I am skeptical of our ability to predict, or even forecast, the future—of human rights or any other important social practice. Nonetheless, an understanding of the paths that have brought us to where we are today can facilitate thinking about the future. Thus, I approach the topic by examining the reshaping of international ideas and practices of state sovereignty and human rights since the end of World War II. I argue that in the initial decades after the war, international society constructed an absolutist conception of exclusive territorial jurisdiction that was fundamentally antagonistic to international human rights. At the same time, though, human rights were for the first time included among the fundamental norms of international society. And over the past two decades, dominant understandings of sovereignty have become less absolutist and more human rights–friendly, a trend that I suggest is likely to continue to develop, modestly, in the coming years.

In September 1896, the city of Bombay witnessed the beginning of a long-drawn-out epidemic crisis, with the outbreak of bubonic plague. This article investigates one particular dimension of this crisis – its effects upon the city's cotton textile mills, and its profound, though temporary, alteration of the relations between employers and workers. It argues that the structure of industrial relations in the textile mills in the second half of the nineteenth century rested upon the retention of wage arrears by mill managements, which forced workers into permanent debt, and bound them to the mill and their employers. The demographic and industrial crisis ushered in during the plague years, the article shows, cracked open this structure of industrial control, and workers were able to sustain a new, fleeting system of industrial “regulation from below”, based on the daily payment of wages. Through a study of the tensions in textile mills in 1897, situated within the broader context of a crisis of urban labour relations, the article shows the ways in which industrial relations were both deconstructed and reconstituted in a new form.

At first glance, the variety of possible denotations of a given prefix in Russian might appear a chaotic set of idiomatic meanings, e.g. the prefix za- may refer to the beginning of an action, movement to a position behind an object, a brief deviation from a path, or completion of an action. I propose a unified analysis of Russian prefixes, where the differences in meaning are claimed to arise from different syntactic positions, while the lexical entry of a prefix remains the same. The main focus is on the verbs of motion due to the consistent duality displayed by the prefix meanings when added to directional and non-directional motion verbs. It turns out that prefixes modify path when added onto a directional motion verb and refer to movement in time with non-directional motion verbs. This semantic distinction corresponds to distinct sets of syntactic properties, characteristic of the lexical and superlexical prefixes. Furthermore, a tripartite division emerges in each set of prefixes, corresponding to goal, source and route of motion (TO, FROM, VIA, respectively) for lexical prefixes and to beginning, completion and duration for superlexical prefixes. This leads to the suggestion that the same prefix with a consistent conceptual meaning, shared with the corresponding preposition receives part of its denotation from its position in the syntactic representation. The separation of conceptual meaning from the structural meaning allows the polysemy to arise from position, rather than from arbitrary homophony. Thus, conceptual structure is unified with syntax.

The competency debate over small cetacean regulation at the International Whaling Commission (IWC) is legal in nature, yet has been in a political stalemate for years. In this article we argue that the IWC has the competence to regulate small cetaceans and that the commercial whaling of ‘small cetaceans’ is a violation of the moratorium on commercial whaling. We present hybrid legal and scientific arguments and counter-arguments for the treaty interpretation of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling and, given recent precedent, advocate that the International Court of Justice be called upon to resolve this matter.

This paper sets out to identify the categories underlying Irish verbal inflection and to explain why they have their observed morphological and semantic properties. Assuming that the semantic range of a tense is a function of the whole clause, it derives the tenses of Irish from three syntactic features. Their basic value and position in the clause, along with that of other independently justified formatives, determines the attested range of interpretations for each tense, while the way they are spelled out determines the observed morphological patterns. Since the analysis of verbal categories is based on their syntactic realization, the same explanation accounts for the paradigmatic structure of Irish conjugation and for various syntagmatic phenomena of contextual allomorphy. A language-specific investigation thus claims a broader theoretical significance as an exploration of the interconnected workings of syntax, morphology, and semantics.

The return journey has long been recognized as a central feature of diaspora, yet contemporary diaspora studies have conventionally understood it in stubbornly mythological terms. This paper looks to foster discussion about physical diasporic return journeys by juxtaposing M. G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003) and Neil Bissoondath’s The Worlds Within Her (1998). Although the two novels overlap in their exploration of the Indian diaspora against the backdrop of racially volatile independence movements in former British colonies, they offer starkly different renderings of diasporic return that are reflected in their engagements with diasporic history. The paper closes with a consideration of the critical assumptions that have allowed the return journey to be overlooked in diaspora literary studies to date, suggesting that its absence may reflect the methodological nationalism of the field.

Enlightenment Orientalism rewrites the history of the novel by restoring consideration of a range of texts (and overlooked aspects of oft-read works) systematically excluded because they failed to fit existing notions of domestic realism. Aravamudan anchors his alternative genealogy in more capacious conceptions of the novel and inverts the usual understanding of Orientalism as restrictive stereotype to instead ask why Orientalism was so productive of cultural products in European literature. The subgenre of enlightenment Orientalism evinces a heteroglossia that exceeds national realism, and recuperating this broader fictional landscape allows readers to recognize a range of texts otherwise taken to be strange because it falls between genres (transgeneric) or between national spaces (intercultural). Taking the novel to be a cultural transportation device, Aravamudan describes this broader fictional ensemble as an investigative tool that is an alternative to the nation-centered novel after the mid-eighteenth century.

This article discusses the niche role that the oblique genitive of the type the friend of John’s occupies in the context of genitive variation. The article shows that the oblique genitive should be considered an independent construction which competes marginally in two syntactic contexts with the s-genitive (as in John's friend) and the of-genitive (as in the friend of John). The first context is one in which all three constructions function as the predicative complement of the clause (e.g. He is a friend of John's / John's friend / a friend of John). Note that in this context the definiteness effect of the s-genitive is downplayed, so that competition is possible with indefiniteness of the other two constructions. The second context is one where the oblique genitive and the of-genitive are introduced by the determiner the. Contrary to the claim that oblique genitive constructions introduced by the definite article must receive restrictive modification of the head (see e.g. Barker 1998; Lyons 1986), the quantitative data presented in this article reveal that oblique genitives introduced by the determiner the are not confined to pre- or postmodification of the head but can occur, albeit rarely, without any modification as in the example the executor of Sir Ralph’s.

The article further compares the oblique genitive, s-genitive and of-genitive with respect to the following five features: noun-headed vs pronoun dependent; animacy of the dependent; length of the noun-headed dependent; determiner of the head; and the semantic relations that can hold between head (e.g. friend) and dependent (e.g. John). The most intriguing theoretical conclusion is that the semantic relations available to head and dependent in the oblique genitive are a subset of those found in the s-genitive, which, again constitute a subset of those that exist in the of-genitive. This means that variation between all three constructions is not only restricted to the two syntactic contexts outlined above but also to a shared set of semantic relations.

One issue in the analysis of degree achievements is whether or not what are called degree achievements are in fact achievements (Hay, Kennedy & Levin 1999, Kearns 2007, Rothstein 2008a). In this paper, we offer evidence from Malay that they are. Our evidence involves findings about the aspectual effect of the verbal prefix meN- in degree achievement sentences, which may receive a natural account under an approach where degree achievements are lexically specified as achievements, but are difficult to explain if they are not. We propose that meN- merges with a verbal projection (VP) that describes eventualities with stages, in the sense of Landman (1992, 2008). This requirement explains meN-'s apparent effect on telicity in degree achievement sentences and the absence of such an effect in non-degree achievement sentences. It also accounts for the restricted distribution of meN- in stative sentences (Soh & Nomoto 2009) and regular achievement sentences. While certain aspectual parallels exist between the verbal prefix meN- and the English progressive, we argue that meN- is not a progressive marker, and that the parallels with the English progressive are due to the subcategorization requirement of meN-, which makes event stages more prominent in sentences with meN- compared to ones without. Our analysis supports the treatment of meN- as a light verb (v) (Aldridge 2008; Nomoto 2008, 2011; Sato 2012), rather than a marker of voice (Voice) (Cole, Hermon & Yanti 2008).

This paper investigates the cost of processing syntactic versus extra-syntactic dependencies. The results support the hypothesis that syntactic dependencies require less processing effort than discourse-derived dependencies do (Reuland 2001, 2011; Koornneef 2008). The point is made through the analysis of a novel paradigm in Russian in which a preposed nominal stranding a numeral can show number connectivity (paucal) with a gap following the numeral or can appear in a non-agreeing (plural) form, as in cathedral-paucal/plural, there were three.paucal __. Numerous syntactic diagnostics confirm that when there is number connectivity, the nominal has been fronted via A′-movement, creating a syntactic A′-chain dependency. In the absence of connectivity, the construction involves a hanging topic related via discourse mechanisms to a base-generated null pronoun. The constructions constitute a minimal pair and Reuland's proposals correctly predict that the A′-movement construction will require less processing effort compared to the hanging topic construction. A self-paced reading study for contrasting pairs as in the above example showed a statistically significant slow-down after the gap with the hanging topic as opposed to the moved nominal. We take this to support the claim that a syntactic A′-chain is more easily processed than an anaphoric dependency involving a null pronoun, which must be resolved by discourse-based mechanisms.

This article explores measures, operationalisations and effects of rhythm and weight as two constraints on the variation between the s-genitive and the of-genitive. We base the analysis on interchangeable genitives in the news and letters sections of ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), which covers the period between 1650 and 1999. Thus, we are ultimately concerned with the applicability of two factors that have their roots in speech (rhythm: phonology; weight: online processing) to an ‘unconventional’, written data set with a historical dimension. As for weight, we focus on the comparison of simple single-constituent and more complex multi-constituent measurements. Our notion of rhythm centres on the ideally even distribution of stressed and unstressed syllables. We find that in our data set, both rhythm and weight show theoretically unexpected quadratic effects: rhythmically better-behaved s-genitives are not necessarily preferred over of-genitives, and short constituents exhibit odd weight effects. In conclusion, we argue that while rhythm is only a minor player in our data set, the quadratic quirks it exhibits should inspire further study. Weight, on the other hand, is a crucial factor which, however, likewise comes with measurement and modelling complications.

This special issue concerns English genitive variation: the choice between the s-genitive and the of-genitive. It has grown out of the workshop ‘Genitive variation in English’, which was held at the conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English at the University of Boston in June 2011. While previous research on genitive variation has already unearthed a wealth of factors predicting the variation, the aim of this volume is to add new dimensions to existing parameters.

Research on the English genitive (e.g. Rosenbach 2007: 154) reports increasing use of the s-variant. This has been explained as extension to inanimate possessors, a semantic shift (e.g. Hundt 1998; Rosenbach 2002), or due to the pressures of economy in journalism, a register change (Hinrichs & Szmrecsanyi 2007; Szmrecsanyi & Hinrichs 2008). The present work reports on a large-scale sociolinguistic investigation of the genitive in vernacular Canadian English using socially stratified corpora and individuals of all ages. The results show that human, prototypical possessors are 96 per cent s-genitive and non-humans are 95 per cent of-genitive. Within the small envelope where both forms are possible, we discover that variation patterns quite differently depending on animacy. For humans, use of the s-genitive is stable in apparent time and correlates with whether or not the possessor ends in a sibilant. In contrast, non-human collectives/organizations reveal an increasing use of s-genitives in apparent time and a favouring effect of short possessors, persistence (when an s-genitive has occurred recently in the previous discourse) and when the individual has a blue-collar job. Groups comprising humans (collectives and organizations), such as our church's youth group, and places that are possible locations for humans (countries, cities, etc.), as in Toronto's best restaurant, are the prime conduit for this change. These findings from vernacular speech confirm the extension of the s-genitive in inanimates by semantic extension.