This chapter interrogates the widespread modern framing of Strozzi’s life and music through the unanswerable asking of whether or not she was a courtesan, and proposes alternative viewpoints from which and with which to understand and represent her. Working from a reception study of popular and academic cultural framings, new engagement with primary materials, and intersectional feminist perspectives on the analysis and representation of contested gendered experiences, this chapter asks what it is that this repeated question does – its functions and its fall-outs – and suggests another way of engaging with the scanty material evidence that has survived of Strozzi’s life. This chapter concludes with a proposal to retire the courtesan question in favor of a more grounded and culturally sensitive understanding of Strozzi’s family life through common seicento Venetian relationship practices, restoring Strozzi’s own representation of herself to the forefront of our representations of her music and person.

The phonological phrasing of adverbs reveals a complex interplay of syntactic positioning, semantic modification scope, and semantic interpretive mode. Several nuanced patterns emerge from this linguistic phenomenon. In syntactic medial position, when an adverb operates at the sentence scope, a phonological phrase boundary materializes subsequently; however, this boundary is precluded following a predicate-scope adverb. In syntactic initial position, a phonological phrase boundary manifests after a speaker-oriented adverb with a subjective interpretative mode, yet remains absent in instances of adverbs with an objective interpretative stance. Moreover, such a boundary occurs after a focused polymorphic-scope adverb, while being systematically absent following a focused predicate-scope adverb. In essence, the focal adverbial tonal domain is fundamentally circumscribed by its scope of semantic modification, demonstrating the complex relationship between syntactic positioning and semantic interpretation.

Function words typically exhibit extraprosodicity at the phonological phrase level and are consequently exempt from tone sandhi processes. These elements, however, are reintegrated at the intonational phrase level, where they become subject to neutral tone operations. When function words receive focus, they no longer exhibit extraprosodicity and are thus subject to tone sandhi processes.

This chapter explores the central theme of meaning-making within the Syrian revolution. It focuses on how exiled intellectuals grappled with the loss of hope and disenfranchisement as the revolution became increasingly militarised. Intellectuals in exile worked to construct new frameworks of meaning, using revolution as a source of existential and cultural significance. The chapter examines how revolutionary language and narratives were liberated from state-controlled discourse and reinterpreted by intellectuals to align with their visions for Syria’s future. However, the chapter also addresses the growing sense of disenfranchisement as these intellectual narratives lost impact amid the rise of competing ideologies and factions within the revolutionary movement.

Through syllable contraction, sandhi, base, and neutral tonal melodies merge, resulting in single tones or tone clusters. Simplification follows via edge-in association, which preserves the edge tones. In cases where clusters are longer, mora addition is employed.

Trisyllabic reduplication involves an emphatic -á suffix attached to the leftmost syllable. When this emphatic -á is absent in triplication, its high tone persists as a floating tone. The initial syllable of triplication, functioning as the prosodic head and favoring a high tone, bears focal stress. If this syllable surfaces with a low-register sandhi tone, it recruits the floating high tone to form a tone cluster. However, if it already carries a high-register tone and satisfies prosodic prominence, the floating high tone remains redundant.

Tetrasyllabic reduplication exhibits distinct phonological and semantic patterns in its various manifestations. The ABAB configuration functions to attenuate semantic meaning, whereas AABB, ABAC, and ACBC patterns serve to intensify semantic content. From a prosodic perspective, ABAB configurations consistently operate as unified tone sandhi domains. In contrast, AABB, ABAC, and ACBC patterns demonstrate prosodic flexibility, potentially functioning either as single unified domains or bifurcating into two discrete domains. It is critical to note that the ABCC pattern, despite its superficial similarity, does not represent genuine tetrasyllabic reduplication; instead, it comprises two distinct phrasal elements that invariably constitute separate tonal domains.

This chapter presents a corpus-based study of the segmental and tonal accents in the iGeneration’s Taiwanese Southern Min (iTSM). Segmentally, iTSM speakers exhibit several distinctive phonological processes. Stop codas in checked syllables are elided, followed by resyllabification rather than gemination. Labial nasal codas are coronalized, while coronal nasal codas are velarized. Velarized nasal codas undergo gemination, while coronalized codas resist it. Labial nasal codas resyllabify to the following onsets. Voiced velar stop onsets, the most marked in the voiced stop series, are often elided or nasalized before nasal vowels, while less marked voiced labial stops and laterals are preserved. Nasalization in iTSM, both intra- and inter-syllabic, shows non-crisp edge phenomena, contrasting with TSM’s crisp edge phenomenon.

Tonally, stop coda elision results in the loss of checked tones, shifting to smooth tones with compensatory vowel lengthening. The study also shows that iTSM speakers prefer parsing longer expressions into tetrasyllabic or shorter fragments, which function as phonological phrases and constrain the application of tone sandhi. This phrasing process is sensitive to syntactic adjuncthood and syllable count.

This essay discusses Pablo Neruda’s youth love poetry collection Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924) in relation to situated subjectivities, from decolonial, intersectional feminist perspectives. One hundred years after the collection was published, we briefly account for Neruda’s inter- and intra-subjective exploration of love and otherness. Particular attention is given here to the poetic process as an unending dialogue between production and reception, including some current poetic and nonpoetic canceling, as well as rediscoveries of his rich eco- and geopoetic vocation.

This essay connects Barbara Strozzi’s life and career to the complex dynamics of Seicento Italian academies and to the strategies women cultural producers and their academic supporters devised in navigating and even reshaping gender norms. We begin with analysis of two thorny discourses in which Strozzi plays a starring role: a 1637 satiric dialogue in manuscript (“Sentimenti gioiosi”) that lampoons the Accademia degli Unisoni, a sodality that served in part as a performance venue for Barbara Strozzi assembled by Giulio Strozzi, a poet and probably her father; and a printed celebration of the Unisoni’s interdisciplinary activities, the Veglie de’Signori Unisoni (Venice, 1638). These representations of Strozzi’s engagement with the Unisoni lead us to consider other women cultural producers who interacted with Italian academies, particularly Isabella Andreini and Virginia Ramponi (fl.1580s–1630s). This exploration affords a new appreciation of the ways that Italian academies both enabled and constrained creative women.

The introduction addresses the double erasures of the story of the Nicaragua Canal and the history of the Mosquito Coast as a result of the triumphalist narrative of the Panama Canal. Arguing that the Nicaragua Canal route has historically been an imperial staging arena, the chapter suggests that exploring the entwined history of the Mosquito Coast and the Nicaragua Canal can help us visualize the shadowy limits of imperialism and sovereignty in the nineteenth century.

A distinctive feature of Barbara Strozzi’s compositional style is her predilection for unusual endings that defy the expectations by concluding too abruptly (leaving the listener hanging on the dominant or without a strong sense of closure) or delaying the final cadence (inciting the listener’s desire for closure). After briefly summarizing ideas about closure from classical rhetoricians and early modern musicians and considering the likely influence of the humorous and often ironic rhetorical stance that was popular among Strozzi’s friends and acquaintances in the Accademia degli Incogniti, I explore Strozzi’s enigmatic conclusions in a selection of both sacred and secular compositions. Drawing upon Bettina Varwig’s Music in the Flesh, I propose that the endings are remarkable not only for the ingenious ways they respond to their text and eschew convention, but also because of the profound impact on the listener’s physiological responses, inspiring variously laughter, irony, frustration, yearning, pleasure, or even rapture.

The Ewe-speaking region straddling the border between Ghana and Togo has not been envisioned by much of the scholarship as a viable political community capable of forming a nation-state. Yet this interpretation does not account for the continued identity claims arising from this transnational region. By looking more closely at grassroots perceptions of what constitutes a political community, the diagnostic may be different. This chapter considers how the scalar and genealogical principle underpinning the local indigenous political space, the dukɔ , has come to underpin the transnational Ewe-speaking region to form a larger political community. This is notable in the Ewe Newsletters, which aimed to convene and construct a transnational Ewe nation based on mutual recognition and oral tradition but also today across the border in both oral tradition and the performance of festivals.