This chapter analyses how the Argentinian Truth Commission (CONADEP 1983-1984) accounted for the dictatorship’s state-violence, and how international law is involved in the making of this account as truth. The argument is that the Truth Commission draws on international law’s promises of peace and democracy to authorize its account as truth. In turn, the Truth Commission deauthorizes, and thereby silences, accounts of the dictatorship’s state-violence that do not conform with the official version embedded in, and mobilized by, the promises of international law of the late-Cold War. To show this, I read the Prologue to the Truth Commission’s Final Report as a literary text that not only works to establish the account that is set out in the Final Report, but that also authorizes that account as the truth by connecting it to international law. This reading of the Prologue to the Final Report’s textual representation of truth and authority draws on scholarship in the field of law and literature. The chapter also discusses the ongoing role of the Prologue in Argentina’s contemporary public life, particularly during the Kircher, Macri and Milei governments.

Multidimensional analysis (MDA) is a methodological approach used to describe the underlying three-way functional relationship between situational characteristics, linguistic structures, and communicative function. The MDA approach was pioneered by Biber (1988), who used it to describe linguistic variation in spoken and written English in terms of linguistic features co-occurrence. In recent years, the MDA approach has experienced considerable methodological growth. This chapter begins with an overview of five MDA studies that played a pivotal role in the historical development of the MDA approach through the introduction of novel methods, applications, and findings. In this overview, the chapter focuses on the novel aspects of each study and the impact that it had on the field. It then discusses the current methodological state of the art, focusing on recent innovative developments occurring at three crucial stages of an MDA: selection of variables for analysis, selection of lexico-grammatical tagger, and selection of the appropriate statistical technique. The chapter concludes with a case study representing the current state of the art in MDA research.

This chapter treats the basic theory of continuous-time Markov processes with countable state space. After recalling (without proof) the standard textbook theory for finite state spaces, three constructions on infinite spaces are discussed in detail: the construction via the embedded Markov chain, the generator construction, and Poisson constructions. It is shown how Lyapunov functions can be used to prove that a continuous-time Markov chain is nonexplosive. This is applied together with the Poisson construction to construct some interacting particle systems for finite initial conditions only, preparing for the general existence and uniqueness results of Chapter 4.

This chapter comprehensively explores the field of corpus pragmatics, focusing particularly on the advances made in the last decade. Traditionally, corpus pragmatic research, heavily influenced by work in corpus linguistics more generally, has adopted a form-to-function approach to the study of pragmatic phenomena. More recently, however, with the emergence of corpora, methodologies, and annotation schemes specifically designed for pragmatic research, the function-to-form approach that effective pragmatic research demands has featured more prominently. In this chapter, both of these approaches to corpus pragmatics are illustrated through case studies. The first of these studies explores the more conventional form-to-function approach to the discourse-pragmatic marker there in Irish English using the one-million-word Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE). The second study illustrates the function-to-form approach to analyze backchannels using the Inter-Varietal Online (IVO) corpus, a 205,529-word multimodal corpus of online business meetings annotated for nonverbal features (head nods, hand waves, etc.). We stress that no one approach is better than the other. Indeed, the ideal is the development of a single methodological approach that embraces the range of technical innovations currently available to researchers in the field.

This chapter examines corpus-based research on intonation and prosodic features, focusing on tune patterns, f0 range, intonational phrasing, and speech rate, alongside tools, annotation systems, and corpus linguistic methods. It highlights multidimensional analysis (MDA; Biber, 1988) and the integration of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors (e.g., gender, speaking style; Gut, 2009; Staples & Puga, 2022; McClellan, 2024), addressing challenges and solutions in these areas. To illustrate research in this area, the case study using Staples and Puga’s (2022) data demonstrates the integration of prosody, fluency, and lexico-grammatical features via MDA, offering insights into functional language use among L1 and L2 English speakers. Data from the LINDSEI and LOCNEC corpora, comprising 259 files from diverse L1 and L2 groups, were analyzed. Results revealed significant differences in fluency, prosodic patterns, and discourse functions. Dimension 1 (D1) showed L1 speakers produced more fluent, informational speech, while L2 groups exhibited simplified, less fluent discourse, highlighting the need to incorporate informational language choices into spoken discourse instruction. Gender also influenced D1 scores: male speakers spoke faster and used fewer high-ending tunes. Findings emphasize distinctions across gender and linguistic groups, advocating for advanced methods that integrate linguistic and social variables to enhance language proficiency assessment and teaching.

Chapter 3 asks what is counted and who comes to count in the enactment of epidemiological knowledge. It explores the presence and absence of injury in statistics, blood, chromosomes, memory, and radiation records, and asks how those exposed to toxic environmental harm experience and evaluate epidemiological accounts of their health. It also examines how scientists who use epidemiological reasoning in toxic exposure studies understand and enact the ethics of their practice. It charts how test veterans grappled with the troubling evidentiary burdens of exposure upon which claim-making depends. In attempting to contest accounts of ‘safe’ radiation exposure embedded within government records, test veterans condemned some epidemiological studies and praised others. ‘Good’ numbers were emergent if they were temporally responsive, appropriately connected and detached from study subjects, separable from the state’s influence, epistemically humble, future focused, and contextualized within the practices of their production. ‘Bad’ numbers, by contrast, were those that perpetuated and exacerbated the injuries they denied.

This chapter discusses corpus linguistic work that investigates change in grammatical phenomena, such as word order patterns, complementation, clause linkage, pronoun systems, or markers of tense, aspect, and modality. The focus is on English grammar, but the main points are applicable to grammatical change in other languages as well. The chapter has two parts. The first part is a selective overview of diachronic studies with different subject matters and theoretical backgrounds in the area of corpus-based work on grammatical change. The overview addresses four core questions:• What grammatical phenomena have been studied?• What corpus-based measures and methods have been used in the process?• Which types of grammatical change are highly amenable to corpus analysis, and which ones less so?• What empirical and theoretical results have emerged?The second part of the chapter offers a detailed report on a diachronic corpus study addressing the English derivational suffix -ment. The study illustrates how corpus-based analysis can reveal the life cycle of a word-formation process. Discussion of the new formations that are typical for different historical stages yields a new perspective on productivity not as a one-dimensional quantitative measure but as a grammatical characteristic shaped over time by structure, meaning, and frequency alike.

Managing financially material climate risk requires reliable, decision-useful data, yet climate-related information remains fragmented and complex. Investor Climate Alliances (ICAs) have emerged as institutional responses, providing the infrastructure to produce, share, and interpret climate risk data across heterogeneous communities. Using the governing knowledge commons framework, this chapter examines ICAs as collective governance systems – institutions that coordinate knowledge production through formal rules, informal norms, and shared practices. Investor Climate Alliances demonstrate that complex knowledge resources can be generated collaboratively. In doing so, they illuminate the friction between collaborative knowledge governance and corporate law’s traditional paradigms which constrain investor collaboration.

This chapter proposes to recast the supply chain as a commons via an extended description of the shared social, intellectual, and regulatory resources currently producing an experiment in a circular economy for organic waste in Sydney, Australia. Organic waste, once composted, finds its way into high-value-added crops like heirloom garlic, which are then sold back to consumers in Sydney. By foregrounding the practices of social learning and information sharing that is making this “circularity” possible, the chapter illustrates how creating a material commons often depends upon creating a knowledge commons to make it cohere, as well as upon creating commoner-subjects who will do the work of caring for both.