This study aligns with Hsiao’s (1991, 1995b) prosodic parameters. In common speech, the tone group (TG) is a phonological phrase marked at the right edge of a non-adjunct XP. Following the Prosodic Hierarchy, an intonational phrase is a sense unit ending with a boundary tone and a pause, typically realized as a complete sentence but subject to restructuring with parentheticals, tag questions, or lists.

To explain tone sandhi, Chinese phonology employs a “prosodic foot” distinct from standard hierarchies. This study proposes two Metrical Hierarchies: Tonal and Rhythmic. The “prosodic foot” is redefined as the metrical tone phrase within the Tonal Metrical Hierarchy. While it governs tone sandhi in metrical reading, it does not dictate verse rhythm. Instead, the phrase is constructed from metrical beats, as a syllable-based approach fails to explain rhythmic tone patterns. A revised Beat Addition assigns initial beats to lexical syllables, while function words, suffixes, and internal syntactic ICs receive or share beats.

Syntactic c-command is dispensable, as it may yield illicit tone patterns and overlook tonal variation. Adjuncthood, rather than c-command, often determines the absence of tone sandhi.

Chapter 5 reanimates social theoretical accounts of the state, particularly those of Carl Schmitt, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu. Bringing together common elements of their work and context and linking these with al-Wardi’s work and context reveals profound resonances in the Iraqi experience of state consolidation. It argues that the state is an order that is consolidated through two main factors: a state’s ability to dominate population and territory, and the sociological legitimacy of the state as the arbitrator of collective life. Domination is a prerequisite for legitimacy, and establishing legitimacy is a historically contingent process. When these two elements come together sufficiently, a state may appear as a reified actor that is coherent, bounded, and autonomous in its actions. But this appearance is an effect of the state’s disciplinary power rather than a reflection of a sociological reality. At the same time, this effect is necessary for the maintenance of state consolidation.

The Epilogue tells the story of how a 2024 proposal to amend the Iraqi family law (Personal Status Law (PSL)) came to pass in early 2025 and outlines the objections to it in the context of this book’s main thesis about how and why state consolidation matters. The Epilogue highlights the main objections to the amendment, coming from Iraqi critics, which are focused on the social justice implications of introducing a legal structure wherein an authority is granted decision-making power over an aspect of public life that is parallel to, and outside of, the state’s authority. Critics see this as a canonization of state fragmentation and the underlying ethno-sectarian power-sharing arrangement on which it rests. The epilogue illustrates through this political and legal contestation the connections that run through sites of state fragmentation, attempts to consolidate a political order, historical legacies of state consolidation, and social justice. What the PSL story suggests is that who decides on public life is consequential to the political possibilities of justice.

Chapter 2 provides the historical context of the Ghana–Togo borderland region. I show how the border communities I have visited manifested both plurality and unity, showing strong remnants of Ewe unity despite the border but also dissensions reaffirming the border as a separation. I then delve deeper into the roots of the historical in-betweenness of the border region explaining the multiplicity of political communities layered on top of each other from the precolonial period to the 1956 plebiscite. Finally, I analyse the scholarship’s approach to nation-building projects arising from the border region in the 1950s. While the literature on political activism in the border region concludes on the failure of the diverse political projects that arose, the persistence of these projects today is not fully explained. I argue that the palimpsestic and interconnected nature of political communities in the borderlands contributes to explain this phenomenon – which suggests that other frameworks smaller than the Westphalian conception of nation-state are at work.

This chapter looks at Barbara Strozzi both as a daughter and a mother. She was raised in the house of her adoptive father, Giulio Strozzi, and her mother, Isabella Garzoni, or Griega. The relationship between Barbara–born illegitimately, as had been her father and grandfather before her– and Giulio, is enhanced through a close reading of his wills. The household eventually expanded to include Barbara’s four children, born to her and one of her father’s friends, Giovanni Paolo Vidman. Barbara had known Vidman at least from 1634, as revealed in Nicolò Fontei’s dedication to Vidman in his Bizzarie, though their first child was born only in 1641. Vidman died in 1648, yet the Strozzis’ connections to his family continued until 1719, with the death of Barbara’s eldest son, Giulio Pietro.

This chapter addresses the Black Atlantic threads contained in Pablo Neruda’s corpus, mainly in Canto general (1950) and Canción de gesta (Song of Protest, 1960). The chapter is particularly focused on moments of poetic representation of the Atlantic slave trade and its aftermath. In this vein, it discusses the Caribbean literary influences – and specifically Négritude and Negrismo movements – that impacted Neruda’s writing, including the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire and the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. As a result, this essay unveils Neruda’s sociological but also political motivations for including the historiographical context of the Black Caribbean in his work, including Cuba’s Black internationalism in Canción de gesta. This latter part of the chapter, which is informed by a personal interview with Roberto Fernández Retamar, sheds light on the political reasons for the neglect of Neruda’s Black Atlantic in Canción de gesta, and offers considerations for correcting the overlooked dimensions of his work.

This essay analyzes the ambivalent status of objects in Pablo Neruda’s poetry. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s studies of the paradoxes present in the figure of the collector, it traces the way poetic objects in Neruda’s odes appear simultaneously as treasured possessions and utilitarian agents of revolution. Although the portrayal of everyday objects in his later work has been read as propagandistic, it is in their personal link to the poet as collected objects that Neruda’s objects retain the potential for social change Benjamin outlines in the collector.

Chapter Four explores the politics of sectarianism and statecraft within the context of the triangular relationship among the Ottoman state, the Safavid state, and the Qizilbash communities situated between them. The chapter examines how the Ottoman state and its Qizilbash subjects devised diverse strategies to navigate their religious sensitivities, sociopolitical realities, and fiscal imperatives. A new set of questions is introduced to challenge the prevailing notion that the relationship between the “Sunni Ottoman” state and its “non-Sunni Qizilbash” subjects was inherently irreconcilable and characterized by continuous persecution of these supposedly powerless, defenseless religious nonconformists. It reveals the existence of a range of policies and approaches adopted by the Ottoman state, from providing financial support to establishing quid pro quo arrangements, from accommodating Qizilbash subjects to resorting to surveillance and heavy-handed suppression and persecution of the very same populations. The chapter emphasizes that the Ottoman Qizilbash, as significant powerholders during this period, exerted their influence not only through practices of conversion and reconversion but also through negotiation, migration, intervention, and at times rebellion.

This essay examines various forms of transactional relationships, from marriage and concubinage to brothel prostitution and the informal exchange of sex for sustenance. It considers the life of famous musician Barbara Strozzi, institutional attempts to manage prostitution through legislation and charity, and the negotiation of transactional sex amongst the city’s poorest residents. Byars demonstrates that early modern Venetians saw sexuality as both necessary and dangerous, fleshes out the porous boundaries on the spectrum between marriage and prostitution, and explores how women navigated the socioeconomic systems that commodified them.