The radical expansion of the written score as art object in late-twentieth and twenty-first-century music resulted in a rapid porting of extramusical objects into music’s textual realm, including a wide array of linguistic graphemes newly treated as musical material. This article suggests that the modern compositional use of scored parentheses, although rarely undertaken for identical aesthetic or formal ends, nevertheless always involves the generation of a virtual site for intimacy between irreconcilable bodies. Parentheses radically reveal the fragile contingencies of fallible musical embodiment: every– thing, every language, every intention, every body as foreign to everything else and yet nothing as foreign at all. Musical parentheses are the privileged site where the I knows that ‘I am not you’, that ‘you are not I’, that ‘you I do not know you I do not know’ – which is to say: they will reappear by the end as love.

This article focuses on the poster child of grammaticalization, be going to V. First expressing ‘motion with intention’, in Early Modern English the construction came to signify ‘motionless intention’. The grammaticalization process continued in Late Modern English with subjectification, so that ‘intention’ was gradually replaced by ‘prediction’. We study the process from Late Modern to Present-Day English in the 200-million-word fiction section of the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), 1810–2009, for which we have gender metadata on the authors. We focus on the productivity of the construction by comparing type frequencies, i.e., the number of different verbs following be going to. Our research questions are how the grammaticalization is reflected in the productivity of the construction, and whether the social factor of gender played a role in the process. We study the internal factors of mental verbs, inanimate subjects and passive voice; to this end, we use robust statistical methods to compare type frequencies and proportions of types over time. We also investigate the semantics of the verb types by drawing on techniques from distributional semantics. Our wider aim is to enrich the cognitively oriented theory of Construction Grammar with insights from historical sociolinguistics.

In a recent book, Bastiaens and Rudra (2018) claim that as governments embraced trade liberalization in the 1990’s, they experienced a revenue shock, and that democratic governments found it harder to repair the breach than did authoritarian ones. As a result, they argue, contemporary trade liberalizations have posed a danger to democracy by starving it for funds, forcing vulnerable governments to resort to politically unpopular policies. This is an important and provocative argument. However, good evidence contradicts its major premise. This research note critiques some data, presentation, and conceptual problems with the argument. It provides new analyses using the well-curated dataset from the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD, updated by UNU-WIDER), instead of the authors’ primary data from World Development Indicators. It shows that developing countries–and democracies especially–did not, in fact, suffer a revenue shock. On average, trade taxes constituted only a minor part of their government revenue. While the revenue they provided declined slightly over the period in question, this trend was overwhelmed by variation in other tax and non-tax revenues. As for total tax revenues, a key variable sometimes underemphasized in the book, ICTD data show that they expanded more rapidly in democratic developing countries than in non-democratic ones. Regression analyses with ICTD data also fail to confirm the authors’ finding of a revenue shortfall among developing democracies.

Methods of critique fashion their possible outcomes. Rita Felski (2015) makes the case for ‘postcritique’, a method of reading in which texts are worked with, understood in their own right, such that a more diverse range of styles and arguments might be understood. Robert T. Tally Jr. (2022) rejects this method, contending that postcritique claims to serve the text under analysis but, in adopting a standpoint of placid agreement, facilitates a mode of reading that diminishes the potency of the text itself and critical dialogue more generally. This article argues that postcritique has dominated the discourse surrounding ‘The New Discipline’, a manifesto of sorts written by composer Jennifer Walshe. The article offers an alternative critical reading of ‘The New Discipline’, arguing that the text is itself a Jennifer Walshe piece. The composer performs the role of a musicologist who falsely declares newness, inconsistently includes and excludes artists, and deploys a vague, if not contradictory, definition of bodies. The manifesto is addressed to an undisclosed but seemingly specific audience. I argue that these apparent shortcomings evoke themes of performance, irony and fictionalisation that are found elsewhere in Walshe’s work and make such a reading licit.

For every positive integer d, we show that there must exist an absolute constant $c \gt 0$ such that the following holds: for any integer $n \geqslant cd^{7}$ and any red-blue colouring of the one-dimensional subspaces of $\mathbb{F}_{2}^{n}$, there must exist either a d-dimensional subspace for which all of its one-dimensional subspaces get coloured red or a 2-dimensional subspace for which all of its one-dimensional subspaces get coloured blue. This answers recent questions of Nelson and Nomoto, and confirms that for any even plane binary matroid N, the class of N-free, claw-free binary matroids is polynomially $\chi$-bounded.

Our argument will proceed via a reduction to a well-studied additive combinatorics problem, originally posed by Green: given a set $A \subset \mathbb{F}_{2}^{n}$ with density $\alpha \in [0,1]$, what is the largest subspace that we can find in $A+A$? Our main contribution to the story is a new result for this problem in the regime where $1/\alpha$ is large with respect to n, which utilises ideas from the recent breakthrough paper of Kelley and Meka on sets of integers without three-term arithmetic progressions.

The Saami Council, founded in 1956, is one of the oldest Indigenous-led international organisations in the world. Despite this, its role and place on the world stage have been seldom examined, as has the place of internationally facing Indigenous Peoples’ Organisations more broadly. Using the organisation’s historical documents, among other sources, this article constructs a historic case study of the Saami Council from its founding in 1956 until the year 2000 to examine how it has evolved during this period and to better understand its standing within the greater international community. As the study discusses, since its inception, the organisation has evolved into an example of an Indigenous-led diplomatic organisation – one that came about through the changing political climate of the 1970s and solidified in the late 1990s. This evolution has implications for how we understand Indigenous-led advocacy and the role of non-state actors in international relations.

Neoclassicism is now largely eschewed within New Music. While there seems space in our pluralistic scene for modernist, postmodernist, minimalist, performative and conceptual music, the compositional values of neoclassicism seem out of step and anachronistic. This article advocates that classical principles should be put back on the table, arguing not for a return to a historical neoclassicism but rather for idiosyncratic forms of neoclassicism that emphasise characteristics such as entertainment, playfulness, clarity, forms of tonality and engagement with received form.

It is plausible that a witness’s credibility is lowered if he testifies to an outcome that has low probability, but this is not always true. If the outcome has a low prior due only to its specificity (as in a fair lottery), witness credibility is not lowered by attesting to it. Even when witness credibility does drop as a result of the testimony, it can substantially confirm its contents, and agreement between independent witnesses can “give back” credibility that one witness lost. Formal modeling and analysis shed light on when each of these situations obtains.