Traditional Christian theism maintains that God’s creative act is intentional and rational, which suggests God must have ideas or creative blueprints in mind when creating. We also have good reason to think that God’s creative act displays creativity or artistry. Tom Ward has recently argued that God gets his creative blueprints from knowing himself, a position he calls ‘Containment Exemplarism’. However, Paul Gould has recently argued that Containment Exemplarism undermines God’s status as paradigmatically artistic or creative. I argue that Gould’s argument is unsuccessful. As I will argue, the conception of creativity Gould employs as the basis for his argument, if understood permissively, can be reconciled to Containment Exemplarism. If understood in a manner to avoid this reconciliation, the conception of creativity Gould utilises is unduly restrictive and leads to unintuitive consequences. Containment Exemplarists would thus be entitled to reject it.

This study explores the interaction between pragmatic and phonetic variation, investigating the usage of just in British English. Based on an acoustic and auditory phonetic analysis of 1,260 tokens of just spoken by 100 male speakers of Standard Southern British English, I argue that speakers utilise phonetic resources to indicate pragmatic meaning alongside predictable contextual effects. The realisation of each of the canonical segments of just (/d͡ʒ/, /ʌ/, /s/, /t/) were investigated using duration, centre of gravity and vowel formant estimates. Discourse-pragmatic uses of just were more likely to exhibit phonetic reduction than adverbial uses in terms of word duration, vowel elision and quality, but not for /s/ and /t/ duration. The realisation of /t/ was dependent on following context, but the effect of function on vowel realisation and duration remained robust despite interactions with surrounding contexts and token stress. This suggests that speakers signal different functions of just via segmental realisation. Analysing just in phonetic detail within its pragmatic and contextual environment describes how the word is shaped in its representation.

This study investigates the English concealed passive construction (CPC), as in the car needs washing, using authentic corpus data. While previous research has explored certain aspects of the CPC, little attention has been given to strongly associated matrix verbs (or verb types) and interactions between matrix verbs (or verb types) and other elements of the construction. To address these issues, we apply three types of collostructional analysis, and our findings indicate that no single, straightforward pattern emerges with respect to real-life grammatical properties of the CPC. We then show that the well-known distinction between raising and control constructions, formalized in the framework of Construction Grammar (CxG), offers a more systematic account for the authentic properties of two subtypes of the CPC. We further argue that this raising vs. control contrast is not arbitrary but arises from the two senses of the verb need, which exhibits a particularly strong statistical association with the CPC.

This plenary critically examines the role of English medium instruction (EMI) preparatory programmes in supporting student success across global higher education. Drawing on a systematic, critical review of empirical studies published between 2015 and 2025, it explores how such programmes influence learning outcomes, motivation, pedagogy, and equity. Through the narrative lens of a Turkish student, Eylül, the discussion highlights how linguistic proficiency alone seldom ensures disciplinary engagement or academic confidence. Evidence from recent EMI research demonstrates that programmes integrating language and content, authenticity, and translanguaging practices most effectively prepare students to ‘think through English’. The paper concludes by identifying gaps in longitudinal and cross-contextual evidence and calls for pedagogical and policy designs that move beyond language support toward sustainable, inclusive, and identity-affirming EMI education.

Narratives possess a particular ability both to encapsulate and engender political/ideological aims. The extreme-right is aware of the pedagogic potential of fiction; however, their fiction is only rarely examined from a discourse-analytic perspective. This article analyses a short story written and distributed by a US neo-Nazi organisation. First, my analysis examines: narrative action processes, that is, the (transitive and intransitive) actions of characters, which drive narrative change; and modal tokens relevant to the evaluative function of the narrative. Second, I argue that narrative action processes and modal tokens represent the ‘warp and woof’ of narrative, since they (i) demonstrate how stories connect events, over time, and (ii) appraise the social/political meaning of these events. My analysis has significance for the discourse-analytic understanding of narrative more generally, as well as the specific ways that fantasies of agency and violence function in this story, to incite political action. (Narrative, narrative action processes, modal tokens, extreme-right, neo-Nazi fantasy)

This paper revisits debates about the right to communicate from the late 1960s to early 2000s, examining how different actors engaged with this concept in reaction to imminent technological changes and their implications for society. It explores how these actors advocated for or contested this concept at different international forums such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to advance different agendas for the international order. In telling the story of the right to communicate, this paper adopts a historical-materialist approach, examining discursive struggles as reflective of and conditioned by material and social relations and their contradictions, and reflects on the question of the promise and perils of human rights for social change, considering not only the malleability of rights language but the material conditions of which human rights concepts are reflective and constitutive.

As digital or video gaming has grown in popularity around the globe in the last few decades, attention to its potential as a means to learn L2s (second, foreign, or additional languages) has grown, as evidenced by an increase in academic journal-based treatment of research in DGBELLT (digital game-based and enhanced second/foreign language learning and teaching), alongside monographs and edited volumes. To identify common findings and research trends, we conducted a review of recent research and scholarship in the young field published between January 2021 and December 2024 inclusive in major academic journals and edited volumes. We ultimately selected 76 pieces for the review, categorizing them into five types or foci: reviews and meta-analyses, studies of game-enhanced L2 learning and L2 gaming, game-enhanced pedagogy, L2 learning game design and development, and teacher education. After synthesizing the pieces in each category, we offer concise take-aways and discussion, implicating gaps, needs, and future directions.

This article provides a formal phonological analysis of s-retraction, the process by which /s/ is realized as [ʃ] in /stɹ/ and /stj/ clusters, e.g. street [ʃʧɹiːt]. While previous research has focused on the sociophonetic and acoustic aspects of this phenomenon, this study situates s-retraction within Element Theory (ET), demonstrating that it is driven by the affrication of the following coronal stop. The analysis shows that both the rhotic /ɹ/ and the glide /j/ function as palatal triggers, as they both contain the palatal element |I|, which spreads leftward, affecting the coronal stop and, subsequently, the preceding /s/.

The study also explains why s-retraction is restricted to /stɹ/ and /stj/ clusters, while being absent in /spɹ/ and /skɹ/. This absence is attributed to elemental antagonism, as labials and velars contain |U|, which prevents affrication. The article further accounts for dialectal variation in yod coalescence and yod dropping, showing that the presence of these processes determines whether affrication – and, consequently, s-retraction – occurs.

Crucially, the evidence from external sandhi suggests that s-retraction is an active phonological process, rather than a purely phonetic effect. The findings align with broader cross-linguistic palatalization patterns, supporting the view that s-retraction is governed by systematic phonological principles.

Noun (N) and Adjective (A) are distinct word classes but share certain features. Some noun uses share more features with how adjectives are used, thus contributing (over time) to a shift from N to A. There is evidence that the use of nouns as adjectives is on the increase (Denison 2013). Earlier work (De Smet 2012) shows key and fun taking different paths shifting to A, apparently because the former is a count and the latter a noncount noun. This article provides a type-based study on the N>A shift during the Late Modern English period on the basis of data from the Oxford English Dictionary and diachronic corpora. Complementing previous research, we address the question of which functional slot (premodifying or predicative) dominates the N>A shift and whether countability of nouns plays an important role. Our findings challenge the view that there is a connection between countability of the nouns in question and the path of the N>A shift. A case study on genius, a noun that is both count and noncount, provides additional quantitative and qualitative analysis of the N>A shift.

Many pressing riverine problems in Asia today can be traced back to the development of a set of new conceptualizations, technologies, and institutions of river management between roughly 1800 and 1945, a period moulded by the expansion of modern imperial powers on a global scale. This special feature investigates the multifaceted entanglements between rivers and imperialism in modern Asia by bringing together cases in Japan, India, China, and Vietnam. Building on the understanding of the dual potential of rivers to support and resist imperial ambitions, the articles in this special feature reconstruct the complicated human-river interactions across Asia that confounded anthropocentric expectations and show how imperial ethos, technologies, and institutions of river management were carried out, resisted, or transformed in varied local contexts by human and non-human actors alike. Understanding the unruly history of rivers in imperial Asia can help us to better understand the precarious future of rivers and their management on the warming continent.