vital lessons for our escalating economic inequality. Attending to how wealth disparity creates unbalanced social power and undermines political democracy, understanding that power must meet power for social change, and realizing that all efforts towards justice are provisional could provide guidance in our contemporary efforts towards greater economic democracy.
Nature and Environment
Authors: Balthrop-Lewis Alda
Published: February 2021

This chapter treats Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought on nature and environment in an effort to evaluate its utility for contemporary environmental politics and ethics. Like a small but growing group of Niebuhrian environmental ethicists, the chapter finds in Niebuhr’s thought both peril and promise. Niebuhr’s anthropological focus leaves him inattentive to the ethical status of the more-than-human world, the intrinsic value of which is a premise for much contemporary environmental ethics and politics. Nonetheless, Niebuhr’s insistence on the social nature of sin and the exigencies of democratic political power should have a more central place in contemporary thinking about the politics of nature and environment. The chapter makes this argument by way of attention to a few themes in Niebuhr’s thought, primarily nuclear science, nature, and industry.
Racial Justice
Authors: West Traci C.
Published: February 2021

Reinhold Niebuhr’s ideas invite us to confront problems of racial justice. Probing questions of method that consider whiteness and white supremacy in US-American life yields guidance for identifying how Christian ethics produces useful approaches to questions of racial justice. Examples from Reinhold Niebuhr’s twentieth-century Christian ethics commentaries on white dominance and his methodological assumptions spark an exploration of how related arguments in twenty-first century Christian ethics and theology analyses of white dominance can contribute. Besides method, concrete racist attitudes and practices in need of Christian ethics disruption are revealed in the politics of immigration seen in Niebuhr’s 1920s claims about German immigrant ethnic identity struggles and addressed by current Christian ethicists on twenty-first-century opposition to welcoming impoverished, migrant brown peoples into the United States.
American Foreign Policy
Authors: Warren Heather A.
Published: February 2021

Reinhold Niebuhr’s ability to analyse the most fundamental aspects of human existence and reckon with them on the grandest scale has remained relevant for American foreign policy since the 1930s. In the contexts of the interwar years, the Second World War, the immediate post-war world, and the Cold War, Niebuhr called attention to the importance of justice, pride, national interest, and prudence in deliberations about the United States’ responsibilities in an interdependent world that faced the menace of communism. The Irony of American History (1952) was his extended examination of America in the new international system, and it included recommendations to guide the making of American foreign policy. Niebuhr’s principles provide insight into US successes and failures in the Vietnam, Bosnian, and Gulf Wars.
Nations and Nationalism
Authors: Paeth Scott
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines the development of Reinhold Niebuhr’s thoughts on nationalism. Over the course of his lifetime, Niebuhr continually returned to the question of nationalism as a factor in international relations, revising his understanding in light of the particular circumstances confronting the United States and the global community. His early writings on German Americanism yielded to a more sceptical analysis of nationalism as a manifestation of collective egoism, but one which could nevertheless provide important resources to human communities. The threat of Fascist nationalism in the 1930s caused him to yet again revise his understanding of nationalism, as a revitalized form of democratic nationalism became necessary to confront it. The Cold War presented the context for Niebuhr’s mature reflection on the subject, advocating for a form of chastened nationalism, which was aware of both its responsibility to confront evil in the world, as well as its own tendencies towards self-delusion and the abuse of power.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Authors: Hauerwas Stanley
Published: February 2021

Despite his sharp criticism of Niebuhr in With the Grain of the Universe, the author of this chapter has a high estimate of Niebuhr’s legacy and of the Jamesian pragmatism that characterizes Niebuhr’s work as a whole. Langdon Gilkey offers a valuable record of the impact of Niebuhr’s energy and imagination on his contemporaries. His insights are compelling and carefully formulated, but they are often separable from the theological framework in which he located them. The continuing power of his insights into sin as pride and sensuality, and his understanding of the relationships between democracy and justice should not obscure the comparative absence of God and the Church from his theology.
The Ironies of Proximate Justice
Authors: Stout Jeffrey
Published: February 2021

History, Reinhold Niebuhr taught, is ironic and often tragic. Idealism makes things worse when put into practice. This side of God’s kingdom, we should approximate justice insofar as we can, but not too single-mindedly. Thinking that justice entails commitment to absolute principles is an idealistic mistake. Niebuhr’s outlook has now held sway in high places for nearly a century, and this chapter argues that it has not worked out well in practice. Tragic choices, supreme emergencies, and lame excuses on the part of officials appear to be multiplying. Leaders first became harder to trust and then downright antinomian. Accountability has atrophied. We have entered an age of permanent war. Principles have more social value than Niebuhr thought.
The 1950s: The Ironies of American Power
Authors: Finstuen Andrew
Published: February 2021

In the 1950s, Reinhold Niebuhr advanced a theology of history rooted in his theology of the Cross. From that vantage point, he challenged conventional, dualistic interpretations of the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, and America’s post-Second World War economic and technological prominence. While he favoured democracy over communism, African American rights over segregation, and abundance over scarcity, he rejected what he thought of as the human pretension to simplify such complex historical phenomena by appeals to American goodness. Instead Niebuhr saw the logic of the Cross as the surest route for navigating the confusion and ironies of history while also creating the conditions for greater forms of justice in history.
The Art of Imperial Politics and the Interminable Frustrations of History
Authors: Bew John
Published: February 2021

This short chapter considers the renewed interest in Niebuhr’s legacy from the middle part of the first decade of the twenty-first century, through the presidency of Barack Obama and into the era of Donald Trump, following his victory in the 2016 presidential election. It places what might be called the Niebuhrian ‘world view’—understood as Christian theology set upon an international historical canvas—against the backdrop of the so-called ‘crisis of world order’, about which much has been written since 2014. It argues that Niebuhr plays a similar role in American intellectual life as Edmund Burke has done in Britain and that his ideas continue to provide a useful guide to the world today.
Two Students
Authors: Lovin Robin
Published: February 2021

Reinhold Niebuhr’s influence extended beyond his own prolific writings and his role as a public intellectual through students who were shaped by their encounters with him during his long career as a teacher at Union Theological Seminary. In his classes, he taught many students who went on to careers in ministry and others who became scholars and writers. He was also a powerful influence on everyone at Union through his sermons in the chapel, and many remembered informal gatherings that Reinhold and Ursula Niebuhr hosted in their home. While it is difficult to formulate meaningful generalizations about so many students, two in particular remind us of the scope of Niebuhr’s influence through his teaching: Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) and Kiyoko Takeda (1917–2018).
What Is Speech? The Question of Coverage
Authors: Schauer Frederick
Published: February 2021

This chapter assesses the question of coverage of the right to freedom of speech. Beneath the language and complexities of the question of coverage, and apart from the misleading question, ‘what is speech?’, is a much simpler question that is necessarily the first question always to be asked: ‘is this a free speech dispute?’. The question of coverage is this question. At times the answer will be determined by an authoritative text. At times it will be answered by examining the underlying point of a distinct and weighty principle of free speech. And at times the answer will be so obviously ‘yes’ or ‘no’ that one may not even recognize that the question is there. But the question, whether explicit or implicit, is always there. Labelling the question as the question of coverage, and distinguishing between coverage and protection, brings to the surface a component that is necessarily part of addressing any free speech issue and any free speech dispute.
Proportionality and Limitations on Freedom of Speech
Authors: Webber Grégoire
Published: February 2021

This chapter studies the depth of judicial and scholarly consensus respecting the principle of proportionality and offers an expository and critical account of proportionality analysis. The fact of disagreement between and within jurisdictions need not deny that the principle of proportionality has merit. However, it does put in doubt the confident claims by some proponents that proportionality is ‘essential’, ‘indispensable’, and ‘unavoidable’ and that, when it comes to rights, it ‘is all and only about proportionality’. To explore these thoughts, and to demonstrate how much of the US debates from the 1950s and 1960s remain apposite today, the chapter explores the appeal of proportionality and balancing for the adjudication of freedom of expression claims and then reviews proportionality’s four evaluations. It concludes by considering the idea that freedom of expression cannot be absolute. It is an idea that is oft-repeated, but one that is based on a mistaken premise.
Freedom of Speech in International Law
Authors: Hamilton Michael
Published: February 2021

This chapter traces the broad contours of the right to freedom of speech as it has evolved in international law, principally under Article 19(2) of the 1996 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR or ‘the Covenant’). Any speech protective principles deriving from the international jurisprudence are qualified by the following factors: the contextual contingency of the value of speech, the inherently limited reach of international scrutiny, the changing nature of the marketplace, and emerging forms of censorship. The chapter then outlines the key human rights treaty protections for freedom of speech, before further exploring the scope of the right. It examines the permissible grounds for speech restriction, highlighting two contested categories of speech—namely, incitement to hatred and glorification of terrorism—where international law not only concedes the low value of such speech, but specifically mandates its prohibition in domestic law. States that introduce broadly framed speech restrictions may claim to be acting in satisfaction of this prohibitory requirement. In consequence, the intensity of any ensuing international scrutiny will inevitably be substantially reduced.
Positive Free Speech: A Democratic Freedom
Authors: Kenyon Andrew T.
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores the positive structural dimensions of the freedom of speech by using a democratic free speech rationale. While far from the only aspect of positive free speech, it offers a useful example of the freedom’s positive dimensions. The chapter focuses on legal conditions underlying public speech and their links to democratic constitutional arrangements. It outlines the general approach before drawing brief comparisons with two well-known US approaches to free speech and media freedom. The chapter then highlights two of the multiple ways in which ‘positive’ can be used in relation to free speech. Positive may concern positive freedom, the idea that freedom is not only a negative liberty but requires support or enablement. It can also be used in terms of a positive right, typically a legal right enforced through courts.
Free Speech and Elections
Authors: Tham Joo-Cheong , Ewing K. D.
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines how elections give rise to special problems relating to speech. In the choice of government and governors, speech needs to be lively and robust, which is not to say of course that speech should be unconstrained. Indeed, the paradox of elections is that they need both freedom and restraint if electoral purposes are to be served. In the context between candidates and parties, who else should be permitted to speak, and what if anything should they be prohibited from saying? In the context of elections, however, what has become a bigger concern in modern liberal democracies is not who may speak and what can they say, but what means can they use, what opportunities and restrictions are to apply to the means used, and how much can be spent in projecting electoral messages? These latter questions do not address the content of speech so much as its volume, but they are urgent questions in light of the exponential increase in the sums spent by candidates, parties, and others in seeking to influence electoral outcomes.
When Is Speech That Causes Unlawful Conduct Protected by Freedom of Speech? The Case of the First Amendment?
Authors: Stone Geoffrey R.
Published: February 2021

This chapter investigates the question of speech causing unlawful conduct. Should speech that causes others to violate the law be protected by the freedom of speech? If those who violate the law can be punished, why not also punish those who cause them to violate the law? For more than two centuries, this question has played a central role in the evolution of First Amendment jurisprudence in the United States. Because the issue has arisen most often in the United States in time of war, the chapter reviews the American experience with this question during the ‘Half War’ with France in 1798, the Civil War, World War I, the Cold War, and over the course of the last half-century. It then offers some concluding observations.
Parades, Picketing, and Demonstrations
Authors: Zick Timothy
Published: February 2021

This chapter focuses on parades, pickets, and demonstrations, which are forms of civic engagement that communicate aspirations, ideas, and, quite often, dissenting opinions to fellow citizens, governments, and broader audiences. For many, gathering together in public, in these and similar forms, is a cathartic act of self-fulfilment and a demonstration of solidarity. Collective action in the form of public gatherings is an integral part of any system of communicative freedom. In the United States, in addition to the freedom of speech, rights to ‘peaceably assemble’ and to ‘petition the Government for a redress of grievances’ are explicitly provided for in the First Amendment to the Constitution. Ultimately, parades, pickets, and demonstrations all further basic expressive values relating to self-governance, the search for truth, and individual autonomy. Nevertheless, Americans seeking to engage in collective modes of expression face a variety of doctrinal, legal, social, and political challenges. The chapter then details how digital connectivity has facilitated expressive opportunities by connecting individuals and supporting new forms of associational activity.
Music and Art
Authors: Tushnet Mark
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores the problem of incorporating music and art into a theory of freedom of speech without also including a far wider range of human activities. Constitution writers and scholars of free expression agree that music and art are covered by principles of free expression. Exactly why they are is a bit unclear, but the unclarity has few practical implications. Examination of the coverage of music and art, though, may reveal something about free expression theory. It may show that that theory deals with subjects sharing a family resemblance rather than resting upon ‘foundations’. If so, the examination has significant theoretical implications—and almost no practical ones. Democratic governments rarely attempt to coercively regulate art and music.
Autonomy and Free Speech
Authors: Mackenzie Catriona , Meyerson Denise
Published: February 2021

This chapter evaluates the relationship between autonomy and freedom of speech, examining a variety of autonomy-based justifications for the importance of speech and especially of freedom of speech. The differences between these justifications relate not only to the different conceptions of autonomy that underpin them, but also to their different responses to the problem of competing autonomy interests. It is plausible to think that the state should respect, protect, and promote the autonomy of everyone—speakers, listeners, thinkers, bystanders, and members of the public at large. Enhancing the autonomy of some might, however, require restricting the speech of others. The liberty-based conceptions of autonomy prioritize the interests of speakers and listeners and hold that the primary obligation of the state is the negative duty not to interfere with the autonomy of individual speakers and listeners. By contrast, the relational conceptions of autonomy hold that the negative liberty interests of individual speakers and hearers should be balanced against the positive duties of the state to promote the social conditions necessary for the development and exercise of autonomy by all citizens.
Freedom of Expression and Democracy
Authors: Bhagwat Ashutosh , Weinstein James
Published: February 2021

This chapter focuses on the relationship between freedom of expression and democracy from both a historical and a theoretical perspective. The term ‘freedom of expression’ includes free speech, freedom of the press, the right to petition government, and freedom of political association. Eighteenth-century proponents of popular government had long offered democratic justifications for freedom of expression. The chapter then demonstrates that freedom of political expression is a necessary component of democracy. It describes two core functions of such expression: an informing and a legitimating one. Finally, the chapter examines the concept of ‘democracy’, noting various ways in which democracies vary among themselves, as well as the implications of those variations for freedom of expression. Even before democratic forms of government took root in the modern world.
Introduction
Authors: Gussenhoven Carlos , Chen Aoju
Published: February 2021

This chapter identifies three recent developments that have helped to promote the study of language prosody in recent years. It briefly reviews definitions of language prosody, points out that these vary in their emphasis on form or function, and concludes that definitions are closely linked to the level of understanding that has been reached in the field. The chapter presents an account of the decisions that were made at the outset of the project and lays out the handbook’s structure. A final section lists a number of topics that have not been included and gives reasons for their absence from the survey.
Speech Rhythm and Timing
Authors: White Laurence , Malisz Zofia
Published: February 2021

Speech events do not typically exhibit the temporal regularity conspicuous in many musical rhythms. In the absence of such surface periodicity, hierarchical approaches to speech timing propose that nested prosodic domains, such as syllables and stress-delimited feet, can be modelled as coupled oscillators and that surface timing patterns reflect variation in the relative weights of oscillators. Localized approaches argue, by contrast, that speech timing is largely organized bottom-up, based on segmental identity and subsyllabic organization, with prosodic lengthening effects locally associated with domain heads and edges. This chapter weighs the claims of the two speech timing approaches against empirical data. It also reviews attempts to develop quantitative indices (‘rhythm metrics’) of cross-linguistic variations in surface timing, in particular in the degree of contrast between stronger and weaker syllables. It further reflects on the shortcomings of categorical ‘rhythm class’ typologies in the face of cross-linguistic evidence from speech production and speech perception.
Iberia
Authors: Frota Sónia , Prieto Pilar , Elordieta Gorka
Published: February 2021

This chapter describes the main features of the prosodic systems of Basque, Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish within the autosegmental-metrical (AM) model. In its word prosody, Basque comprises pitch-accent and stress systems, while the other languages differ in the distribution of final and antepenultimate lexical stress. A discussion of prosodic phrasing and phrasal prominence patterns reveals that accentual phrases play a crucial role in Basque, but not in Catalan, Spanish, or Portuguese, which differ in their higher prosodic structure. Melodic patterns vary in the complexity and distribution of pitch events as well as in their ability to express sentence modality and focus in collaboration with lexical and syntactic markers. The division of labour between prosodic and morphosyntactic encodings varies greatly, with Basque displaying a heavier syntactic load and the other languages having a more varied melodic functionality. Some unresolved research issues are highlighted.
The North Atlantic and the Arctic
Authors: Árnason Kristján , Arnhold Anja , Chasaide Ailbhe Ní , Dehé Nicole , Dorn Amelie , Miyaoka Osahito
Published: February 2021

Goidelic word stress is initial but with some signs of quantity sensitivity. Phrasal intonation tends to be falling (for both declaratives and questions) in southern Irish dialects but rising in northern ones. Interrogativity is marked by phonetic adjustments in initial or final accents of the utterance. Icelandic and Faroese have traditional word-initial stress-to-weight but show signs of penultimate stress patterns in loanwords. Intonation is characterized by phrasal accents within overall downtrend patterns (also in questions, but with some accentual distinctions). The polysynthetic structure of the Inuit languages makes the notion of lexical stress irrelevant, but tonal targets are associated with prosodic domains of various kinds, and a distinction is made between word-level and phrase-level tones; devoicing and truncation are utterance final. In Central Alaskan Yupik, primary word stress marks the last foot by pitch movement. Enclitic bound phrases, phrasal compounds, and non-enclitic bound phrases are seen as larger constituents below the utterance.
The Indian Subcontinent
Authors: Lahiri Aditi , Kennard Holly J.
Published: February 2021

This chapter provides brief descriptions of the basic intonational tunes and phrasing properties of some of the Indo-Aryan languages, including Bengali, Marathi, and Assamese, and also touches upon Dravidian languages such as Tamil and Telugu. The crucial issues governing the basic morphology of tunes include the expression of focus, question prosody, the possibilities of neutral prosody, and phrasing, including its role in the expression of focus. One of the crucial cross-linguistic issues that is addressed relates to the presence or absence of H toned pitch accents and boundary tones related to questions. Some Indian languages show a mixture of H and L tones as well as critical phrasing patterns which suggest that phrasing may play a bigger role than one might be led to think on the basis of other Indo-European prosodic systems.
China and Siberia
Authors: Zhang Jie , Duanmu San , Chen Yiya
Published: February 2021

This chapter provides a summary of the prosodic systems of varieties of Chinese spoken in mainland China and Taiwan as well as languages in Siberia, in particular Ket. What the Chinese languages and Ket share is their tonal nature. This chapter highlights three unique aspects of the prosody of these languages. First, it surveys the typologically complex patterns of tonal alternation known as ‘tone sandhi’ and provides a summary of current experimental findings on the productivity of these patterns. Second, it discusses the patterns of lexical and phrasal stress and their interaction with tone, with a focus on the similar metrical principles that underlie tone languages and other languages. Third, it surveys the different types of interaction between lexical tone and the intonational use of pitch, in particular focus and interrogativity. These issues are first discussed in the context of Chinese languages, then echoed in a brief summary of Ket prosody.
Mainland South East Asia
Authors: Brunelle Marc , Kirby James , Michaud Alexis , Watkins Justin
Published: February 2021

The languages of Mainland South East Asia belong to five language phyla, yet they are often claimed to constitute a linguistic area. This chapter’s primary goal is to illustrate the areal features found in their prosodic systems while emphasizing their understated diversity. The first part of the chapter addresses the typology of word-level prosody. It describes common word shapes and stress patterns in the region, discusses tone inventories, and argues that beyond pitch, properties such as phonation and duration frequently play a role in patterns of tonal contrasts. The chapter next shows that complex tone alternations, although not typical, are attested in the area. The following section reviews evidence about prosodic phrasing in the area, discusses the substantial body of knowledge about intonation, and reconsiders the question of intonation in languages with complex tone paradigms and pervasive final particles. The chapter concludes with strategies for marking information structure and focus.
North America
Authors: Caballero Gabriela , Gordon Matthew K.
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores the typologically rich but relatively understudied prosodic systems attested in North American Indian languages, many of which are either critically endangered or no longer spoken. Both word-level patterns (including stress, tone, and pitch accent) and higher-level phenomena (encompassing intonation and prosodic constituency) are considered within the broader contexts of prosodic typology and prosodic drift. Topics include segmental manifestations of metrical structure, phonetic correlates of prominence, the interaction between word-level and phrase-level prosody, morphological effects on stress, and tone–stress interactions. Drawing on a combination of phonetic and phonological data, this chapter synthesizes the relatively small number of rigorous case studies of individual languages with the considerably larger set of more cursory descriptions of North American Indian languages in order to gain an appreciation of this linguistic area’s numerous important contributions to both language description and linguistic theory.
Mesoamerica
Authors: DiCanio Christian , Bennett Ryan
Published: February 2021

The Mesoamerican linguistic area is rich with prosodic phenomena, including a wide variety of complex tone, phonation, stress, and intonational systems. The diversity of prosodic patterns in Mesoamerica reflects the extreme time-depth and complex history of the languages spoken there. This chapter surveys the prosody of Mesoamerican languages and some past analyses of their structures. Topics include the areal distribution of tonal complexity; interactions between stress, tone, and segmental contrasts; the phonetics of tone and phonation; metrical structure; and higher-level prosodic phenomena. Case studies from different languages also highlight interactions between morphological and word-prosodic structure. These topics underscore the importance of research on Mesoamerican languages to both phonological theory and linguistic typology.
Australia and New Guinea
Authors: Baker Brett , Donohue Mark , Fletcher Janet
Published: February 2021

The languages of Australia constitute a single genetic group. They are non-tonal, in that tone is not lexically contrastive in any Australian language, and they tend to have stress systems where the location of stress is largely determined by the edges of morphemes. Their intonation systems are not unlike those of some European languages, though with phonetic rather than phonological effects of post-focal compression for the most part. The large number of languages of New Guinea are remarkable for their word-prosodic diversity and for that reason of great typological significance. While the entire area is under-investigated, the intonation systems in New Guinea are particularly poorly documented.
Meanings of Tones and Tunes
Authors: Westera Matthijs , Goodhue Daniel , Gussenhoven Carlos
Published: February 2021

Theories of intonational meaning can be organized into two broad categories. Specialist theories aim to capture the meaning of a particular type of intonation contour, or even just a particular usage of that contour, typically using tools from formal semantics. By contrast, generalist theories aim to capture the meanings of a broader range of contours, typically by assigning more basic, underspecified meanings to a larger set of prosodic morphemes. Both strands have yielded important insights, but neither is entirely satisfactory: specialist theories have limited empirical scope and explanatory potential, and generalist theories have not readily yielded concrete, testable predictions from their basic meanings. In recent years, following developments in formal pragmatics, partial but promising attempts have been made to combine the strengths of both. With this goal as a focal point, the current chapter provides an overview of theoretical and empirical work on intonational meaning.
Prosodic Encoding of Information Structure
Authors: Kügler Frank , Calhoun Sasha
Published: February 2021

In many languages, prosody plays a key role in encoding information structure (IS). In general, focused elements are more prominent, while topical and given elements are less prominent. This chapter reviews evidence for prosodic cues to focus, topic, and givenness across a wide range of languages, in relation to a common IS framework. A typology is proposed of stress-based, phrase-based, and register-based focus-marking strategies. There are, however, some languages for which prosody does not seem to be relevant to marking focus, or for which prosody plays a role only when considered in conjunction with prosody–syntax interactions related to IS. Further, a critical review is presented of recent and long-standing theoretical claims in the literature that these different prosodic-marking strategies can be linked by overarching principles (e.g. focus-as-prominence, focus-as-alignment, or focus-as-register).
Prosody in Discourse and Speaker State
Authors: Hirschberg Julia , Beňuš Štefan , Gravano Agustín , Levitan Rivka
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines prosodic variation in discourse and in speaker state. The discussion of discourse prosody includes an examination of both prosodic entrainment and turn-taking behaviours. Prosodic entrainment results from the tendency of speakers to become more like each other as they speak in a variety of behaviours including pitch, speaking rate, and intensity, as well as higher-level prosodic elements such as pitch accent and phrasal tones, and including body gesture and facial expression, which are beyond the scope of this chapter. Prosodic research in discourse turn-taking focuses on prosodic elements of different turn-taking behaviours such as smooth turn exchanges, interruptions, and backchannels, and the turns that precede and follow these. Prosodic aspects of speaker state include prosodic characteristics of speakers’ emotional state as well as related states such as deception. These characteristics may be used to identify different speaker states as well as to produce them in synthetic speech.
Sign Language Prosody
Authors: Sandler Wendy , Lillo-Martin Diane , Dachkovsky Svetlana , Müller de Quadros Ronice
Published: February 2021

Sign languages are unlike spoken languages because they are produced by a wide range of visibly perceivable articulators: the hands, the face, the head, and the body. There is as yet no consensus on the division of labour between these articulators and the linguistic elements or subsystems that they subserve. For example, certain systematic facial expressions in sign languages have been argued to be the realization of syntactic structure by some researchers and of information structure, and thus prosodic in nature, by others. This chapter brings evidence from three unrelated sign languages for the latter claim. It shows that certain non-manual markers are best understood as representing pragmatic notions related to information structure, such as accessibility, contingency, and focus, and are thus part of the prosodic system in sign languages generally. The data and argumentation serve to sharpen the distinction between prosody and syntax in language generally.
Word-Stress Systems
Authors: Gordon Matthew K. , van der Hulst Harry
Published: February 2021

This chapter provides a typological and theoretical overview of word stress. Drawing on broad cross-linguistic data, it discusses phonological and phonetic characteristics of stress. It evaluates the typological distribution of stress systems along multiple dimensions, including notions such as obligatoriness and culminativity, the directionality of edge orientation, weight (in)sensitivity, rhythm, stress windows, non-finality, boundedness, primary versus secondary stress, and lexical versus predictable stress. Formal theories of stress and phonetic explanations for stress systems are examined. This chapter also considers some outstanding issues, such as the proper identification of stress diagnostics.
Tone Systems
Authors: Hyman Larry M. , Leben William R.
Published: February 2021

This chapter presents tonal systems in all their variety, including relatively familiar and unfamiliar facets of tone. Among the parameters that can differ among languages with contrastive pitch levels are the number of phonological levels, the domain of tone features, the presence or absence of accentual properties, whether contour tones behave as single units or sequences of levels, and the presence of downstep and other register phenomena. Tone can undergo vertical or horizontal assimilation as well as dissimilation. Tone can function lexically, morphologically, syntactically, or semantically. No other phonological features exhibit the long-distance effects found with tone. Examples chosen from languages from around the world illustrate the variety of behaviours associated with linguistic tone and, to some extent, the types of analysis that have attempted to account for them.
Prosodic Morphology
Authors: McCarthy John J.
Published: February 2021

The phrase ‘prosodic morphology’ refers to a class of linguistic phenomena in which prosodic structure affects morphological form. These phenomena include reduplication, infixation, root-and-pattern morphology, and truncation. A key notion in the analysis of prosodic morphology is the prosodic template, a type of morpheme that consists of a prosodic unit devoid of segmental structure. The filling of the template with segmental material from a basic word produces a morphologically derived word. For example, in Ilokano the prosodic template consists of a heavy syllable. It is filled reduplicatively, by copying the segments from the singular noun sufficient to create a heavy syllable: pusa ‘cat’, pus-pusa ‘cats’.
Chronicles/Paralipomena
Authors: Vianès Laurence
Published: February 2021

‘Paralipomena’ is the Greek title for what in English is known as the books of Chronicles. The name means ‘things omitted’, i.e. in relation to the contents of the books of Kings, to which it was seens as a complement in antiquity. The division into two books has always existed in the Greek as far as we know and was introduced into Hebrew editions only in modern times. There are two main textual traditions, the Old Greek, and the Antiochian or Lucianic recension. The precise relationship of Paralipomena to the Hebrew Samuel–Kings and Greek 1–4 Kingdoms and to 1 and 2 Esdras is complex and not easily resolved.
Jeremiah and Baruch
Authors: Richelle Matthieu
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses two books that are inseparable in the Septuagint manuscripts: Jeremiah and Baruch. For both books, it surveys classical topics like translators, translation technique, and provenance. The main focus, however, is on the manner they exemplify important and recurrent issues in Septuagintal studies. The book of Jeremiah is a textbook case of a work that exists in two literary editions, a short one (in Hebrew) and a long one (in Greek). The study of the book of Baruch is a good example of a pseudepigraphical work that seems to be translated from a Semitic language, although this is disputed.
Daniel, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon
Authors: Munnich Olivier
Published: February 2021

A major issue in the study of the book of Daniel is the question of the replacement of an earlier translation (Dan-o’) by a later one (Dan-θ’). The study of a pre-Hexaplaric witness (Pap. 967) helps define the main tendencies of the Hexaplaric recension (MS 88 and Syrohexapla). In the papyrus the adaptation of the o’ text to the Hebrew–Aramaic Vorlage stops suddenly at the beginning of chapter 4. Another key question relates to the quantitative and qualitative differences between the later translation (Dan-θ’) and the MT text. The different placement of the deuterocanonical additions is less problematic than the inversion of the chapter order in the oldest part of the Dan-o’ tradition (chs. 5–6 after chs. 7–8 in Pap. 967), which has to be considered together with the qualitative differences between these chapters in Dan-o’ and MT. In the book of Daniel the Greek evidence witnesses to the complexity of the Hebrew–Aramaic text, and the doublets of the Dan-o’ tradition merit particular attention.
The Twelve Minor Prophets
Authors: Dogniez Cécile
Published: February 2021

This chapter relates to the series of twelve books of the Minor Prophets of the Greek Bible. They differ in order from their counterparts in the Hebrew Bible. Dated to the first half of the second century bce, the Greek rendering of the Twelve Minor Prophets was probably carried out in Alexandria by a single translator. The Septuagint version of the Twelve fluctuates between a very literal translation style that reproduces the original word for word by preserving even the word order of the phrase, and a free rendering displaying individual interpretations, creativity, and stylistic concerns. Frequently cited in the New Testament, the fathers of the Church devoted entire commentaries to the books of the Twelve.
Proverbs
Authors: Cuppi Lorenzo
Published: February 2021

For a long time the LXX translation of the book of Proverbs has puzzled scholars by its translation technique, which produced a literary version embellished with relatively free renderings, together with omissions, additions, doublets, and differently ordered sections. These peculiar features have raised on the one hand an ongoing debate on the value of LXX Proverbs for text-critical purposes, and on the other, much enquiry regarding the translator’s education and the cultural interplay between Hellenism and Judaism reflected in the rendering. A further challenge to those working on the book in either its Hebrew or LXX form is presented by the difficulties in distinguishing recensional readings, including Hexaplaric material, from the Old Greek.
Deuterocanonical and Apocryphal Books
Authors: Salvesen Alison G.
Published: February 2021

The terms ‘deuterocanonical’ (a later, Catholic, term) or ‘apocryphal’ (used by early Church writers) are popularly used to refer to religious books from the Judeo-Christian tradition perceived as having a lower status than those books regarded as normative for doctrine. Both ‘deuterocanonical’ and ‘apocryphal’ imply the recognition of a contrasting fixed group of authoritative scriptural works, with which the ‘deuterocanonical’ and ‘apocryphal’ books are associated. This chapter focuses on books transmitted in early Greek Christian pandect Bibles and associated with the LXX corpus, but whose status was debated within Christian circles and largely unrecognized by rabbinic Judaism. It explores the original language, date, Greek text form, and witnesses to those complete books most commonly listed in modern times as deuterocanonical, along with some semi-independent works including the Letter of Jeremiah, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151. (The additions to Esther, Daniel, and Jeremiah are covered in Chapters 18, 20, and 22 in this volume, on Jeremiah, Daniel, and the Megillot respectively.)
The Scrolls from the Judean Desert and the Septuagint
Authors: Ulrich Eugene
Published: February 2021

The Hebrew and Greek biblical scrolls found in the middle of the twentieth century in caves at Qumran and other sites along the Dead Sea have greatly enhanced our knowledge of the LXX. Some Greek scrolls prove to be witnesses to the original Greek translation four centuries earlier than our previous manuscripts. They penetrate further behind other manuscripts to offer readings closer to the OG than previously available. In turn, some Hebrew scrolls provide a text which, though at variance from the traditional MT, displays the type of Hebrew edition from which the OG was translated. They confirm that the OG is generally a faithful translation of whichever Hebrew text lay before the translator, as opposed to a paraphrase of the MT or a ‘theological’ or ‘actualizing’ translation.
Kaige and ‘Theodotion’
Authors: Kreuzer Siegfried
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines the so-called Kaige and Kaige-Theodotion text of the Septuagint tradition. The Kaige Recension is a revision of the generally somewhat more freely translated original Septuagint (Old Greek) towards the now (late second-/early first-century bce) relevant form of the Hebrew text, the so-called proto-Masoretic text that at least started in the first century bce. The identification of the Kaige Recension also solved the problem that Theodotionic readings had been identified in writings from the first century ce, i.e. long before the traditional dating of the translator Theodotion in the late second century ce. However, there remains the question of a meaningful relationship between ‘Kaige’ and Theodotion.
Citations in the New Testament
Authors: Lincicum David
Published: February 2021

The New Testament and the Septuagint share a bound fate in their common reception. Indeed, the Septuagint functions as the great predecessor text that serves as an ‘encyclopaedia’ for the authors of the New Testament, and so makes sense of many distinctive modes of expression and theological concepts which the earliest Christian authors employ. This chapter surveys the New Testament’s debt to the Septuagint’s language, ideas, and canon, then goes on to offer a brief overview of the individual writings of the New Testament from the perspective of their use of the Greek Jewish Scriptures.
Origen’s Hexapla
Authors: Gentry Peter J.
Published: February 2021

An Old Testament containing perhaps six editions in parallel columns was produced by the church father Origen (d. 253/4 ce). Surviving evidence for this work is meagre: colophons, a few manuscripts with evidence of the columnar form, marginal notes in manuscripts giving readings from non-LXX editions, and testimony from some patristic writers who had some contact with Origen’s work. Currently, almost every point in the description of this work is debated, and scholars are at a point where all the sources of evidence on the Hexapla need to be examined afresh. Key questions include Origen’s purpose in creating it; possible precedents in Alexandria; the extent of the Hexapla; which editions were included beside the Old Greek; the use of text-critical symbols; the role of Pamphilus and Eusebius in later recensions of the Hexapla; the relation of the so-called Tetrapla to the Hexapla.
The Vetus Latina (old latin)
Authors: Bogaert Pierre-Maurice
Published: February 2021

The translations of the Old Testament into Latin, from c.200 ce onwards, were based on the LXX rather than the Hebrew. Due to the eventual triumph of Jerome’s translation according to the Hebrew (later known as the Vulgate), the witnesses to the Old Latin (Vetus Latina) are poorly preserved, but this latter text was the one that was quoted and commented on by the Latin Church fathers, who in turn frequently use commentaries by Greek fathers on the LXX. In this way the Old Latin acts as a link between the LXX and the Latin fathers. The early texts of the LXX sometimes differ from the textus receptus, and consequently also their Latin translations. Differences may be local or great, e.g. the order of chapters in Exodus, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Proverbs. Qumran has shown that some of these differences are attested in Hebrew. The Old Latin translated from the Old Greek (whether preserved or not) represents a form of the Old Testament distinct from the Masoretic Text.
Christian Theology
Authors: Barton John
Published: February 2021

The differences between the Septuagint and the Hebrew Old Testaments are not a matter of indifference for Christian theology. At the textual level, the LXX reflects ideas more typical of postbiblical Judaism and early Christianity, such as eschatology, messianism, and resurrection. At the canonical level, it can be argued (as for example by Hartmut Gese) that including the Greek books in the Old Testament better symbolizes the continuity of the Testaments for Christians. Five specific issues are: (1) Unlike the Hebrew Bible, the LXX has no fixed and stable text; (2) The term ‘canon’ is a slippery one, and it is unclear exactly what the LXX canon contains; (3) The LXX may not be a single ‘work’ susceptible of a holistic interpretation; (4) The attempt to write a ‘Theology of the LXX’ might be worthwhile; and (5) It might be possible to see both LXX and MT as canonical.