This article presents an acoustic analysis of vowel quality and duration in Chichicastenango K’iche’ (Maya) tense, lax and glottalized vowels through a controlled speech production experiment. The results show that most of the five tense–lax pairs can be distinguished through F1 and F2, with the high and mid lax vowels lower than their tense counterparts and the low lax vowel higher than its tense counterpart. Glottalized high and mid vowels have lax quality while glottalized low vowels have tense quality. The high lax vowels /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ and their glottalized counterparts show a high degree of overlap with surrounding categories and appear to be in process of being lost, though they retain distinct phonological behavior. Glottalized vowels are longer than tense vowels, which are longer than lax vowels. The voice quality of glottalized vowels is highly variable and is influenced by context. Realizations with full closures are almost entirely absent. Neither vowel quality nor voice quality results show clear evidence in favor of either a one-segment or two-segment analysis for glottalized vowels.

This article discusses the variation between masculine and neuter anaphoric pronouns in Afrikaans, especially in reference to inanimate entities such as objects, abstracts, collectives, and masses. The fact that books, governments, and wine can be referred to as both hy ‘he’ and dit ‘it’ is well known, but it is surprising given what is known about pronominal gender systems. Such systems are usually organized according to clear semantic principles, yielding predictable choices. The article summarizes the available literature, provides new data from the NWU-Kommentaarkorpus, and presents an approach that helps to make sense of the synchronic variation and, to some extent, the diachronic developments.

The recent turn to market activism is transforming the politics around the state and capitalism, while significantly restructuring markets. We focus on one important but understudied element in this development: the securitization of market competition in the European Union. We argue that European political actors are strategically using specific narratives to construct competition policies in a new way, one that implicates the geopolitical standing of the EU and its national security. This contrasts with the longstanding view of EU competition policy as existing in a separate sphere, disembedded from politics, where market efficiency is paramount. To empirically capture this change, we undertake a systematic analysis of DG Competition Annual Reports, using a language-analysis schema over the decade from 2013 to 2023. Our findings demonstrate that this securitization strategy has been consistently increasing over time in the EU, evidenced in the rhetorical use of crises, the linking of markets to a larger set of issues and policy goals, the invocation of geopolitical pressures, and the framing of a need for the consolidation of EU power. We note, however, that this policy turn towards securitization of economic policy brings substantial political tensions given the EU’s limited democratic accountability.

This article examines Afrikaans V1-constructions with the verb laat ‘let’ and compares them with similar constructions in Dutch. I refer to these as pseudo-let imperatives (or PLI-constructions). Although PLI-constructions have the same form as some let-imperatives in both languages, they no longer function as commands and lack the directive force typically associated with imperatives. Instead, PLI-constructions are used to express the speaker’s perspective on a certain event or action. Drawing on grammaticalization criteria used by Van Craenenbroeck & Van Koppen (2015, 2017) in their work on perception and causative verbs in imperative(-like) constructions in Dutch, this article argues that PLI-laat/laten has undergone grammaticalization in both Afrikaans and Dutch. Additionally, I demonstrate that the Afrikaans PLI-laat has grammaticalized further than its Dutch counterpart. I propose that Afrikaans’ contact with a variety of other languages throughout its history may have accelerated the grammaticalization of laat relative to its Dutch counterpart, resulting in the observed differences in the grammaticalization of PLI-laat/laten constructions.

This article concerns the so-called Infinitivus Pro Participio (IPP) effect – in terms of which what appears to be an infinitive surfaces where a selected past participle is expected – as it manifests in modern Afrikaans. Prior research has highlighted the apparent optionality of this effect, leading to conflicting conclusions regarding the continued existence of a productive IPP-effect in contemporary Afrikaans. Here we draw on recent corpus- and questionnaire-based investigations to consider the optionality of the IPP-effect in Afrikaans in more empirical detail, with the objective of establishing (i) the status of the IPP in Afrikaans and (ii) how it differs from the IPP in Dutch. The article’s second objective is to consider the role of language contact in shaping the IPP-effect as it is currently attested in (varieties of) Afrikaans.*

To those living through them, the Elizabethan and early Stuart years of England’s history seemed unusually riven by plots and conspiracies. Protestants feared the public effects of the private machinations of the Scottish queen and her supporters, of Jesuits, and of perfidious “papists” more generally. Catholic polemicists countered with narratives of dark deeds done by men who subverted rather than served the Crown: “secret histories” circulated that warned of William and Robert Cecil, the earl of Leicester, and others undermining the public state of the realm.1 Very real conspiracies by men such as the Earl of Essex and Guy Fawkes fostered fears of others. From the hard and hungry 1590s, protests against enclosures and lack of food became so common and concerning that the authorities contrived to brand some such riots as the products of treasonous conspiracies that threatened not just particular landlords or grain merchants but the public at large.2 Over the early seventeenth century, fears of covert machinations by both the poor and the powerful only increased, culminating in the fear that King Charles himself had become a pawn in a Catholic conspiracy that endangered the lives and liberties of his subjects.3 Talk of plots and conspiracies—real and imagined—abounded in an increasingly divided and discordant political culture, seen as threatening a “public” they arguably helped to create.

How and why do attempts to remedy sexual violence fail survivors so profoundly? In industrialized democracies, government consensus that rape is something to combat has done little to reduce its prevalence. A rich corpus of literature in political science focuses on the causes and consequences of public violence while ignoring private violence altogether. In states that identify as leaders on gender equality, how does this failure to effectively respond to sexual violence unfold? We build on a wealth of feminist scholarship to advance a simple claim, worthy of urgent attention from scholars of political violence. Through formal and informal institutions, states routinely perpetrate violence, upholding structures of gendered, classed, and racialized domination and oppression. We show how legal, medical, and family systems perpetrate violence by reimposing rather than challenging patriarchal power in their interactions with survivors. By denying survivors’ experiences, dehumanizing their survival, and subjugating them in their efforts to seek care, legal, medical, and family systems refuse survivors and other feminized populations autonomy, power, and control over their own lives and bodies. These practices enact violence by recreating the embodied experiences and power dynamics present in acts of sexual violence. We join a chorus of feminist scholars to argue that understanding how institutions perpetrate violence after rape is critical for understanding broader power relations in society.

This article explores how late nineteenth-century British socialists theorized the relationship between socialism and democracy through debates about the referendum. At the 1896 London Congress of the Second International, Fabians such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw defended parliamentary representation, expertise, and leadership as essential to socialist politics. In contrast, radicals in the Social Democratic Federation, and the Independent Labour Party advanced a theory of “real democracy” centered on direct popular legislation. Rejecting parliamentarism as corrupt, they envisioned referenda, mandates, and recall as tools to secure individual sovereignty and to dissolve the dominance of permanent majorities. This model redefined majority rule as transient, issue-specific, and plural, challenging both plebiscitary leadership and technocratic elitism. Although the International ultimately adopted the referendum only for strategic purposes, these debates reveal an original, if forgotten, socialist account of democracy as a form of pluralist, non-electoral majoritarianism.

The idea of decentering the human from our understanding of the world is under discussion across the globe. Behind this lies the question of anthropocentrism and the social sciences formed around it. In what follows, I outline what is involved in decentering humans and how this process is linked to materiality. This is not a new issue: an extensive tradition of materialist critiques of anthropocentrism stretches from eleventh-century Iran to sixteenth-century Rome, post-war Germany, and Indigenous knowledges passed down across generations. We need to access these histories and understand how they have interacted with, pushed back against, and been reconfigured by colonialism and empire. Dealing with such matters raises conceptual problems about power and agency, structure and change, and nature and the social. But this work also leads to questions about global knowledge production, including who gets to theorize, who is theorized, and how different regions—such as Iran—are rendered intelligible. While there is no single blueprint for change, there is scope for invention and experiment. In this article, I contribute to the nexus of new materialism, postcolonialism, and Iranian studies by exploring these questions and providing an overview of the special issue: “Materiality in Iran.”

The increasing pollution of water bodies by tetracycline (TC) has emerged as a looming threat to both environmental sustainability and human health, and the development of novel and effective remediation techniques is essential. The purpose of the present research was to explore the potential of montmorillonite (Mnt) and ZnO/Mnt composites as cost-effective and eco-friendly adsorbents for the removal of TC from polluted water sources. Batch adsorption experiments were carried out under controlled laboratory conditions, where adsorption isotherms, kinetic studies, and zero-charge point (pHzcp) determinations were performed systematically to evaluate the performance of ZnO, Mnt, and ZnO/Mnt composites. The results highlighted the underlying importance of surface charge to adsorption by establishing pHzcp for ZnO, Mnt, and the ZnO/Mnt composite. The effects of pH on the surface charge of adsorbents (ZnO, Mnt, and the ZnO/Mnt) and the equilibrium structure of TC were measured systematically and trends that are imperative for understanding the dynamics of adsorption were identified. The removal efficiencies of TC at the optimal pH of 5 were 100% for Mnt, 70% for ZnO/Mnt, and 4% for ZnO. Mnt exhibited the greatest adsorption capacity (125 mg g–1), particularly effective within the pH range of 3–7, demonstrating its strong potential for pollutant removal. However, the ZnO/Mnt composite, although showing a lower adsorption capacity (72 mg g–1), offers additional advantages due to the photocatalytic properties of ZnO. Under light irradiation, ZnO promotes the mineralization of adsorbed TC into harmless products such as CO₂ and H₂O, thereby reducing the risk of secondary pollution. While Mnt alone efficiently captures TC, the lack of degradation may pose environmental challenges. By integrating adsorption with photocatalysis, the ZnO/Mnt composite provides a more sustainable, dual-functional approach, highlighting the significance of coupling pollutant capture with degradation for effective and eco-friendly water treatment.