It's soldiers who fight battles, rearrange landscapes, traumatize populations, reshape families, and build military institutions. Making sense of soldiers’ choices means exploring who soldiers were, how they got into the fighting, how they imagined war, what they experienced, and how they remembered it. This chapter divides the study of soldiers into five analytical lenses: compositional, experiential, motivational, behavioral, and memory, and introduces a new one: the soldiers' universes—a set of distinct but overlapping networks. They had their squad or “mess” (the primary group). The regiment added bureaucracy and a hierarchical officer corps. Further up lay the institution, and its universe of training, indoctrination, and so on. Outside the army there was both a soldier-enemy universe, and a soldier-civilian universe. Finally, links to home front and family remained, even at war. Each person-to-person link within these and other possible universes was shaped by infrastructure and interest. Ultimately history flows from soldiers' choices on battlefields, and those choices emerged from the universe of connections among soldiers, to their leaders, to their enemies, and back home.

This chapter reevaluates William Burroughs’ cut-up fictions through the lens of repetition, textual variation, and the limits of intertextual theory. Benoît Delaune argues that Burroughs’ compositional method – especially in The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express – exceeds traditional literary frameworks such as Kristeva’s intertextuality or Genette’s transtextuality. Drawing on the restored editions of Burroughs’ work and early collaborations like Minutes to Go, the chapter shows how Burroughs employed chance procedures alongside careful editorial strategy to create complex recursive networks of affective resonance. Rather than merely remixing texts, Burroughs generated a form of material autotextuality that destabilizes meaning, challenges linear reading, and undermines authorial intention. Through comparisons to avant-garde practices in music and poetry, Delaune situates Burroughs’ writing as a radical alternative to literary production – a practice that treats language as sensory and viral, foregrounding affect, repetition, and disruption over interpretation or reference.

This chapter explores behaviours of wh-words L2 Chinese. The chapter first shows that English-speaking learners of Chinese generally do not transfer wh-movement from their L1, behaving native-like in accepting Chinese wh-in-situ questions, providing insights into the selective nature of L1 transfer. The chapter reveals that different wh-words behave differently when located inside different islands in L2 Chinese wh-questions, suggesting that they do not develop uniformly and their behaviours are influenced by features attached to them. Attitude-bearing wh-questions are also examined, indicating that L1 transfer can be overridden by computational complexity. The chapter further explores wh-topicalisation in L2 Chinese wh-questions, revealing that this can generally be governed at the syntax–discourse interface, although success in establishing such an interface is not universal. Chinese wh-words used as universal quantifiers and existential polarity words are also investigated, and the data indicate that licensers for these words may have different licensing powers and that their successful acquisition is variable-dependent. It is suggested that Japanese and English speakers’ L2 Chinese grammars may follow different developmental paths in acquiring these aspects of the Chinese grammar.

Affect makes us vulnerable to attention capture. William Burroughs explored the aesthetic functions of playing with and capturing attention through his comic routines, his writing and his performances. This chapter shows how the outrageousness of Burroughs’ routines and his iconic performances in “Chappaqua,” “Drugstore Cowboy” and “The Black Rider” break down defensiveness through laughter and expose the enablers and drivers of addiction, challenging us to rethink our vulnerabilities in the face of drugs, social institutions, and new forms of media. His comic routines and performances reveal the social drivers of addiction, such as the health system’s involvement in the opioid crisis and the War on Drugs’ investment in social control, and anticipate the capture and resale of attention leading to the contemporary “attention economy,” the profits of surveillance capitalism and engineered addiction to social media.

Monotonicity and positive correlations are two basic tools that, when available, greatly facilitate the study of an interacting particle system. After recalling (without proof) the basic properties of the stochastic order, it is shown how one can prove that a given system is monotone or has positive correlations. The lower and upper invariant laws of an interacting particle are introduced and studied, and it is shown how comparison results can be used to show that various functions of an interacting particle system are monotone or to transfer results from one system to another.

Union veterans faced significant challenges returning to civilian life. The war had removed them from civil society, collected them into vast armies where new social norms prevailed, subjected them to hardship, introduced them to different geographies and climates, and often exposed them to combat trauma. Readjusting to civilian norms was difficult in a society that expected them to quietly resume their prewar lives. As a result, many veterans left their antebellum communities and moved west. Those who reinvented themselves on the frontier differed from the overall Union veteran population. They were more mobile both before and after the war, served longer enlistments, were more likely to have been wounded or have encountered wartime trauma, and often either consciously or unconsciously compensated for their exposure to trauma when choosing where to settle and with whom to interact. The frontier provided the mechanism they needed to reclaim their lives. The nuances of veteran migration to the frontier cannot be fully understood without accounting for both the war and its aftermath, blurring the line between “military history” and “war and society” as paradigms of analysis.

Studies interpreting frequency-based linguistic and socio-pragmatic features of professional registers have increased extensively over the past two decades. Research on settings such as offices; outsourced call centers; healthcare facilities; and hotels have focused on improving our understanding of workplace communication and developing training materials to enhance service quality, avoid miscommunication, and facilitate successful (business) transactions. To demonstrate how linguistic features of (mis)communication in professional, multimodal workplaces can be investigated using corpora, a corpus of workplace interaction from various settings was explored. Features associated with task-oriented, polite, elaborated discourse were compared for each setting and found to be most notable in hotel and call center customer service settings. Polite professional discourse was more prominent in call centers in the Philippines than in other countries, and least frequent in the United States in general. The results demonstrate how corpus distributions can show discursive practices across sociocultural structures and task dimensions of talk in professional settings, reflecting speakers’ understanding of role relationships, discoursal goals and objectives, cultural and/or racial identities, and power dynamics at work.

The relationship that Japanese elites established with ancient Greece has both a technical and an imaginative dimension, having been constructed by means of words and concepts nourished by dreams and illusions. In combination, these dynamics led to a profound incorporation of elements associated with antiquity in contemporary Japanese culture, whether in the realm of taste or of values. When authors such as Robert Guillain refer to the archipelago as the “Far West,” a phrase meant to call attention to Japan’s growing proximity to European countries, this relation is not limited to “material aspects” and “economic models,” but also concerns politics, the arts, and science.

What is the employment law at international organizations? The answer – international administrative law – implements treaty-based employment at all international organizations, including the United Nations, International Labour Organization and the World Bank. It governs an encounter between the status of the international civil service, administrative authority at international organizations and the jurisprudence of international administrative tribunals. For the first time, the universal legal basis of international administrative law is concisely and clearly introduced, tracking the employee lifecycle, from selection, through remuneration, performance management and integrity to ending service. Drawing on the judgments of multiple administrative tribunals, a clear and useable interpretative framework of interconnected legal principles and legal duties is established. Intended for all staff at international organizations, Member State representatives, legal practitioners and scholars, this book serves as the basis for a shared understanding of international administrative law, equal to the enormity of the endeavours entrusted to the international civil service.

While phase transitions have been discussed at length, no phase transition has been rigorously established up to this point. This gap is filled in this final chapter, where comparison with oriented percolation is used to prove that contact processes with sufficiently large infection rates survive. This result depends on a comparison between k-dependent and independent random variables due to Ligett, Schonmann, and Stacey, which is proved in detail. In the final exercises, the reader is asked to apply the method to other interacting particle systems, such as a model with cooperative branching.

The fourth chapter, framed by current discussions on antisemtism and the war in Gaza, explores how several younger German Jewish writers (born between 1981 and 1986, and mostly migrants from the former Soviet Union) create original and moving expressions of their newly emancipated lives in Israel. Mirna Funk, Lena Gorelik, Olga Grjasnowa, Dimitrij Kapitelman, Markus Flohr, and most recently Dana Vowinckel all wrote narratives presenting Israel as an important space for German Jewish Holocaust memory to unfold. Untangling some of their conceptions of Holocaust memory as it shapes their protagonists’ identities sheds light on how and why Israel has become such an important reference for German Jewish Holocaust discourse even before the most recent war on Gaza. Israel, for many of these younger writers’ protagonists, functions both as an exotic and exoticized locus amoenus as well as a locus terribilis in the quest to recover previous generations’ Holocaust memory. While Israel is used as a space to reflect on the protagonists’ own more personal trauma and migration stories, it also serves as a catalyst to address Jewish–Muslim relations.

Chapter 5 investigates the dynamics of meaning generation pertaining to social structures, processes, and relations; to grammatical and semantic roles, particularly problems created by choice of grammatical voice in identifying agents and experiencers of violative actions and the ideological positioning of those individuals relative to human rights evaluations of those actions. It compares the appeals with philanthropic fundraising letters: both are problem/solutions texts attempting to persuade their addresses to act to solve their respective problems. It examines the appeal topics and the language of the rhetorical moves and steps that enact them and compares these with Amnesty’s letter writing guidelines. It identifies patterns of grammatical mood, polarity, and evidentiality that represent rights and the legal instruments from which they derive; and patterns of linguistic choices expressing concern and exigency, norms of evaluation, violation and redress, concession and rebuttal, engagement and gratitude, and that construct the cohesion exhibited by the documents and their relationships.

This chapter contrasts phraseological studies based on their research goals, the nature of the multi-word units that are analyzed, and the major methodologies that are used to identify multi-word units, ranging from the use of simple frequency criteria to probabilistic methods that identify word sequences that occur more often than would be predicted from the frequencies of the individual words. The research synthesized in this chapter has shown that there are major differences in the extent to which phraseological chunks are used, and in the kinds of phraseological chunks that occur, between spoken versus written discourse and across languages with different typological characteristics. The chapter summarizes these major patterns of use and demonstrates those patterns through a case study contrasting the use of continuous lexical sequences and discontinuous lexical frames in conversation and academic writing. Methodological issues relating to the identification of both types of phraseological chunks are described in detail.