As the largest and most comprehensive Chinese database in the world, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI: Zhong guo zhi shi ji chu she shi gong cheng 中国知识基础设施工程, also commonly known as Zhi wang 知网)1 is supervised by Tsinghua University and Tonfang Knowledge Network (TKN), a high-tech enterprise funded by Tsinghua University in 1997. It is supported by the Chinese Ministry of Education, the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the State Administration of the Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of the People's Republic of China and the State Planning Commission of the PRC. In December 1996, CNKI began providing CD-ROM and CAJ-CD for Chinese academic journals, and it was officially launched in 1999. This repository initially focused on Chinese academic journals and later expanded its coverage to PhD dissertations, masters’ theses, conference proceedings, yearbooks, books and patent documents. It is divided into three categories: ‘databases’, ‘specialized sources’, and ‘international sources’, including ProQuest and Taylor and Francis journal databases. Ten service centres are established across the world, including Beijing, North America, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong; users include universities, research institutions, government think tanks, industries, hospitals and public libraries.2 CNKI (or CIKRD) updates its information on a daily basis, and its current growth rate is approximately 350,000 new journal articles per month.

I would like to offer heartfelt thanks to Professors Stephen Hanson, Egor Lazarev, Bryn Rosenfeld, and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova for taking the time to read the book carefully and for offering their thoughtful comments and critique. I am also grateful to the editors of Nationalities Papers for providing a forum for and facilitating the symposium.

While larger British colonies in Africa and Asia generally had their own medical services, the British took a different approach in the South Pacific by working with other colonial administrations. Together, colonial administrations of the South Pacific operated a centralised medical service based on the existing system of Native Medical Practitioners in Fiji. The cornerstone of this system was the Central Medical School, established in 1928. Various actors converged on the school despite its apparent isolation from global centres of power. It was run by the colonial government of Fiji, staffed by British-trained tutors, attended by students from twelve colonies, funded and supervised by the Rockefeller Foundation, and jointly managed by the colonial administrations of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France and the United States. At the time of its establishment, it was seen as an experiment in international cooperation, to the point that the High Commissioner for the Western Pacific called it a ‘microcosm of the Pacific’. Why did the British establish an intercolonial medical school in Oceania, so far from the imperial metropole? How did the medical curriculum at the Central Medical School standardise to meet the imperial norm? And in what ways did colonial encounters occur at the Central Medical School? This article provides answers to these questions by comparing archival documents acquired from five countries. In doing so, this article will pay special attention to the ways in which this medical training institution enabled enduring intercolonial encounters in the Pacific Islands.

The article deals with the phenomenon of shaping Ukrainian national identity in artistic works of autobiographical nature, created at the time of life crisis and oppressive sociopolitical situation, using Leon Getz as an example. Getz (1896–1971) was a painter who was raised in a Polish-Ukrainian family in Lviv but made a decision to identify nationally with the Ukrainian minority, oppressed both in pre- and postwar Poland. After WWII, he was subjected to surveillance by the Polish Security Office because of his Ukrainian identification. That led him and his wife (also a Ukrainian) to attempt suicide—unsuccessful in the case of the artist, fatal in the case of his wife. Getz wrote down his memoirs twice: the first time in the 1930s, the second time after his wife’s death in the 1950s. The first memoirs expressed his loneliness in an environment dominated by Poles, and they were drawn up openly, though for the author’s needs only. The second memoirs presented his personal tragedy and were kept in secret because the Security Office sought to intercept Getz’s notes as documents incriminating the officers. However, the author hoped to make the text public in the future. The subject of the analysis is constituted by memoirs read in the context of the artist’s other personal documents and works. They present the formation of his Ukrainian national identity as the chosen one and at the same time as the one that, in his opinion, was related to his and his wife’s tragedy. I interpret these memoirs in two different but complimentary ways: first, as life writing at the time of a man’s personal life crisis and, second, as life writing in a situation of oppression by the authoritarian and after WWII totalitarian state, under surveillance by the Security Office, whose moves put the very subjectivity of an individual in crisis. Both interpretations highlight the process of building Getz’s self-identification not as a discovered preexisting nationality, but as a deliberate—and nonobvious—choice of national path. The article is based on Getz’s unpublished memoirs and works, which are held in archives in Cracow (Poland) and Rome (Italy).

In this article, we address the following question: how do comprehenders reason about the persona embodied by the speaker to determine the referential meaning of numerical expressions such as ‘The price is $200’? Using a picture selection task, we show that descriptions uttered by speakers embodying a Nerdy persona, indexically associated with highly precise speech, are interpreted more precisely than those uttered by speakers embodying a Chill persona, indexically associated with imprecise speech. These findings contribute to building a more integrative perspective between the socio-indexical and the referential domain of signification, highlighting comprehenders’ social perception of the speaker as a crucial element informing pragmatic reasoning, and meaning interpretation more broadly. (Social meaning, personae, pragmatic reasoning, precision, numerals)*

This article offers three musings on Sakiru Adebayo’s Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa, focusing specifically on the challenges and prospects of centering African histories, cultures, and epistemologies in mainstream memory studies. Through a reading of Continuous Pasts, the article contests the marginality of African and Afrodiasporic memory cultures in memory studies, and makes a case for the affordances of “ancestral memory” in articulating a uniquely African and global Black diasporic memory practice.

Contrast, adversative and corrective can all be represented by er in Classical Chinese, but they are lexicalized respectively by er, danshi and ershi in Modern Chinese. The two lexicalization systems suggest that the opposition relations have commonalities as well as differences. In the framework of relevance theory and ‘three domains’, this study argues that the three opposition relations are in different cognitive domains, at different representational levels, and trigger different inferences, which accounts for their diverse lexicalizations in Modern Chinese. The opposition relations also have cognitive or metaphorical connections with each other, which justifies their unified actualization in Classical Chinese. The pragmatics-cognitive framework could also account for interlinguistic data.

One of the questions that still surrounds the history of auxiliary do is what function it had during the Middle English period (c.1100–1500). Scholars have put forward different hypotheses, suggesting that it could serve, among others, as a perfective marker (Denison 1985), agentive marker (Ecay 2015) and habitual marker (Garrett 1998). The present article reports on a quantitative study that aims to shed further light on this issue. By means of a collexeme analysis, this article investigates the semantic features of the infinitives that occur with auxiliary do in several Middle English corpora. The results show that auxiliary do was not connected to verbs with specific semantic profiles, but it was employed in different contexts and had various functions. Specifically, the data suggest that auxiliary do was used (i) as an accommodation tool to facilitate the use of low-frequency verbs, particularly of French origin, and (ii) as an aspectual particle to mark both perfectivity and habituality. It is argued that the multifunctionality of auxiliary do in Middle English played a crucial role in the preservation of the construction before it spread to the NICE (i.e. negation, inversion, code and emphasis) environments.