Hobby metal detecting in Norway has grown since 2014. In the Norwegian recording system, all finds are catalogued by professionals at five regional museums. The examination of the dataset thus created allows the authors to look at regional and national patterns and discuss the inherently messy and ‘human’ nature of a seemingly quantitative material. Their study suggests that both archaeologists and detectorists influence the quality of the evidence and how representative the data are. They argue that metal detecting patterns are primarily the result of modern activities, such as management practices and the endeavours of a few very prolific detectorists in certain areas. Understanding these biases and systematically recording the activities of the actors involved is crucial if we are to make full use of the metal-detected material.

This paper presents a dictionary-based study of French loanwords in contemporary English in order to investigate the location of primary stress in these loanwords. Four factors are found to be significant predictors of the position of primary stress: endings, word complexity, the segmental structure of the final syllable, and syllable count. Moreover, this study confirms previous observations on the tendency for American English to have more final stress in French loanwords than British English. Finally, the implications of our findings are discussed in light of a model that assumes that English phonology consists of distinct interacting subsystems.

Deer hunting was heavily ritualized in medieval Europe, as indicated by historical and archaeological evidence; it also emphasized social differentiation. The butchery of a deer carcass (‘unmaking’) was integral to the ritual and led to different body parts being destined for individuals of differing status. Archaeologically, the practice is particularly visible in high-status sites in Britain, but documentary and archaeological sources are consistent in pinpointing its earliest occurrence in twelfth-century France. In Italy, late medieval evidence for such ‘unmaking’ is present but is not supported by any known historical sources. Red and fallow deer were butchered in a formalized manner, whereas the data for roe deer are unclear. Although the Normans contributed to the diffusion of the ‘unmaking’ practice, in France it is also found outside the core area of Norman influence. The extensive spread of the practice demonstrates the connectedness of the medieval hunting culture in Europe.

In most of the literature on English phonology, historically prefixed words such as contain, respect or submit are seen as having no morphological structure synchronically. However, such words were treated as complex in the early generative literature and are still analysed in that way in part of the literature. In this paper, we seek to review the evidence for the claim that such words are simplex words, which predicts that they should pattern with words with no internal structure in their phonological and morphological behaviours and in psycholinguistic experiments. We show that the evidence does not support that claim and shows that these words should be treated as morphologically complex units, although they differ from words with productive morphology. As these words tend to be partly or entirely opaque semantically, this raises the question of how such structures may be learned. We argue that the recurrence of forms is the main factor leading to their identification and lay out a possible order of acquisition of various morphological structures. Finally, we argue that theories of phonology may account for this by allowing the reference to morphological constituents whose semantics are impoverished.

This is a response to the engagement of scholars with my argument in my book, Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture. I expand on my argument about the way that the novel form can nuance Orientalist or Eurocentric assumptions about freedom, the links between neoliberalism and Hindu Nationalism, whether a theory of freedom that takes into account the constraining contexts through which agency is produced can ever include rebellion, and the contradictory discourses and contested subjectivities through which agency is constituted.

In this article, the author explores the cooperative aspects of mound construction in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. Arguing against the outdated but widely held view that only centralized rule could organize monument construction, he investigates how participation in mound construction affected the people of Sør-Fron in south-eastern Norway. He contends, first, that repeated participation in mound construction helped create a sense of belonging and shared identity, which was maintained through centuries of major environmental and political turmoil. Second, mound construction was part of an active and conscious strategy to limit aggrandizement and prevent centralization and concentration of power. Rejection of Christianity arguably worked in similar ways. The author concludes with considerations of approaches to Iron Age monuments, emphasizing the importance of consensus and community-building and the role of communal opposition to centralized rule.

The hypothesis that affixes following a stem are easier to process than ones preceding has not been tested in a straightforward manner in any language, as far as we know. Cutler, Hawkins & Gilligan (1985) and Hawkins & Cutler (1988) adduce some evidence that supports this hypothesis indirectly, but they do not conduct experiments to test it directly. They use this hypothesis to explain in part the suffixing preference. Some others, such as Asao (2015), continue to assume the correctness of the hypothesis. We do not aim to explain the suffixing preference at all but to test the hypothesis that affixes preceding the stem (informally, prefixes) disrupt the comprehension of a word more than affixes that follow (informally, suffixes) do. In this paper we test this hypothesis (henceforth the ‘Cutler--Hawkins hypothesis’) on Georgian, because it has a wide variety of prefixes and suffixes, and in a single experiment on English. In Georgian we test a prefix and a suffix that mark the person of the subject in a verb, a circumfix and a suffix that mark derivation in nouns, and a prefix and a suffix that form intransitive verbs (usually called ‘passives’ in Georgian). Across the set of experiments, we find little support for the Cutler--Hawkins hypothesis.

To what extent can de facto states act autonomously vis-à-vis their patron states and domestic societies? This article draws on theories of clientelism in international relations to develop a novel argument explaining the agency of de facto states. Examining two strategic triangles—Russia–Transnistria–Moldova and US–Taiwan–China—it demonstrates that interrelated domestic factors such as robust political competition, democratic pluralism, reimagined national identities, and big business shape the autonomy of de facto states in Eastern Europe and East Asia. Furthermore, the structured focused comparison of Transnistria and Taiwan indicates that the agency of de facto states declines when rising parent states and dissatisfied patron states challenge the status quo, engaging in great power competition. Their autonomy varies across areas of low and high politics, as patron states prioritize military-security issues and interfere less in the economic and cultural affairs of the de facto states.

The aim of this article is to open a new way of understanding corruption by examining its place within the law and culture of the European semi-periphery, with a focus on inter-war Romania. My intention is to operate a twofold displacement of the analysis of the anti-corruption and the status of constitutional practice in this context. First, I aim to reposition the question of political corruption within a jurisprudential and legal historical context. In this way I inquire what is the legal theoretical importance of political corruption in a post-dependency context? In other words, what can the representation of corruption entail for law, and for a particular legal historical trajectory within the European periphery. Second, I move towards exploring the context of the inter-war period as well as the discursive construction of political corruption within the law and through the fascist criticism levelled against it.

This essay brings to light a rare feature of the Stewart legal system. Grand jury charges remain understudied, partly for want of primary source materials. The brief historical and biographical sketches of the essay are appended by a unique and relevant artifact of the time: a preamble or exhortation to a grand jury charge, ostensibly delivered by a Justice of the King's Bench, John Dodderidge.