György Ligeti has stated that his micropolyphonic compositions were ‘governed by rules as strict as Palestrina's’ (Ligeti 1983, 14); some of these rules are preserved directly in his sketches and others can be derived from the compositions themselves. This article discusses the artistic context in which Ligeti developed systems of rules for individual compositions, and investigates in depth the composer's rules for the organization of pitch and rhythm in two of his seminal works from the 1960s, transmitting the explicit rules for pitch in sketches for the ‘De die judicii’ movement of the Requiem and uncovering implicit rules for rhythm in Lux aeterna. By examining both the rules and their application in composition, with the exceptions that arise therein, we come to a better understanding of the aesthetic goals Ligeti's rules were devised to meet, and the balance of stricture and freedom that was essential to the composer's persona.

Instead of using Milton's famous opening lines, librettist Christopher Fry begins the text for Krzysztof Penderecki's opera Paradise Lost with the invocation that opens Book III, which alludes to acts of creation both biblical and literary. While the primordial effects of Penderecki's instrumental introduction to the opera parallel this allusion in easily discernible ways, his melodic lines used within this introduction also parallel this allusion in ways understood using recent theoretical perspectives on the composer's neo-Romantic style. These melodies exhibit a rare feature of paradoxicality, in that they are at once finite and infinite within stylistic constraints. This musical paradox corresponds to notions of paradox in accounts of cosmological creation, in a literary-operatic creation in which the author is character, and in the hypostatic union of the divine and human in Jesus Christ, a union foregrounded more in Fry's and Penderecki's opera than in Milton's original poem.

In John Corigliano's and William Hoffman's opera The Ghosts of Versailles (1991), generic, musical, and temporal boundaries are dissolved, and historical processes revealed, resulting in a work that performs an operatic rendering of what philosopher Frank Ankersmit has referred to as sublime historical experience. As Marie Antoinette's ghost resolves her trauma by narrativising it in performance, and as music extends and dramatises the experience of the sublime, the audience experiences profoundly the liminal realm that historically-based operas inhabit in their movement between past and present. Indeed, the temporal suspension that is so central to theories of the sublime finds parallels in opera's historical obsession with death, and in music's ability to momentarily blur the boundaries between life and death, and past and present. The Ghosts of Versailles allows for the audience's relationship to history to be revisited, reconfigured, and in many cases, reconciled, through a haunting of the present in operatic performance.

This paper identifies ‘savage numbers’ – number-like or number-replacing concepts and practices attributed to peoples viewed as civilizationally inferior – as a crucial and hitherto unrecognized body of evidence in the first two decades of the Victorian science of prehistory. It traces the changing and often ambivalent status of savage numbers in the period after the 1858–1859 ‘time revolution’ in the human sciences by following successive reappropriations of an iconic 1853 story from Francis Galton's African travels. In response to a fundamental lack of physical evidence concerning prehistoric men, savage numbers offered a readily available body of data that helped scholars envisage great extremes of civilizational lowliness in a way that was at once analysable and comparable, and anecdotes like Galton's made those data vivid and compelling. Moreover, they provided a simple and direct means of conceiving of the progressive scale of civilizational development, uniting societies and races past and present, at the heart of Victorian scientific racism.

This paper analyses aspects of the loss of verb-second (V2) in Old French in a historical sociolinguistic perspective. Data come from sequences in which a main declarative is preceded immediately by a tensed subordinate clause (Vance, Donaldson, and Steiner, 2010). Following Romaine (1982), represented speech and narrative are considered to represent distinct registers within a single text. An analysis of intra-textual variation between narrative and represented speech reveals stylistic variation, in that represented speech evinces higher rates of surface subject-verb-(object) orders in main clauses than narrative passages within the same text. The data also reveal gender variation, as the represented speech of women tends to be more linguistically conservative than that of men.

Un sujet crucial concernant l'opposition massif/comptable est l'apparente flexibilité morphosyntaxique régulière de certaines classes sémantiques, comme celle des noms d'animaux (Kleiber, 1999; Nicolas, 2002 et références incluses), ou celle des noms de fruits et de légumes. C'est cette dernière que nous examinons ici, par le biais d'une vaste étude de corpus comprenant l'analyse quantitative (profils distributionnels) et qualitative (effets de sens) des acceptions massives et comptables de 18 items lexicaux. Nos observations nous amènent à postuler un modèle original de la localisation de l'opposition massif/comptable, rendant compte des phénomènes de flexibilité régulière sans recourir à la notion de polysémie, et basé sur un Principe de Double Héritage. Ainsi, nos données suggèrent que les noms de fruits et de légumes présentent de manière intrinsèque les deux acceptions, et hériteraient leur caractère comptable au niveau lexical (propriétés ontologiques) et leur caractère massif à un niveau supra-lexical, de par leur appartenance à une certaine classe sémantico-pragmatique (objets de consommation culinaire).

Suppose the only difference between the effects of two actions is to whom they apply: either to parties who would – or would not – exist if the actions were not performed. Is this a morally significant difference? This is one of the central questions raised by the Non-Identity Problem. Derek Parfit answers no, defending what he calls the ‘No-Difference View’. I argue that Parfit is mistaken and that sometimes this difference is morally significant. I do this by formulating a familiar kind of example in a new way. I make use of some findings in social psychology to help deflect counterexamples to my view. I then show how my view withstands Parfit's latest argument in favour of the No-Difference View. I conclude with a brief discussion of some questions my argument raises for consequentialist moral theory.