The physicist Richard Gott defends the Copernican principle, which claims that when we have no information about our position along a given dimension among a group of observers, we should consider ourselves to be randomly located among those observers in respect to that dimension. First, I apply Copernican reasoning to the distribution of evil in the universe. I then contend that evidence for intelligent extraterrestrial life strengthens four important versions of the argument from evil. I remain neutral regarding whether this result is a reductio of these arguments from evil or the statement of a genuine evidential relationship.

This article is a response to Stephen Law's article ‘The evil-god challenge’. In his article, Law argues that if belief in evil-god is unreasonable, then belief in good-god is unreasonable; that the antecedent is true; and hence so is the consequent. In this article, I show that Law's affirmation of the antecedent is predicated on the problem of good (i.e. the problem of whether an all-evil, all-powerful, and all-knowing God would allow there to be as much good in the world as there is), and argue that the problem of good fails. Thus, the antecedent is unmotivated, which renders the consequent unmotivated. Law's challenge for good-god theists is to show that good-god theism is not rendered unreasonable by the problem of evil in the same way that evil-god theism is rendered unreasonable by the problem of good. Insofar as the problem of good does not render belief in evil-god unreasonable, Law's challenge has been answered: since it is not unreasonable to believe in evil-god (at least for the reasons that Law gives) it is not unreasonable to believe in good-god. Finally, I show that – my criticism aside – the evil-god challenge turns out to be more complicated and controversial than it initially appears, for it relies on the (previously unacknowledged) contentious assumption that sceptical theism is false.

Is divine goodness incompatible with efficacious petitionary prayer? Scott Davison has recently argued that prayer cannot make a difference in what God would do since a good God must always do what is best. I examine Davison's presentation of the divine goodness problem for petitionary prayer, and argue that the argument fails. I go on to argue that, since there are certain relational benefits uniquely made available through responding to petitionary prayer, divine goodness leads us to expect that God would at least sometimes respond to petitionary prayer – even prayers for third parties.

In 1758 the renowned Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus sent his student Anton Rolandson Martin to the Arctic on-board a whaler to collect scientific specimens. He became the first Swedish scientist to sail these northern waters and to set foot on Spitsbergen. But what route did the ship take and where exactly did he land? By using a combination of geographical information in Martin's diary together with latitude and wind directions from his meteorological records the ship's voyage has been reconstructed. The whaler set course directly to the west coast of Spitsbergen and then patrolled waters from there to the eastern flank of the ice fields off Greenland. The ship then returned to Spitsbergen as the whaling season drew to an end. Martin got the chance to set foot on land only once and for just two hours. After recent field work at the presumed locality 258 years after Martin's visit, his descriptions of the islets were checked and a first-hand comparison was made between the rock sample Martin brought home and the local bedrock. The author is now confident that the landing took place on Forlandsøyane islands, situated off the southwestern coast of Prins Karls Forland.

In this state-of-the-art review, we aim to build on Alptekin & Tatar's (2011) article covering research conducted in Turkey between 2005 and 2009, and survey published research in 31 Turkey-based journals between 2010 and 2016. As the second review paper on Turkey's English language teaching (ELT) agenda, our goal is twofold: first, to introduce the research of those researchers whose high-quality, Turkey-based work may not be known outside Turkish academia; and second, to point to recent scholarly developments that have occurred in Turkey and set these in the context of recent shifts in language teaching research worldwide. This paper presents approximately 140 articles that appeared in locally published peer-reviewed academic journals, and clearly demonstrates that Turkey as an English as a foreign language (EFL) context presents a vibrant research scene in language teaching. The reviewed works cover a wide spectrum of timely topics (e.g., computer-assisted language learning (CALL), the European Portfolio for Student Teachers of Languages (EPOSTL), language assessment, affective factors), and present findings that have much to contribute to current discussions in the field. Nevertheless, our review also reveals some concerning trends, including an almost exclusive emphasis on practical concerns over conceptual development; shortcomings in locating research within broader disciplinary debates; and few efforts to bring together and build on local research in a manner that might allow for original and creative influences on the broader discipline. It is therefore the further aim of this article to spark debates on these issues among Turkish scholars and contribute to the strengthening of the local disciplinary community.

Like many EFL teachers of my generation, I side-stepped into the profession. While doing post-graduate research at Oxford in the early 1960s, I took a job one summer vacation teaching English in a local language school. Though I had no idea how to do this, I enjoyed the work, and kept on a few hours’ teaching in the next academic year. As time went on, it became clear that I had somewhat more talent for this type of activity than for academic research, and I became a full-time teacher, subsequently opening my own school of English.

The Department of Linguistics at University of Victoria (UVic) in Canada has a long-standing tradition of empirical approaches to the study of theoretical and applied linguistics. As part of the Faculty of Humanities, the department caters to students with a wide range of backgrounds and interests, and provides crucial language teaching support in collaboration with other teaching units at UVic. Accordingly, some applied linguistics studies concern language teaching and learning, some of which are conducted in classroom settings. In this article, we provide a brief overview of recent corrective feedback research conducted by UVic Applied Linguistics Research Group.

Using key constructs from sociocultural theory and activity theory, this paper outlines three broad areas of future research on written corrective feedback (WCF) that may be of interest to second language (L2) researchers and practitioners. The first area uses the constructs of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and scaffolding to assess the nature and appropriateness of the feedback provided. The second area uses the construct of tools and considers learners’ responses to the means used to provide WCF, including automated feedback. The third, and perhaps most important area, views WCF as an activity, and examines context-related and individual factors that impact on the provision and response to WCF. The paper provides concrete examples of small-scale longitudinal studies in each of these areas, including recommendations as to the kind of data and measures to employ.

A decade ago, Hornberger & Johnson proposed that the ethnography of language planning and policy (ELPP) offers a useful way to understand how people create, interpret, and at times resist language policy and planning (LPP). They envisioned ethnographic investigation of layered LPP ideological and implementational spaces, taking up Hornberger's plea five years earlier for language users, educators, and researchers to fill up and wedge open ideological and implementational spaces for multiple languages, literacies, identities, and practices to flourish and grow rather than dwindle and disappear. With roots going back to the 1980s and 1990s, ethnographic research in LPP had been gathering momentum since the turn of the millennium. This review encompasses selected ethnographic LPP research since 2000, exploring affordances and constraints of this research in yielding comparative and cumulative findings on how people interpret and engage with LPP initiatives. We highlight how common-sense wisdom about the perennial gap between policy and practice is given nuance through ethnographic research that identifies and explores intertwining dynamics of top-down and bottom-up LPP activities and processes, monoglossic and heteroglossic language ideologies and practices, potential equality and actual inequality of languages, and critical and transformative LPP research paradigms.

Ever since Aristotle and Plato (The Categories; Cratylus), linguists have considered language to be the pairing of form (sounds or gestures or written strings) and meaning. This is true for all meaningful linguistic units from morphemes, through words, phrases and sentences, to discourse. Generally speaking, semantics is the study of how form and meaning are related. However, semantics is more narrowly construed as excluding those meanings that derive from speaker intensions and psychological states, as well as sociocultural features of the context. Furthermore, the boundary between semantics proper and pragmatics is intensely debated and to some researchers constitutes an empirical question. Formal semantics came into being as a system describing formal languages, that is, the mathematical and logical languages of computing machines as opposed to the natural languages of human beings. However, in the late 1960s the philosopher Richard Montague argued that natural languages such as English could be fruitfully described using the same rigorous rules and correspondences utilized in the description of formal languages. Modern formal semantics was born and is currently prospering as a branch of linguistics.

This study is a corpus-based diachronic analysis of English reporting parentheticals, i.e. clauses introducing direct speech, placed after or in the middle of the reported message. The aim of the investigation is to trace the development of the construction throughout the history of English, establishing the main factors influencing the choice between VS and SV patterns (i.e. with and without quotative inversion respectively), showing how various reporting verbs were increasingly attracted to the construction, and demonstrating the gradual morphological reduction of the main reporting verbs: quoth and say. The study is based on syntactically annotated corpora of Old, Middle, Early Modern and Late Modern English, and uses other corpora to illustrate more recent changes. The study reveals that reporting clauses do not show regular quotative inversion with all subject types until the Early Modern English period and links this development to the emergence of the comment clause with say. It is also claimed that quotative inversion is not directly derived from the V-2 rule and that parenthetical reporting clauses have functioned as a separate construction since the Old English period.

This paper presents the details of lichens and mosses found on whale vertebrae substratum in the Admiralty Bay area, King George Island, Antarctica. Samples were taken in the coastal area at Hennequin Point, a relict of the Antarctic whaling era. The samples were collected from the upper surface of the whale bones found in the study area during the austral summer 2010–2011. A total of 15 lichen and two moss species were found. All species sampled are known in the Admiralty Bay area, both as pioneers and in more advanced succession stages in ice-free areas. These results suggest that the colonisation of whale bones is not new for Antarctic plants, but it is an additional substrate on which these plants can develop. A map showing the distribution of colonised bones and details of the usual substrata for the lichens and mosses found in this study are provided.