Palliative care is an interdisciplinary approach to caring for individuals and families who are suffering with serious illness. Medical and psycho-social-spiritual symptoms and needs are assessed and addressed. Much of palliative care is about working with patients and families to bring their context to light, that is, to understand not only their medical situation but also their wishes, values, cultural background, previous experiences, and quality of life. As palliative care clinicians, we have seen how popular understanding and misunderstanding about what it means to “honor thy mother and father” can influence medical decision making. Whether or not adult children of patients have familiarity with the honor commandment, the biblical text “honor thy father and mother,” or whether they identify with a particular religious tradition, this theme plays a central—and often unaddressed—role as adult children strive to make decisions with and for a seriously ill parent. In this article we examine the commandment to honor one's father and mother by exploring its religious, spiritual, textual, and cultural origins, as well as subsequent Jewish commentary. We also contextualize the honor commandment in the palliative care setting through clinical case studies that illustrate the concerns of adult children who wish to honor their parents but are perplexed or conflicted about what this mandate means in the face of difficult medical and psycho-social-spiritual circumstances.

Following the European Union (EU) experience, an increasing number of countries are establishing an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The EU ETS often serves as a ‘model’ despite fundamental differences in the receiving environment. In the EU liberalized energy markets, carbon prices are intended to raise the cost of carbon-intensive energy and thereby stimulate cleaner alternatives. In contrast, many emerging economies continue to regulate energy investments and prices, which may insulate consumers and producers from the impact of an ETS. To avoid this risk, energy economists advocate EU-style energy market reforms as a prerequisite to the introduction of the ETS concept abroad. By focusing on the cases of China, Kazakhstan, and Russia, this article highlights the limits on the exportation of the EU liberalization model and argues that, instead of energy reform, the ETS must be reconceptualized as a mechanism that integrates the regulated energy market paradigm in emerging economies.

Language change is neutral if the probability of a language learner adopting any given linguistic variant only depends on the frequency of that variant in the learner’s environment. Ruling out non-neutral motivations of change, be they sociolinguistic, computational, articulatory or functional, a theory of neutral change insists that at least some instances of language change are essentially due to random drift, demographic noise and the social dynamics of finite populations; consequently, it has remained little investigated in the historical and sociolinguistics literature, which has generally been on the lookout for more substantial causes of change. Indeed, recent computational studies have argued that a neutral mechanism cannot give rise to ‘well-behaved’ time series of change which would align with historical data, for instance to generate S-curves. In this paper, I point out a methodological shortcoming of those studies and introduce a mathematical model of neutral change which represents the language community as a dynamic, evolving network of speakers. With computer simulations and a quantitative operationalization of what it means for change to be well-behaved, I show that this model exhibits well-behaved neutral change provided that the language community is suitably clusterized. Thus, neutral change is not only possible but is in fact a characteristic emergent property of a class of social networks. From a theoretical point of view, this finding implies that neutral theories of change deserve more (serious) consideration than they have traditionally received in diachronic and variationist linguistics. Methodologically, it urges that if change is to be successfully modelled, some of the traditional idealizing assumptions employed in much mathematical modelling must be done away with.

In this paper, we propose a new distinction between expressive and non-expressive particle verbs in German. The basic observation for our proposal is that these two classes behave differently in the domain of particle fronting. In order to explain this difference, we will show that certain particle verbs are extreme degree expressions and that, therefore, a possible contrast across degrees makes fronting acceptable, even when the particle in isolation is non-contrastable. Our claims are supported by a rating study probing German native speakers’ intuitions about the likelihood of the occurrence of an utterance, without relying on acceptability judgments. We connect these new findings to other forms of non-information-structural fronting patterns that endow utterances with an emphatic flavor.

Biological control of arthropods emerged as a scientific enterprise in the late nineteenth century and the orchard industry of California was an early centre of expertise. In 1900, as the Australian colonies prepared for federation, each had a government entomologist attached to its agriculture department. The hiring of George Compere from California by the Western Australian Department of Agriculture began a controversial chapter in the early history of biological control that was linked to a late, local popularization of acclimatization. Compere became known as the ‘travelling entomologist’ and for a decade brought ‘parasites’ of pest insects from overseas and released them in Perth. His antagonistic disciplinary rhetoric and inflated claims for the ‘parasite theory’ created conflict with his counterparts in the eastern states. The resulting inter-state entomological controversy was played out in the press, revealing the political use of science for institutional and even state identity. It is a story of transnational exchanges, chance discoveries and popular public science: popular because of the promise of a simple, natural solution to agricultural insect pests and because of the public nature of the disputes it generated between the experts. This microcosm contributes to the global historiography of acclimatization, biological control, scientific exposition and the professionalization of agricultural science.