Chapter 5 broadly discusses language use in multilingual and multidialectal societies, codeswitching, language birth, and language loss. We include case studies of multilingualism in the Vaupès in Amazonia and the Maghreb in Africa, the intermingled nature of Maltese and Michif, and English-only movements in North America.

The Postscript outlines the aftermath of Gao Pian’s assassination, in Huainan and beyond, formulates several salient conclusions, and pinpoints the historiographical issues the book raises. In “A Meeting of Ghosts,” Gao Pian’s spirit makes an appearance in Runzhou in the company of three historical statesmen, all past victims of political violence. The apparition takes place in 907, shortly after the Tang’s demise. “Auguries of a New Order” narrates the fall of the Tang, describes the multipolar structure of power rising from the ruins of the empire, and analyzes Gao Pian’s part in shaping that emerging new order. “Fact and Fiction” then asks what can be learned from the divergences between Gao’s image in contemporary writings and official historiography. “Center and Periphery,” finally, discusses the historiographical focus of this book on regional perspectives and individual biography and, more generally, the capacity of microhistory to throw light on macrohistorical events.

Chapter 2 examines changes in colonial mercy proceedings from the late 1940s to the 1960s, and the tensions that arose between decolonisation and British involvement in determining the fate of condemned prisoners. These tensions were apparent in cases from British Guiana, Malaya and Kenya, among others, but in the immediate aftermath of British abolition they were especially pronounced in the Bahamas, which had a constitutionally advanced system of internal self-government and where, in 1968, British ministers prevented the execution of two prisoners whom locally elected political leaders and the governor had decided should hang. Analysis of these cases reveals the dynamics of death penalty culture and political debates in the Bahamas and demonstrates that Britain could not divorce itself from the ramifications of colonial capital cases, even as successive British governments remained formally committed to the Creech Jones doctrine that they should not interfere in determining the fate of condemned prisoners.

This chapter examines the founding doctrine of the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO) and heterodox challenges to socialist orthodoxy within the party. Though “doctrine” was an important guarantor of party unity and identity, heterodox challenges to this doctrine were not in themselves enough to provoke a schism within the SFIO. The more determinant factor behind the 1933 “neo-socialist schism” was the practical question of socialist ministerial participation in bourgeois governments. The doctrinal status of ministerial participation was, however, ambiguous according to the founding texts of the SFIO, raising the question of how the factional debate over ministerial participation was transmuted from a “tactical” debate into a question of “doctrine” and thus of the boundaries of legitimate socialist identity.

Chapter 4 explains the community-building benefits of creating or finding an academic writing group. The chapter describes the various structures and functions of writing groups, suggesting different configurations of groups that address specific aspects of the writing process or focus on particular writing goals. We provide writing group formats that readers can use to create their own groups. Chapter 3 outlines the advantages of joining a writing group, including increased productivity and establishing a support system for academic writers.

This chapter discusses the problematic but ubiquitous attempts by nineteenth-century linguists to map languages onto language areas and to map states onto those. Languages occupy an uneasy scalar position between dialects and language families: ‘splitters’ will concede an independent status to smaller variants, ‘lumpers’ will group all these variants together into greater wholes. By the same logic, sometimes small language areas are seen as the separate territorial footprints of independent language groups justifying their separate nationhood, while others might claim those areas as part of a larger national whole, as in the case of German expansionism vis-à-vis Schleswig-Holstein and the Low Countries. This chapter discusses the uneasy scalar taxonomy of the Slavic language family as treated by ‘lumping’ pan-Slavic and ‘splitting’ separatist tendencies. The macronationalism of language families constituted a support network for separate national movements in various countries (as in the case of pan-Celticism or pan-Slavism). Macronationalism could also shade into a racial logic for ethnolinguistic macro-groups such as the speakers of Germanic, Indo-European or putative ‘Turanian’ languages.

This chapter reads the criticism of I. A. Richards in relation to the tradition of scientific reading sketched in this book, positioning him as a theoretician of linguistic exactitude. Far from Empsonian ‘ambiguity’, Richards’s overall investment in the striving for linguistic clarity reconfigures how we should view his place in the history of the discipline. If close reading is a practice that today prizes ambiguity, contradiction and the play of the signifier, then Richards sits awkwardly as its founder – and, towards the end of his career, Richards would even wonder out loud whether a literary criticism based on exactitude could help facilitate a one-world liberal government. The chapter ends by returning to the question of artifice and the knowledge it can produce, focussing on the Cambridge-based poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who sought to reconfigure Richards’s concept of a linguistic instrument through her verse practice. Reading her poetry and criticism from the 1970s, the chapter shows how Forrest-Thomson localises the idea of poetry as a unique linguistic instrument in her conception of poetic artifice, which she sees as a form of knowing irreducible to scientific explanation.

People enact meaningful personal relationships using communication technologies. The current chapter overviews how technology and personal relationships are intertwined. The perspective of the chapter is centered on how people relate via technologies while recognizing the importance of understanding the technologies themselves and how they are used. The chapter has three main sections. The first examines how communication technologies are integral to relational communication across the course of relationships, and the second considers factors that shape the nature and impact of relational communication occurring via technologies. The third section focuses on both relationships and technologies by considering the contemporary notion of mixed-media relationships, which are enacted via multiple channels, often simultaneously. Finally, the conclusion of the chapter elucidates some key complexities and their implications for future research and theory, including the need to consider both technologies and messages simultaneously and the challenges of analyzing multimodal communication in relationships.

A patient on clozapine has an absolute neutrophil count (ANC) of 1200. What do the prescribing guidelines recommend as the next step?