Homophonous morphs have been reported to show differences in acoustic duration in languages such as English and German. How common these differences are across languages, and what factors influence the extent of temporal differences, is still an open question, however. This paper investigates the role of morphological disambiguation in predicting the acoustic duration of homophones using data from a diverse sample of 37 languages. Results indicate a low overall contribution of morphological affiliation compared to other well-studied effects on duration such as speech rate and Final Lengthening. It is proposed that two factors increase the importance of homophony avoidance for the acoustic shape of morphs: crowdedness (i.e. the number of competing homophones) and segmental make-up, in particular the presence of an alveolar fricative. These findings offer an empirically broad perspective on the interplay between morphology and phonetics and align with the view of language as an adaptive and efficient system.

Does the presence of two or more transborder minorities alter the logic of nation-building and affect minority securitization? This article goes beyond the triadic nexus framework commonly applied to minorities caught between their home- and kin-states, proposing a complex lens for analyzing states with multiple ethnic minorities. Titular political elites dealing with multiple minorities assign them to contradictory frames to manage the challenging reality of ethnic demography and regional security. By framing one minority as a “model minority” — trustworthy and law-abiding — and another as a “fifth column” — threatening and disruptive – they accomplish two aims: (1) maintain the dominant status of the titular nation by discrediting minority claims for institutional changes, and (2) legitimize the differential treatment of minorities. Ethnic minorities’ responses to these frames vary from relative acquiescence to violent conflict. I explore why the initially excluded Poles have been recently accommodated in Lithuania, why the marginalized Uzbeks became targets of repression in the Kyrgyz Republic, and why the relatively accommodated Russian speakers, former colonizers, became framed as a security threat in Lithuania but not in the Kyrgyz Republic after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Understanding how strategic framing advances nation-building offers generalizable insights on (de)securitization of ethnicity.

Arcaded houses forming porticoes are characteristic of many medieval European towns in Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Czechia, Poland, Silesia and Ukraine. They are a unique feature at the border between public and private space, used for commerce, crafts and communication. Taking the arcaded houses of Silesia as a case-study, this article focuses on the legal and urban contexts in which they were constructed and removed. Comparison with the broader European context suggests that the form and appearance of arcaded houses in Silesia follow similar patterns and chronology to those that have been observed in much better-studied regions.

This article focuses on the Italian inventor, telephone pioneer and opera house technician Antonio Meucci (1808–1889), exploring the shifting relationships between Meucci’s experiments and his operatic connections across his transatlantic career. Meucci first developed an acoustic telephone while working at Florence’s Teatro della Pergola, before discovering the transmission of sound via electricity during his tenure as chief machinist at Havana’s Teatro Tacón in the 1840s. These experiments were further refined after his relocation to New York, where he continued to be part of a network of Italian musicians, thinkers, journalists and scientific practitioners while seeking to patent his invention. Feted among the Italian diasporic community in the USA – both for his technological innovations and for his close relationship with Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi – at the time of his death Meucci was nonetheless embroiled in a lengthy legal case against Alexander Graham Bell over the primacy of the telephone’s invention, a dispute not fully resolved until the twenty-first century. This article accordingly unfolds in three main parts, focusing in turn on Florence, Havana and New York. Meucci’s experiments – and his complex emigrant environment – collectively highlight the Italian opera house as a global and multidimensional site of technological and sonic innovation, during a period when the telephone gradually moved from conceptual fantasy to material reality. At the same time, Meucci’s career can challenge direct links between Italian sonic environments and Italy itself. Ultimately, I argue, the complex and changing relationships between opera and the telephone invite more nuanced approaches to histories of music and technology, while demonstrating the centrality of the Italian opera house and its sounds – within, across, and beyond the stage – to nineteenth-century auditory cultures more broadly.

On February 6, 1968, leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference drafted a letter addressed to the president, Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court. The letter argued that the U.S. constitution facilitated economic and social second-class citizenship because the constitution did not protect economic and social rights but instead protected only civil and political rights. The letter’s authors demanded that the nation repent for its continued subordination of the poor and minorities and atone by recognizing economic and social rights. In this article, the authors recover the draft letter—a proposed economic and social bill of rights—and assert it was and remains a morally compelling call to recognize and protect positive fundamental rights under the constitution. The authors maintain that while the SCLC leaders who drafted the letter were clear that law alone could not end the sinful conditions that created racism and poverty, they were becoming more adamant that a radical redesign of the constitution was a necessary step toward building a beloved community.

This study examines how human activities influenced soil development at two contrasting Arctic sites: Maiva, a 19th-century farmstead, and Snuvrejohka, a seasonal Sámi reindeer herding settlement in the Lake Torneträsk region, northern Sweden. Using geochemical and geophysical soil analyses, we explore the spatial distribution and vertical development of anthropogenic signals in the soil. At Maiva, prolonged agricultural use and earthworm bioturbation have led to extensive soil mixing and altered soil horizons, resulting in elevated phosphate, lead, and organic matter concentrations in Ap and Ah horizons. In contrast, Snuvrejohka displays more stratified profiles with localized chemical enrichment around hearths, primarily within E horizons. These results highlight how different land-use practices leave distinct geochemical fingerprints in Arctic soils and emphasize the need for sampling strategies adapted to site-specific soil formation processes. Our findings demonstrate that even short-term or seasonal human activities can leave distinct and detectable signatures in Arctic soils. Through an integrated approach combining soil science, geoarchaeological methods, and historical data, this study provides new insights into the reconstruction of past land-use practices and highlights the vulnerability of archaeological soil records in Arctic environments facing rapid climate-driven change.

The analyzed data provide evidence for sound changes that involve cumulative effects in the phonologization of phonetic duration. The data come from Kashubian, an understudied, endangered language spoken in northwestern Poland, and illustrate two historical processes: preservation and loss of ultra-short vowels (jers) and compensatory lengthening. The unified analysis of the two processes hinges on a reinterpretation of phonetic vowel duration as phonological length. Phonetic duration is contextual: Vowels in head syllables, in open syllables, and before voiced consonants tend to be longer than vowels in non-head syllables, in closed syllables, and before voiceless consonants. The effects are cumulative in the sense that all three conditions must co-occur on a single vowel. The discussed changes provide support for phonological models that (i) allow phonological constraints to access fine-grained phonetic information and (ii) are capable of deriving cumulative effects. The data contribute to the typology of cumulative processes by providing novel evidence of alternations that are simultaneously conditioned by the prosodic and segmental context.

This review essay focuses on the intimate, yet contingent, historical relationships between capitalism, democracy and the welfare state in the OECD region. Six landmark studies, published over the past decade, are reviewed: Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty and The Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty; Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology; Torben Iversen and David Soskice’s Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism through a Turbulent Century; Peter H. Lindert’s Making Social Spending Work; and Ayşe Buğra’s Social Policy in Capitalist History. All these books reveal the independent effect of historical political factors on the rise of the welfare state across advanced capitalist democracies. Contrary to received wisdom, the central argument put forward is that there is no trade-off between capitalism and democracy and, more importantly, that the welfare state has become an existentially important lubricant buttressing both advanced capitalism and liberal democracy.

The resonance constraint holds that something can benefit someone only if it bears a connection to her favoring attitudes. It is widely taken as a decisive reason to reject objective views of well-being since they do not guarantee such a connection. I aim to show that this is a mistake and that felt-quality hedonism about well-being can in fact meet the constraint. First, I argue that the typical way of putting the constraint is misguided in its demandingness. I then introduce alternatives and argue that the most plausible among them are compatible with felt-quality hedonism. I proceed to show that the same considerations which animate traditional resonance concerns motivate another kind of resonance which the hedonist is well-positioned to accommodate. One upshot is that the constraint does not provide us with a reason to favor subjective views of well-being, as they are traditionally formulated, over objective ones.

Semantic transparency is usually defined as the extent to which the lexical meaning of a morphologically complex word can be inferred from its structure and constituents. Recent studies have emphasized the need to distinguish two aspects of transparency: relatedness (i.e. the degree to which the meaning of lexical constituents is retained in that of a complex word) and compositionality (i.e. the degree to which the meaning of a complex word is determined by the meaning of its constituents and the way they are combined). In this paper, we investigate the influence of a variety of linguistic factors on both relatedness and compositionality. Our objective is twofold, as we seek to (i) determine more precisely the impact of lexical and morphological properties on transparency and (ii) better understand the distinction between relatedness and compositionality based on their respective determinants. The study focuses on deverbal nouns in French and estimates relatedness and compositionality based on human judgments and computational methods. The results indicate that the frequency and ambiguity of bases and derivatives, as well as the productivity and polyfunctionality of nominalizing suffixes, have different effects on relatedness and compositionality. They confirm the relevance of the distinction between the two aspects of transparency.

Forced labour in the Middle Congo was characterized in the interwar period by, on the one hand, a declining role of the notorious French concession companies, and, on the other hand, the growing importance of forced recruitment and forced labour orchestrated by the colonial state. The article attempts to analyse and understand the overall setup of overburdening created by these conditions. Based on new French and Congolese archival resources, it discusses the effects of this overburdening, linking it to the responses shown by local populations, notably through flight and evasion. In a last step, the discussion focuses on the role of intermediaries and their impact on the violence that was locally experienced. The analysis includes a wider perspective into the changes and continuities during the years of World War II, and on the challenges for the forced labour system due to its official abolition in 1946 and the decline of clandestine practices of continuity until 1948.

Russian nation-building policy has often been described as ambiguous, blending a rhetorical commitment to the state’s multinational character together with more exclusionary rhetoric and policies. Drawing from original survey questions on national identity commissioned in December 2022, I find that Russian citizens continue to endorse a multinational vision of the Russian state during wartime. Respondents are simultaneously likely to exclude minorities from being fully considered as “true Rossians” [istinnye rossiiane], while socioeconomic and political factors are meaningfully associated with these patterns. In line with previous scholarship, these findings underscore the blurriness of the russkii/rossiiskii distinction in practice: just as russkii should not always be interpreted as an exclusively ethnic term, rossiiskii should not be seen as a non-ethnic category, either. The findings in the Russian case carry implications for understanding how nation-builders in multiethnic contexts may seek to cater to ethnic majorities while simultaneously signaling commitments to ethnic diversity.

The rise of antagonism between the German and Czech nationalist activists in the mid-19th century has been neither clearly explained nor convincingly dated. Although this is a topic closely linked to the history of nationalism, the state of research has paradoxically been misguided by the nationalist approach adopted by historians analyzing it. The reason is that nationalism was not the cause but just one response to a greater phenomenon. The aim of the article is therefore to clarify the German-Czech relationship in the broader context of European history and the history of international relations using the perspective of geopolitics and security. As it claims, it was not cultural, linguistic, or constitutional issues but the fear of external threats that caused the mutual distrust of political activists that led to hostility and conflicting policies. Under the impact of international events and within the context of their relations to other international actors this process originated in 1839 by the latest. During subsequent years it developed rapidly and became obvious during the 1848 revolutions. The article thus reveals that this year did not represent the beginning but merely another chapter in a process that had begun nearly a decade earlier.

Grice’s foundational conversation model has inspired a range of influential developments, with various approaches to merging the maxims. This paper addresses unresolved controversies and circular dependencies that have fuelled assumptions of interdependence among the principles. It provides a revision of both Grice’s cooperative principle and the principles of truthfulness, relevance, informativeness and clarity, and extends them to include a principle of social conformity, which I collectively refer to as the TRICS-Principles. I demonstrate that the TRICS-Principles operate independently of each other at different levels and show the extent to which the other principles may function under the umbrella of a flouted principle of truthfulness. Furthermore, I distinguish the principle of social conformity from the concept of politeness, offering a nuanced perspective on their relationship. Finally, I provide new insights into factors influencing shifts in the prioritisation of the TRICS-Principles.

In Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks with conviction on the need for and importance of community. King depicts American society and modern civilization as a great “world house” that is inhabited, inherited—and imperiled. Behind the metaphor of the world house is a prophetic vision and dream—the realization of what he called the “beloved community.” In this article, the author considers King’s beloved community ideal through a housing lens. Engaging with King’s metaphor, the author frames the beloved community as an apologetic for integrated community. The author views the metaphor of the world house as a significant means to expand understanding of beloved community, elevate housing as a moral-ethical concern, and engender radical structural solutions that can be realized through racial justice in the housing sector.

This article contributes to the ongoing debate on reactionary internationalism by linking it with scholarly discussions on civilisation and civilisationism, which have mostly been running in parallel trajectories. By doing so, it attempts to address the question of how the radical right, rooted in numerous particularisms, such as cultural, national, and religious, has managed to foster a global movement with an internationalist ideology that poses a significant challenge to the liberal international order. Through an analysis of the relevant literature and a case study of the Serbian radical right, this article tries to elucidate this question and bridge the gap between the two debates by demonstrating that civilisationism forms the core of reactionary internationalism, unifying the radical right from the West to the East. This article examines the Serbian case and its history of civilisational and geopolitical reactions as a possible paradigm for the contemporary radical right in general. Furthermore, it explores the role of Russian revisionism and war in Ukraine in shaping this civilisational discourse, specifically considering the narratives built around the Serbian foreign fighters’ network in Ukraine. An additional contribution of this article is that it provides a non-Western perspective on civilisation, religion, and nationalism.

This article documents the legal and social history of “distress for rent” (also known as rent distraint) in early Republic New York, a legal tool that allowed landlords whose tenants were in arrears to seize tenants’ belongings and sell them to offset the cost of the unpaid rent. Rent distraint was a practice and topic around which New Yorkers contested ideological and practical conceptions of class, the rights of property, the role of law, and welfare. In 1811, New York City officials began tracking tenants in arrears of rent, creating a deep archive of documents that reveal the nuances of landlord-tenant relations and subsistence in this period. This article follows that paper trail, exploring distraint in this context as a legal remedy, as an experience with major impacts on individuals’ lives, and of efforts to reform the law and the lived experience of law. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, poor, middling, and wealthy New Yorkers were engaged in knowledge exchange around distraint and the social categories and experiences associated with it. Their stories document a materialist sensibility that crossed class lines and was attuned to the practical dimensions of working people’s living conditions.