Chapter 2 provides a comprehensive survey of various linguistic illusions, showing how errors in language processing arise. It begins with auditory illusions, such as the Yanny/Laurel effect and McGurk effect, highlighting how multisensory inputs influence speech perception. It covers sentence processing illusions, including lingering misinterpretations, role reversals, and local coherence effects, which reveal systematic misinterpretations of syntactically complex or semantically ambiguous sentences. The comparative illusion, missing VP effect, and illusory NPI licensing are explored, demonstrating how these errors reveal the workings of the fundamental cognitive mechanisms that support language processing, such as memory retrieval and the interaction between domain-specific and domain-general processes. A central theme is the interaction between shallow processing strategies and deeper cognitive mechanisms, which sometimes lead to illusory interpretations. This exploration of linguistic illusions underscores their value as tools for uncovering how the mind processes language in real time, contributing to broader theories about sentence comprehension and cognitive architecture.

The first section of this chapter introduces and defines what constitutes a “basic word” within a language and connects the notion of basic words to issues related to world-building. The second section identifies key considerations you need to make as you describe your speakers and construct a world for them, and the final sections ask you to focus on how your speakers meet their basic daily needs and the words they might need in their language to communicate about those needs. At the end of this chapter, you will be asked to provide more detailed information about your speakers and conworld and connect those pieces of information to a beginning list of basic vocabulary in your language.

In this chapter three prison memoirs are recalled, detailing the stories of three men that significantly shaped the civil rights revolution during the 1960s. Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver wrote about their lives before prison, during the struggle, in prison, and after prison. They tell the story of the Black Panther Party and introduce the readers to their deepest feelings about life in America as oppressed Black men fighting for liberation. Nonetheless, their history stands apart

from other people who have written about this period simply because their personal journeys led them to prison and jail where these narratives were organized, outlined, and composed

as prison memoirs.

This chapter explores how mediation starts, using different concrete examples from the Nordic mediation experience to illustrate the complexities around mediation selection and initiation. It addresses a number of central questions: Why do the warring parties want mediation? Why do belligerents choose Nordic mediators? Why do the Nordic countries want to mediate? Which individuals are chosen as mediators? Why do international organizations appoint mediators from the Nordic countries? We also discuss the issue of perceived bias in mediation and how potential mediators can manage and relate to such perceptions. The key finding of the chapter is that the mediation selection process is closely associated with how the mandate for mediation is formed. In this chapter, we show how the formation of a mandate can be a multifaceted process and mediation efforts can be initiated in many ways, including through direct appeals to governments from the parties to a conflict. The Nordic countries’ mediation efforts constitute an interesting cross-section of these initiatives.

The chapter provides an overview of Hemingway’s life from his birth in Oak Park, Illinois, to his death in Idaho. Key episodes include his experience, including his wounding, during the First World War, his emergence as a writer in Paris in the 1920s, his travels in Europe and Africa, including as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, and his receipt of the Nobel Prize for literature.

This chapter sketches the contexts, both broadly historical and more narrowly cultural, for Hemingway’s life and work from the 1910s through the 1950s, including the wars he experienced and the literary scenes that his work both shaped and was shaped by.

Women of the middle millennium were more mobile than we imagine, moving from one location to another for marriage, work, trade, worship, to visit family members, to take part in warfare, to settle in new lands, and—against their will—to be trafficked as slaves and sex workers. This picture of women on the move might contradict pervasive stereotypes of premodern women confined to the domestic sphere, or living out their whole lives within the context of one village or neighbourhood. Certainly, diverse religious and secular edicts ordered women to remain confined to domestic spaces and denigrated ‘wandering’ women as harlots of loose character. Many women of elite status were constrained to obey such orders and found themselves subject to strict control over movement. The majority of women who did travel probably did so less often and over shorter distances than their male peers. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to imagine half of humanity was absent from the roads, paths and ship-routes of the premodern world. It is not that women did not make journeys, but rather that travel was highly gendered in ideology and practice.

This chapter explores ways you can expand information provided in noun phrases, with the first half focusing on grammatical specification and the second half on semantic modification. The first section investigates the types of determiners that occur in languages, including articles and demonstratives, and the second section focuses on possessive forms and the types of relationships they can reflect. The final two sections introduce modifiers that can occur within noun phrases, including adjectives and adposition phrases. You will decide if your language will have any adjectives belonging to its basic vocabulary and set a foundation for the shapes modifiers take within noun phrases.

The first section of the chapter introduces you to the world of pronouns, beginning with personal pronouns, whose (typically small) forms can inflect to indicate a wide range of grammatical information: person, number, class, and case. The next section focuses on other pronouns, including demonstrative, reflexive, and indefinite forms. The chapter ends with a discussion of verb agreement to demonstrate how verbs can inflect to agree with at least one argument in the clause and connects verb agreement inflections to pronouns and their use. By the end of this chapter, you will have developed series of pronouns for your language and made your first major decision about verb inflections.

This chapter explores the ongoing and novel merging of gold mining with organized crime, highlighting the relation of drug trafficking, land grabbing, and other related sectors to deforestation. The recent gold-mining expansion and boom in the Amazon is linked to gold markets and the global political economy. The chapter scrutinizes the rise of narco-gold mining, linking drug trade, organized criminal groups, and money laundering with rainforest gold and the surge of authoritarian and mafia-like power. During the Bolsonaro era there was a significant deepening of the link between gold-mining activities and organized drug traffickers and criminal networks. In southwestern Pará, gold mining is the leading cause of deforestation inside areas like the upper Tapajós Munduruku Indigenous lands near Jacareacanga. This chapter utilizes field research experiences, interviews, and ethnographic observations to illustrate the complex dilemmas faced by communities currently being pressured and divided by increasing gold extraction in their territories. In the end of the chapter the discussion turns to solutions for how to address these and other root causes of deforestation in political economy.