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.

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.

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.

William Burroughs’ avid consumption of pulp magazines in his youth led to his discovery of H. P. Lovecraft, whose influence would impart a distinctive set of horror devices to Burrough’s writing. Naked Lunch displays these devices with remarkable vividness, giving graphic expression to the key horror tropes of interstitiality and impurity. Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject provides a useful interpretive tool to assess the effect of these tropes, enabling a reading of Naked Lunch that identifies the disintegration of selfhood as its central concern. Using repeated images of bodily fluids and monstrosity, Naked Lunch excavates the anxiety of being a gay drug addict in the normative 1950s. In the process, both the reader and the narrator undergo abjection through the visceral language and profoundly fragmented narrative voice. Naked Lunch represents a redeployment of Lovecraftian horror that helped to create the body horror of the 1980s.

Chapter 6 traverses a test veteran group action against the British Ministry of Defence as it moved through the High Court of England and Wales, the Court of Appeal, to a final ruling in the UK Supreme Court. According to the legal principle of limitation, test veterans needed to offer the courts life histories proving ignorance of nuclear risk. The MoD’s legal counsel argued that an individual’s obligations to anticipate and understand injury were unrelated to the pragmatic enactment of such knowledge. In witness stands, test veterans recontextualized their knowledge of injury in ways that animated state, medical, and legal actors as powerfully capable of stymying their knowledge. In this case, claimants experience a series of unjust legal reversals and ironies. First, the actions and duties of claimants, not those accused of injuring them, became the subject of moral and legal judgement. Second, claimants’ long-running quests for knowledge about their health became the very legal rationale to deny them justice. And third, such legal processes imposed strict time limits on claimants’ actions, while also making claimants wait as appeals stretched over years.

This chapter introduces Ando tuples, a key ingredient for the development of the main results. It is shown that not only do Ando tuples describe every minimal Ando isometric lift of a commuting contractive pair via a Douglas-type model, but also they govern the uniqueness of minimal isometric lifts. Ando tuples come equipped with their own notion of unitary equivalence. Equivalence of Ando tuples corresponds to unitary equivalence of the associated minimal Ando lifts of the given commuting contractive pair. This gives a way of classifying the previously observed lack of uniqueness (up to unitary equivalence). This lack of uniqueness gives part of the explanation as to why the bivariate problem is harder than the univariate classical version. For the development of this chapter, we need what we refer to as Type I Ando tuples. ​An in-depth analysis reveals that Type I Ando tuples exist, which leads to a new proof of Ando’s dilation theorem.

Chapter 5 dwells on the legal reasoning that governed New Zealand military disablement pensions. It charts how test veterans experienced law as an arbitrary logic, one that remained simultaneously open and closed to them. Law, many felt, was a force capable of dividing their community according to the vicissitudes of luck. This chapter also engages with the labour of Pension Appeal Board members who tried to fit veteran accounts of injury within legislative notions of reasonable evidence and plausible causation. Sitting face to face in appeal board meetings, veterans and those adjudicating their claims attempted to embody the state’s legal and moral responsibilities to offer benevolent and exceptional military entitlements to veterans. Test veterans reveal how thresholds of proof and exposure become negotiable and unstable objects of law and medicine that shift dynamically throughout the proof-making process. As this chapter shows, flexible and informal proof-making systems that aim to overcome unfair evidentiary burdens of exposure can, for claimants, ultimately reinscribe a sense of injustice and harm due to their seemingly arbitrary, opaque, and inconsistent judgements.

This chapter revisits the early New York circle that would become the core of the Beat Generation, focusing on how William Burroughs was mythologized by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac as an enigmatic and “inscrutable” figure – simultaneously a mentor, literary underground guide, and embodiment of countercultural authenticity. While Burroughs’s role in shaping Beat sensibilities has been canonized in critical anthologies and biographies, this chapter interrogates the recursive loops of fiction, memoir, and myth that have shaped that reputation. It shows how Kerouac and Ginsberg strategically deployed Burroughs’s persona – banker-turned-junkie, literary sage, and shadowy insider – to confer legitimacy on their own nascent artistic identities. Drawing on works such as Junky, Naked Lunch, and Vanity of Duluoz, alongside correspondence and early collaborations, the chapter argues that Burroughs’ very inscrutability became legible only through Beat mythology. Yet this process ultimately risks reducing the complex multiplicity of Burroughs’s work to a single, romanticized origin story.