The founding fathers of the Turkish Republic worked to create “an imagined community” that would define them as Turks, regardless of their ethnic differences or primordial bonds with the “homeland.” Their rules were simple: if someone identifies as a Turk, they will be accepted as one. Within that framework, Afro-Turks, descendants of Africans brought to the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, became part of the new nation through citizenship, linguistic assimilation, and everyday participation in the civic rituals. Their visible difference did not prevent their integration, reflecting a model that operated through legal and cultural criteria rather than formal racial hierarchy. Yet their recent articulation of an “Afro-Turk” identity raises deeper questions about the mechanisms through which Turkishness is produced, negotiated, and transformed, particularly amid the post-2000 identity landscape, where new nationalist discourses and large-scale migration have reshaped how difference is perceived and accommodated. Drawing on in-depth interviews and historical analysis, this article demonstrates that Afro-Turks’ long-standing incorporation reflects the workings of everyday nationalism, symbolic whiteness, and conditional inclusion. Their experience shows that the republican promise of equality is realized most fully when difference is demographically small, politically unthreatening, and culturally unobtrusive, revealing the tacit norms that continue to structure belonging in Türkiye.

Literature about the discovery of the leprosy bacterium Mycobacterium leprae usually mentions the Hansen-Neisser controversy. It is an established narrative that Neisser tried to present himself as the discoverer of the leprosy bacterium. However, Neisser’s first publication on Mycobacterium leprae refers explicitly to Hansen’s original discovery. How did the notion of Neisser trying to claim Hansen’s discovery emerge? A thorough source-critical examination of Hansen’s and Neisser’s scientific and popular publications between 1874 and 1897 as well as of the literature dealing with the so-called controversy brought interesting new results. The notion that Neisser tried to steal Hansen’s discovery is based on a misreading of Neisser’s publications by Hansen’s biographer. But Neisser tried indeed to bypass Hansen in trying to prove that Mycobacterium leprae was the contagion causing leprosy. The competition between the two scientists resulted in a personal enmity. This study shows how the history of modern science is prone to myths and underlines the importance of source criticism when dealing with established narratives.

The commander in chief of the British forces in North America functioned as a linchpin for many of the colonial reforms that British ministries implemented after 1763. The office’s existence outside the authority of any single colony made the commander in chief a critical instrument for metropolitan reformers seeking to systematize and subordinate colonial governance. Aside from enforcing the Proclamation Line, regulating Indigenous trade, implementing the American Mutiny Act, ensuring peace in the west, and overseeing the expanded American establishment, the commander in chief also policed colonial resistance in the emerging imperial crisis. Yet the advent of a peacetime commander in chief in America is often overlooked as a reform in and of itself. While questions of sovereignty during this period often focus on the place of colonial assemblies, the creation of this new military commander in the colonies produced its own contests for authority from 1763 to 1774. Particularly for officials such as colonial governors, the division in authority between civil and military power represented a contradiction in sovereignty—an imperium in imperio. Men skeptical of this centralized power, as well as many who were merely self-interested, challenged the authority of the commander in chief and revealed the contradictions in British approaches to the structure of North American governance.

Cet article d’introduction présente l’ambition et la contribution de ce numéro thématique consacré aux travaux sur l’im/politesse en langue française. L’article contextualise et présente cinq études empiriques qui illustrent la vitalité du champ : l’étude historique des rapports de pouvoir entre maîtres et domestiques par Paternoster, la comparaison des compliments ordinaires et médiatiques de Claudel et Moallemi, l’étude constructionnelle de l’insulte chez Van Olmen et Grass, les stratégies de critique professionnelle de Bersier et al., et enfin la comparaison de l’auto-éloge en français hexagonal et en anglais étasunien par Tobback et Moens. En faisant dialoguer ces travaux, l’introduction démontre que la gestion des faces positive et négative ne dépend pas de simples calculs stratégiques, mais de normes sociales et de genres discursifs spécifiques. Le numéro thématique dans son ensemble souligne la nécessité de prendre en compte la multimodalité, les nouveaux médias et la diversité des variétés du français à travers le monde, positionnant ce numéro thématique comme un jalon essentiel pour les futures recherches dans les domaines de l’analyse du discours et de la pragmatique du français.

Pain is often portrayed as the guardian of life. Unpleasant sensations are undisputedly in the service of the self-preservation of living beings. However, it is questionable whether the first sensations in evolution must have been those of pain. The emergence of a new property cannot be derived from the function that the property has once it is there. In evolution, new properties are not produced by needs (this would be teleological thinking), but by mutations and selection. Accordingly, rather than pain, the first sensation of an early creature may just as well have been a neutral (or pleasant) sensation. Furthermore, it is conceivable that the self-preservation of early organisms and evolutionarily old and successful species (such as bacteria or jellyfish) is achieved by biochemical processes without the involvement of consciousness. The individuals of evolutionarily very old extant species may still have a kind of luxury primitive consciousness (restricted to neutral or pleasant sensations) hovering above organismal needs. This has ramifications as regards argumentative standards of antinatalist moral theory, for example.

The Banat, like all territories lost after the First World War, was part of Hungarian irredentist plans. On the eve of the German occupation of Serbia, Hitler promised both the Bačka and the Banat to Hungary. Romania, the other ally of Nazi Germany, also had interest in the Banat as compensation for its territorial losses and as fulfillment of its First World War goals. To avoid a possible conflict between its two allies, Germany decided to occupy the Banat and appointed an ethnic German administration to the region. This article explores how the Banat Hungarian cultural elite navigated this new situation in the shadow of the Reich German occupation and the ethnic German administration. The failed and indefinitely postponed return of the region to Hungary raised self-doubt in the Banat Hungarian minority elites, causing them to rethink their position in the region and in the Hungarian nation. In the hopes of strengthening their positions, these elites discussed their ideas in the only Hungarian-language daily in the Banat during the period. The texts published in the Torontál repositioned the historical borderland of the Banat as a core part of the Hungarian nation-state and reinforced the border only towards the Balkan peninsula.

This article presents five arguments against the idea that non-sentience is a sufficient condition for not considering abortion an immoral act: the formal paradox argument, the third-person argument, the abortionist status argument, the implicit antinatalist premise argument, and the manipulation argument. These five arguments do not disqualify pro-abortion approaches that do not use the element of non-sentience but suggest that it would be appropriate for these approaches to also consider them. The existence of these other pro-abortion arguments shows that non-sentience is not a necessary condition either for trying to show that abortion is not immoral.

In this article, the forms and role of compliments in French are analysed to identify preferred behaviours in two types of discourse. Forty-five instances of compliments were extracted from everyday interactions and 83 instances from television programmes (talk-shows and talent shows). The linguistic-discursive approach used provides the key to understanding these corpora, revealing processes specific to each genre. In everyday interaction, the use of situational deictics, onomatopoeia, dislocated forms, elliptical structures or the intensifier ‘too’ in its high degree value is favoured, whereas in television programmes, it is rather the high degree of axiological praise, the repetition or successive use of adverbs, or the amplification of paraverbal and extraverbal signals (emphatic intonation or detachment of syllables in certain key terms) are preferred. It shows that ordinary interactions give priority to situational anchoring and a certain spontaneity, whereas television programmes tend to intensify the expression of compliments to capture the audience’s attention by turning exchanges into a spectacle.

German features a special coordinate structure in which the second conjunct contains a subject gap, resulting in the asymmetric coordination of a verb-second clause and a verb-initial clause. In this paper, coordination with subject gaps is compared with normal phrasal coordination. Both types of coordination show asymmetries between the conjuncts, including the occupation of the clause-initial position, the omission of non-subject elements, the scope of adverbial constituents, asymmetric extraction and the events described in the conjuncts are naturally connected. Observing the similarities between them in terms of structure and interpretation, I argue that coordinate structures share a unified asymmetric syntactic structure, and coordination with a subject gap is derived from phrasal coordination with a shared subject in the sentence-initial position. The fronted non-subject constituent in the coordination with a subject gap is the result of asymmetric extraction from the first conjunct to the sentence-initial specifier position, which is licensed by its differentiated information structure.

This article examines how the identification and assessment (I&A) of adverse environmental impacts (AEI) within corporate value-chain due diligence (VCDD) norms under the Guidelines of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is normatively designed, and how it can be distinguished from similar legal requirements that already bind corporations to perform environmental impact assessments (EIAs). Through a systematic analysis of specific instances of National Contact Points (NCPs), the article investigates how these expectations have been interpreted and applied in practice in environmental disputes raising claims concerning the I&A due diligence stage. The findings highlight inconsistencies in how NCPs handle such claims and showcase the interpretative divergences concerning the ways in which they perceive the interplay between these VCDD expectations and other host-state legal requirements that bind corporations to conduct assessments of environmental impacts. Based on the analysis, the article then reflects on the specificities of I&A expectations, as well as on avenues for future research. The research argues that VCDD requirements for corporations to identify and assess adverse environmental impacts should be interpreted as setting independent normative commands that warrant a specific compliance assessment. The article concludes by issuing recommendations concerning the ways in which I&A expectations should be interpreted in practice to avoid blurring the boundaries between two distinct layers of home- and host-state regulation.