This chapter focuses on L2 acquisition of Chinese passives, ba-constructions, and relative clauses (RCs), offering insights into why certain features in these structures are more difficult to acquire than others. It begins by looking at the ease and difficulty that L2 learners have in acquiring Chinese passives, highlighting challenges that semantic constraints pose to L2 acquisition of Chinese passives, which are argued to be caused by L1 transfer, and the availability and consistency of cues in the input. The chapter then explores the ba-construction, a unique structure in Chinese characterized by its apparent SOV word order, despite the canonical SVO order. Semantic constraints on the ba-construction, such as the definiteness requirement of the noun phrase following ba and the affectedness feature on the VP are discussed, showing how L2 learners often struggle with these nuances. Also discussed is L2 acquisition of the part–whole relation required for the retained object in the ba-construction. The chapter also delves into RCs in L2 Chinese, examining the use of resumptive pronouns and the confounding factors involved in investigating the processing of subject vs. object RCs in L2 Chinese.

This chapter interrogates William Burroughs’ construction of queer masculinity across his life and work, tracing how trauma, sexual repression, and homophobic cultural conditioning shaped his macho queer persona and his artistic output. Ian MacFadyen analyzes The Wild Boys and Port of Saints as exuberant departures from earlier narratives of abjection, projecting a militant, erotic utopia of all-boy societies free from female influence. Through Burroughs’ letters, routines, and cut-up techniques, the chapter tracks the evolution of a self-sustaining erotic textual system – simultaneously revealing and concealing the vulnerability that underpinned his hostility and misogyny. MacFadyen contrasts Burroughs’ rejection of effeminacy with his fascination for sexual fluidity, exploring the cultural contradictions of queer identity in the mid twentieth century. Through close readings, the chapter considers Burroughs’ boy fantasies as both a symptom of and response to social trauma, while critically assessing his lasting legacy – and limitations – as a radical figure of queer cultural disruption.

Rurality in health care presents a multitude of challenges, not only to providers of healthcare services but most significantly to healthcare consumers. Providing and gaining access to appropriate and timely services in regions of Aotearoa New Zealand that are remote and isolated from the wide variety of healthcare services offered routinely in urban areas require ingenuity and creativity. Appreciating the unique healthcare landscape and focusing on the provision of health care in rural and remote areas of Aotearoa New Zealand are essential to understanding and working alongside the communities that live, work and play in those areas. This exploration of the challenges is necessary to provide health care that is sensitive to the nuances of residing in rural or remote areas and to meet the unique cultural needs of those communities.

This central chapter builds on Chapter 2 to give sufficient conditions for an interacting particle system to be uniquely defined by a Poisson point process called a graphical representation. The generator construction is also discussed. The basic construction result is applied to prove that interacting particle systems with sufficiently weak interactions are ergodic in the sense that they have a unique invariant law that is the long-time limit started from any initial state. The theory is demonstrated on a stochastic Ising model, leading to a proof that the magnetization is zero at sufficiently high temperatures.

This chapter interprets Calvin’s infamous claim that the human mind is a “perpetual factory of idols” through early modern theories of imaginative dysfunction unto delusion. Calvin’s charge of “idolatry,” including the institutionalized idolatry of the Catholic Mass, emerges as a targeted diagnosis of a condition that inverts the ideal of spectatorship – one in which a sinful imagination, left unchecked, generates corrupted phantasms that come to supplant external sense data, resulting in functional blindness to God’s sensible accommodations.

This chapter introduces the major themes, questions, methods, and layout of the book.

Chapter 1 describes the defining characteristics of motivation ( i.e. purpose, flexibility and goal direction, reinforcement, affect, a capacity to overcome obstacles, resolution of competition), with varying sensitivity to internal (e.g. nutrient levels) and external incentive (e.g. food) factors. The dichotomy between approach and avoidance is introduced. It goes on to introduce the topics of the remaining chapters of the book. Motivation potentiates certain functionally appropriate responses (e.g. lordosis in the female rat). The chapter describes Tinbergen’s four types of explanation: causal, functional, evolutionary, and developmental/learning.

This chapter reviews research on corpus-based approaches to regional and social dialect variation in the English language. The studies reviewed in this chapter focus primarily on lexical and grammatical variation across nation, gender, age, class, and region, in both spoken and written English, from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Notably, this review includes extensive discussion of recent research on computational sociolinguistics, an emerging interdisciplinary field that has primarily focused on the analysis of very large corpora of social media data. The second part of this chapter presents a case study to exemplify this new approach to the analysis of language variation and change, which maps variation in the use of profanities in American English for the first time based on a multibillion-word corpus of social media data. In addition to illustrating how a large-scale corpus-based approach allows for new research questions in dialectology to be pursued, it also identifies two clear regional patterns in the use of profanity online, reflecting well-established American cultural patterns, specifically related to ethnicity and population density.

This essay compares disparate responses of African Americans to “brown babies”—children of African American servicemen and German women born because of WWII—and Black Amerasians, offspring of African American servicemen and Vietnamese women born during the Vietnam War. It argues that African American assertions of transnational racial kinship with Germany’s brown babies and rejection of Black Amerasians from Vietnam informed how both groups of children grappled with illegitimacy, race, and identity. It situates the Black response to brown babies within the civil rights era and the reaction to Black Amerasians amidst the aftermath of Vietnam. Each moment forced African Americans, brown babies, and Black Amerasians to confront questions of race and responsibility for illegitimate children born abroad. African American efforts to “save” brown babies from Germany and to rescue Black Amerasians from Vietnam forced child welfare professionals in each country to reconsider transnational and transracial adoption processes. By juxtaposing African American perceptions with children’s lived experiences, the essay reveals challenges posed to notions of race and nation when war creates life.

Corporations act as entities addressing the world with a single face and voice, with the law resorting to metaphors such as “person” and “body” to present the group as an entity distinct from its members. Four historic models of group action, which can hybridize across time, can provide an added functional analysis: the “cathedral” built by self-regulating guilds and societies; the “factory” resting on division of labour and hierarchical organization; the “bazaar” of adjoining enterprises providing some level of market integration between traders; and the “commune” resting on personalized bonds and common purposes. All types are affected by coordination problems arising whenever members must take joint decisions or set up a deliberative system for forming judgements preparatory to taking decisions. While a group can be said to attain corporate status when it functions as a univocal entity owning its actions, in order to act effectively, the corporation must develop techniques to gather and process information attained by its agents, much of which will be predictions of the conduct of other agents. The corporation exists to cultivate and embody common knowledge. Preceding this chapter’s conceptual analysis is a case study of the historically important and now-troubled Boeing.

This chapter describes corpus-based work that analyses texts from a register perspective – that is, analyzing patterns of pervasive linguistic features and interpreting the communicative functions served by the features in the situational context. The chapter defines ‘register’, distinguishing it from ‘genre’. It then reviews research, covering studies of different linguistic scope (individual features, discourse systems, patterns of co-occurring features) and different purposes with respect to registers (e.g., describing a single register vs. comparing registers), as well as studies about the nature of situational characteristics. Example studies illustrate a variety of approaches while also covering seminal work. The chapter includes a section focused on English for specific purposes (ESP) since register variation is central to that field. Pulling together the research, the chapter summarizes accomplishments and challenges for register studies thus far. Accomplishments include establishing the importance of register variation and continually advancing research methods to better understand it. Challenges include the struggle to impact related fields, especially education and other areas of linguistics. The final section describes a sample study focused on engineering writing that is typical of register research in many ways but also incorporates interview data to illustrate how corpus results can be made more meaningful for educational applications.