Previous research shows that speakers use prosody to disambiguate between string-identical canonical information questions and noncanonical questions conveying surprise. In this study, we investigated whether the prosodic cues produced by speakers are enough for naïve listeners to distinguish between the two readings of two distinct question structures in French that can express either a request for information or an emotive reaction of surprise: ‘qu’est-ce que’ and ‘c’est quoi ce NP’ questions. This article provides experimental evidence that listeners can in fact disambiguate between the two interpretations based on prosodic cues alone, in particular the contour and the duration of the question word.

China impressed the world with its success in containing the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Many researchers have attributed China’s success to its hybrid mode of urban neighborhood governance, which could effectively mobilize residents to implement strict surveillance and quarantine measures for the state. However, despite their growing attention to urban neighborhood governance, they tend to privilege the government’s role while neglecting residents’ agency, thereby perpetuating the myth of an omnipresent and omnipotent Chinese state and reducing residents to passive objects of governance. This article challenges earlier researchers’ assumptions by exploring a crisis scenario – the lockdown of Shanghai from March to June 2022 – in which the local government’s capacity to surveil and micro-manage individual residents and deliver public services was significantly hampered. Through semi-structured interviews with eighteen individuals who experienced the lockdown in Shanghai, it examines the self-preserving efforts made by Shanghai residents to address the most serious challenge confronting them – supply shortages. It demonstrates that spontaneous organization and autonomous action among Shanghai residents were crucial to their survival during the crisis.

The first three of Fauré’s nine preludes (Op. 103), first published as Trois Préludes, were completed and dispatched ten days late. This article suggests that the deadline created a compositional strain by uncovering a range of phenomena, from copying errors to shared gestures and the mining of older works. Piecing together the web of self-quotation and associations found in primary and secondary sources of Fauré scholarship, it appears that Fauré’s first three preludes display not only a nocturnal arc, but also a vague relation to the three main heroines of his oeuvre, so that depictions of stars, spinning and flames intermingle. Additionally, Fauré’s compositional short-cuts, including self-borrowing and additive thematic development, are utilized over a pervasive earworm which slipped into the composer’s working memory through a score recently completed, the last song of La chanson d’Ève (op. 95): ‘Ô mort, poussière d’étoiles’. The combined discussion frames a self-referential story of the composer’s toil with his current deadline; although past deadlines – toiles and étoiles – resurface, Fauré emerges victorious with a completed score in hand.

This study explores how secondary school English teachers in Portugal and Spain perceive extramural English (EE) and integrate it into English Language Teaching (ELT). EE involves any exposure to English outside the classroom, through watching videos, listening to music, or playing games – these being the activities identified by teachers in both countries as the most common among their students. The study analyzes teachers’ perspectives on the frequency of students’ exposure to EE activities, the impact of these activities on different language areas, and, more broadly, the relationship between EE and ELT. A total of 244 participants took part in the study. A survey was used as the research instrument. Data were analyzed by means of mixed ANOVA and an exploratory factor analysis. Findings showed that Portuguese teachers reported higher frequencies of student engagement in all EE activities compared to their Spanish counterparts. However, teachers from both countries shared similar perceptions of the impact of EE on language learning, and identified listening skills, informal language use, and the development of vocabulary as the areas most positively influenced by EE. Finally, teachers from both territories supported the integration of EE into ELT.

This article argues that an emerging body of ‘target laws’ – legislation that incorporates binding, quantified environmental targets with specified deadlines – represents a crucial evolution in environmental governance. Whereas traditional environmental risk regulation was valuable for managing discrete environmental impacts, it has proven inadequate to address systemic challenges like climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse. Target laws, by contrast, are better equipped to deliver the transformative change needed to respond to systemic threats. Drawing on examples from climate legislation and the European Union’s Nature Restoration Law, the analysis demonstrates how target laws can overcome environmental law’s persistent vulnerabilities to short-termism, marginalization, and public obscurity. However, targets are paradoxical entities that inject considerable complexity into legal frameworks, creating novel challenges around temporality, legal status, implementation, and enforceability. While acknowledging these formidable difficulties, the article contends that target laws merit vigorous defence as they offer environmental legislation unprecedented dynamism, resilience, and transformative potential.

This paper explores and compares smoking advertisements and anti-smoking and anti-cancer messages in Australia’s migrant press, particularly newspapers, from 1930 to 1960. It investigates the ways in which smoking was promoted to migrant communities through their newspapers, contrasts this with the increasing prevalence of anti-smoking and broader anti-cancer messages, and explores whether there were any shifts in advertising and in anti-smoking messages following the growing research linking smoking and cancer (particularly lung cancer) from 1950. These messages were ultimately tied to this growing research, as well as the various Australian state and national anti-cancer campaign committees which emphasised early diagnosis and swift treatment as the best method to combat a range of cancers. Yet the Australian authorities, although finally acknowledging the dangers of cigarette smoking, rejected any government intervention other than providing the medical reports to the public. Greek-language newspapers (notably To Ethnico Vema) form an important case study; however, other foreign-language and migrant community papers were also consulted, including Italian, Jewish, and French.

In this paper, I argue that Taurek’s positive view, namely that we ought to show equal respect and concern to those affected by our actions, commits him to saving the bigger number in some cases. This leads to an adjustment of his negative claim, namely that numbers don’t count. Numbers don’t count in the sense he was interested in, i.e., sums of harms or benefits (across different people) lack moral significance. Numbers do count, however, when considering how to act fairly which is what equal respect demands. This adjustment supports Taurek’s general view on how to think about moral matters.

In The Image of God (2022), Eleonore Stump seeks to address a residual problem that remains even after a successful theodicy, namely the problem of mourning. The problem of mourning concerns the appropriateness of certain evaluative responses (such as grief or disappointment) with respect to the world that contains suffering. To answer this problem, Stump seeks to demonstrate how lives with suffering are maximally great precisely because they contain suffering: some person S’s most glorious self is to be located in her participating in the sufferings of Christ and thereby magnifying God’s love in herself. This paper identifies a problem with Eleonore Stump’s solution to the problem of mourning, namely valorisation: Stump’s solution entails that there is a type of suffering that is constitutive of value and therefore a reason-giving end in it itself. Valorisation is something we should avoid. I therefore present a different solution to the problem of mourning that is based on the incommensurability of S’s best lives. After this I address one final issue – the problem of preference – that is in the neighbourhood of Stump’s problem of mourning. I argue that if S’s best lives are incommensurate, we can reject the preference problem as incoherent.

Today, the story of the opium trade is an almost archetypal representation of the social, economic and military power dynamics at play in the colonial world. But few, if any, are aware that the European encounter with Chinese opium smoking spurred a European interest in opium vapour therapy, or that its spirited uptake in European medicine inspired a research programme that spanned the continent for more than half a century. Opium smoking was intoxicating, something which experimental science suggested should be impossible, since the chemical properties of opium’s active alkaloids all but precluded the possibility of vaporization. Recalling opium smoking’s entrance into medical practice and the subsequent experimental interest in the chemical constitution of opium vapour, this paper reconstructs the history of European ‘opium science’. In doing so, it realizes opium science as the site of competing definitions of the biomedical reality implicated in the experience of opium intoxication, one centred on the intoxicated experiences of the colonial subjects themselves. Far from being a simple story of exchange between centres and peripheries, it examines the polycentricity of knowledge circulation in the colonial world and the implacable agency of intoxication.

This article contends that meteorology endured a severe crisis in the USSR in 1972. During a devastating drought this year, meteorology lost its reliability as a science able to forecast the weather many weeks and months in advance. Many professional users turned to an alternative weather forecaster, Anatolii D′iakov, who predicted the weather for the next season by observing the sun. The argument made here is threefold. First, the fundamental reason for the crisis in long-range weather forecasting lies in the disruption of a bond of trust between meteorologists and the government, built on unfulfilled prospects of rapid and sudden, but unrealistic, progress in long-range forecasting to help agriculturalists of the steppe regions. Meteorologists could not fulfil the high expectations put in them. Second, journalists covering rural matters were instrumental in extolling D′iakov’s alternative forecasts and in lambasting ‘official’ meteorology; however, they did not succeed in convincing the leadership to purge forecasters and reorganize meteorology. The meteorologists preserved their autonomy to deal with D′iakov. Third, the article reflects on the consequences of the failure of long-term forecasting for the status of science within Soviet governance and ideology.

After years of focussing on infectious and degenerative illnesses, U.S. public health turned to the problem of accidents. Over the course of the twentieth century, safety practitioners repurposed the models of infectious disease control, risk-factor medicine, and biomechanics to improve the precision of injury data and to guide its applications. The resulting set of frameworks, methods, and practices, collectively referred to as ‘the epidemiology of accidents’, changed how health professionals analysed injuries but never produced a lasting consensus on appropriate safety interventions. This article uses the understudied history of home accident prevention to explain why mid-twentieth-century public health failed to prioritise injury control and what made home accidents especially intractable. During the 1940s, the American Public Health Association and U.S. Public Health Service collected statistics from communities across the country to determine the causes of home accidents and to inform local safety campaigns. These investigations were comprehensive but nonspecific, seeking to educate families about all the dangers of domestic space. After John Gordon published his influential study on accidents in 1949, this approach shifted from counting cases associated with risky behaviours and conditions to quantifying the extent to which isolable risk factors contributed to injuries. From the 1960s to 1970s, William Haddon changed accident prevention again, defining injuries as ‘abnormal energy exchanges’ and finding ways to minimise harm when accidents happened. Across these iterations, the epidemiology of accidents tried to identify, classify, quantify, and control the causes of home injuries but fell short of translating research into policy.

According to recent research, the get-passive, e.g. get arrested, rather than the be-passive, was arrested, has been increasing in frequency since 1850 (Hundt 2001). While some researchers argue that the two variants remain differentiated by semantic nuances like adversativity and agent animacy (e.g. Quirk et al. 1985: 167–71), others assume they are interchangeable and vary according to social factors (Weiner & Labov 1983). Recent corpus-based studies (Allen 2022; Fehringer 2022) tested linguistic and social factors, finding that both play a role. In this article, we aim to contribute new insights by analyzing get vs be in a large corpus of vernacular English from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century in Ontario, Canada. Using a combination of mixed-effects logistic regression and decision tree analysis, we find significant effects of animacy, explicit agent, adversativity, speaker gender, level of education and year of birth. The results show that the get-passive is increasing in apparent time. Moreover, we discover a prevailing effect of animacy that reveals the nature of the reorganization taking place in the system across the twentieth century. We conclude that get emerged as a change from below but is gradually losing its stigma and continues to advance into the grammar of English.