This paper examines /ɛ/ lowering before /r/ in Louisiana Regional French (e.g., père, /pɛr/ → [pær], [pɛr] ‘father’) between 1977 and 2011 in a small geographic region. The analysis of 436 tokens from 32 speakers shows that /ɛ/ lowering has changed through time from a generational to a geographical boundary marker. This explains differing /ɛ/ lowering rates reported in the literature (Guilbeau, 1950; Dubois, 2005; Salmon, 2009). Results confirm that sociolinguistic factors play an active role in Louisiana Regional French, despite its endangered status (Dajko, 2009; Dubois, 2005), underscoring the need to better control for diatopic factors in future research.

The last military dictatorship to come to power in Argentina is most well known for its atrocious human rights violations. However, this campaign of terror represents just one act carried out in the regime's efforts to counter leftist activities. The military sought to provide responsive administration as a means to pacify the nation. In the national capital, Buenos Aires, the military pursued a comprehensive set of urban reforms meant to streamline and control the metropolis. Cold War ideologies deeply penetrated the every-day and profoundly changed how citizens lived in Buenos Aires.

This article presents the results of a study of rhythm in Ontario French in local minority and majority contexts. To determine whether French in a minority situation shows a less syllabic rhythm due to English influence than it does in a majority situation, we used the following rhythm measurements: %V, ΔV, ΔC, VarcoV, VarcoC and nPVI-V. The results suggest no effect of language contact on the minority setting data where we find even more syllable-timed rhythm than in the majority variety. In addition, we observe that women and older speakers exhibit a more syllabic rhythm than men and younger speakers.

In Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality, Douglas Portmore introduces a novel position regarding the actualist–possibilist controversies in consequentialist thought – securitism – a position he argues is theoretically superior to the standard views in both the actualist and possibilist camps. After distinguishing the two camps through an examination of the original Procrastinate case, I present Portmore's securitism (a new species of actualism) and its implications regarding his modified Procrastinate case. I level two serious objections against securitism: (i) that it implausibly implies that morality is radically more demanding for the virtuous than it is for the vicious and (ii) that it fails to recognize moral vice in a wide range of cases. I close by arguing that a possibilist variant of Portmore's securitist view is impervious to such objections and thus appears theoretically superior to the actualist version Portmore promotes.

At least four littoral countries have Arctic strategies that address energy issues. However, US, Canada, Russia and Norway strategies up to 2020 and beyond, reveal different interests in exploring Arctic resources. While Arctic oil and gas are of strategic importance to Russia and to Norway, Canada and the US seem content with continuing their current extraction predominantly south of the Arctic Circle. Despite the different approaches, the outcomes seem strangely similar. Indeed, despite the hype concerning the Arctic in the last decade, and for very diverse reasons, it is unlikely that any of these four countries will increase hydrocarbon production in the Arctic during the period under analysis. This was true even before the recent drop in oil prices. For all its potential, it is unclear what lies ahead for the region.

The final phase of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) in 1975 is widely regarded as the high point of détente. This article discusses the staging and legacy of the CSCE from the perspective of its host city, Helsinki. The article examines how the Finnish initiative to host the conference became enmeshed with Helsinki's municipal politics and how the CSCE's and Finland's neutrality were used by the Helsinki authorities to project an attractive image of their city. The article further highlights the Helsinki Summit as a public spectacle with which a large number of local residents engaged.

The Cold War era created a gap between two opposing ideologies manifested on all social, economic and spatial levels. However, cities and their material expression maintained their significance, acting as valuable ideological resources.The specific position of Yugoslavia during the Cold War shaped the political background in which Belgrade and its planning and architectural scene developed intensive professional activities and international interactions thus overcoming global tensions. Covering the period from 1948 until 1980, this article identifies the main channels of professional exchange and dissemination beyond the constraints of the Iron Curtain, as well as their influence on the production of urban space in Belgrade.

This article has two main goals: (i) to show how nasal–obstruent clusters interact with a Canadian-Raising-type pattern in Liverpool English and (ii) to provide evidence that fine phonetic variation in the realisation of nasal–obstruent clusters influences the production of the preceding vowels. I present quantitative evidence from an acoustic study on price and mouth vowel realisations before nasal–obstruent clusters in Liverpool English. The investigation looks at price and mouth separately before obstruents, nasals and nasal–obstruent clusters, in order to demonstrate that nasal–obstruent clusters influence vowels differently depending on the quality of the vowel. Price realisations before nasal–obstruent clusters are similar to productions before singleton obstruents with the same voicing. Specifically, price has a raised realisation before nasal–voiceless obstruent clusters, but a non-raised realisation before nasal–voiced obstruent clusters, which is the same pattern as before singleton obstruents. Mouth realisations preceding nasal–obstruent clusters show evidence of a greater influence from the nasal. The nucleus formant measurements are similar to those before singleton obstruents, but there is frequent monophthongisation preceding nasal–obstruent clusters in mouth, which is mainly found before singleton nasals. Furthermore, I show that the variation in nasal–obstruent clusters in Liverpool English helps to explain the differences in realisation of the target vowels. Nasal deletion is more frequent in nasal–voiceless obstruent clusters following price, leading to vowel productions similar to those before singleton voiceless obstruents. However, nasal durations are longer in nasal–obstruent clusters following mouth, leading to a greater influence of the nasal in the form of more monophthongal vowel productions.

Bantu inversion constructions include locative inversion, patient inversion (also called subject–object reversal), semantic locative inversion and instrument inversion. The constructions show a high level of cross-linguistic variation, but also a core of invariant shared morphosyntactic and information structural properties. These include: that the preverbal position is filled by a non-agent NP triggering verbal agreement, that the agent follows the verb obligatorily, that object marking is disallowed, and that the preverbal NP is more topical, and the postverbal NP more focal. While previous analyses have tended to concentrate on one inversion type, the present paper develops a uniform analysis of Bantu inversion constructions. Adopting a Dynamic Syntax perspective, we show how the constructions share basic aspects of structure building and semantic representation. In our analysis, cross-linguistic differences in the distribution of inversion constructions result from unrelated parameters of variation, as well as from thematic constraints related to the thematic hierarchy. With some modification, the analysis can also be extended to passives.

The first part of this review article summarises and evaluates the contents of the book, attempting to do justice to the wealth of perspectives it offers. The book considers phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic features from the vantage points of approaches as diverse as typology, computational linguistics and formal theories like Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Minimalism. The second part of the article discusses several of the unifying threads that run through the volume, including the internal and cross-linguistic validity and correspondence of features, as well as the boundaries between morphology, syntax and semantics. I argue for a syntactic treatment of what has been referred to as periphrastic tense constructions in Bulgarian (including the future and the perfect), which I believe ensures greater language-internal and cross-linguistic consistency in proposing features and assigning their values. After briefly examining animacy in Bulgarian, I conclude that the operation and classification of features can make drawing boundaries between semantics and morphosyntax especially difficult. Finally, a case is made for treating tense as at least partly morphosyntactic in English, in contrast to prevalent current assumptions about the strictly morphosemantic nature of tense cross-linguistically.

We address the question, in decision theory, of how the value of risky options (gambles) should be assessed when they have no finite standard expected value, that is, where the sum of the probability-weighted payoffs is infinite or not well defined. We endorse, combine and extend (1) the proposal of Easwaran (2008) to evaluate options on the basis of their weak expected value, and (2) the proposal of Colyvan (2008) to rank options on the basis of their relative expected value.

The reconstruction of Managua following the 1972 earthquake laid bare the contradictions of modernization theory that justified the US alliance with Latin American dictators in the name of democracy in the Cold War. Based on an idealized model of urban development, US planners developed a plan to ‘decentralize’ both the city of Managua and the power of the US-backed Somoza dictatorship. In the process, they helped augment the power of the dictator and create a city its inhabitants found intolerable. The collective rejection of the city, the dictator and his alliance with the United States, helped propel Nicaragua toward its 1979 revolution and turned the country into a Cold War battleground.

This paper explores the contrast between mentalistic and behaviouristic interpretations of decision theory. The former regards credences and utilities as psychologically real, while the latter regards them as mere representations of an agent's preferences. Philosophers typically adopt the former interpretation, economists the latter. It is argued that the mentalistic interpretation is preferable if our aim is to use decision theory for descriptive purposes, but if our aim is normative then the behaviouristic interpretation cannot be dispensed with.