There are various types of nominal appositives. One is predicative, as in She invited Lulu Moppet, an old friend, to the party; one is specificational, as in She invited an old friend, Lulu Moppet, to the party; and a further type is equative, as in She invited Reginald Kenneth Dwight, Elton John, to the party. This paper argues that each type of nominal appositive comes from a reduced copular clause of a certain kind. Such a copular clause is base-generated as the complement of a categoryless functional head, like a low conjunct or a modifier. The combination of the reduced copular clause and the functional head is merged with, and categorized by, the matrix clause. Thus, a nominal appositive is not base-generated in the same proposition-denoting expression where its anchor occurs. Explicit steps of derivation for building a nominal appositive construction are proposed. The proposed syntactic derivations rule out unacceptable positions of nominal appositives. The research explores the general syntax of non-argument-taking relations.

Many theorists tie social norms to attitudes, such as expectations towards others, perhaps along with conforming practices. Challenging this view, we instead ground social norms in a social norming process, an often non-verbal social communication process that ‘makes’ the norm through mutual expressions of support. We present the process-based account of social norms and social normativity, and distinguish social norms from social pressures, social practices and Lewisian conventions. The process-based view brings social norms closer to legal norms, by tying them to ‘expressive acts’, just as laws and contracts arise through acts of voting or signing, not through mere attitudes.

This article investigates how the Ottoman–Habsburg rivalry was materialized in Istanbul’s urban fabric, c. 1530–1606. Tracing the itinerary Divanyolu → Elçi Hanı → Topkapı Palace, it reconstructs a ritual geography in which routes, lodgings and thresholds converted diplomacy into spatial governance. Drawing on protocol notes, narratives and images, it shows how orchestrated confinement, staged spectacle and reciprocal visibility structured ambassadorial experience: envoys were lodged under watch in the Elçi Hanı, processed along a ceremonial corridor and received in a palace that magnified authority by withholding it. Combining visual, textual and architectural analysis, the article demonstrates how power was materially and symbolically enacted and ambassadors became both spectators and exhibits. Rather than treating the city as backdrop, it reads Istanbul as an instrument that translated rivalry into movement, vantage and constraint, situating the Ottoman capital within a wider Mediterranean economy of representation, comparison and control.

This article traces the conservation history of the inner suburb of Parkville in Melbourne, Australia. It focuses on its 1972 designation as Melbourne’s first urban conservation area by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria). It examines Parkville’s establishment in the setter-colonial city as an elite neighbourhood, its post-war transformation, the role of the resident amenity group, the Parkville Association, and the evolution of heritage planning policies by the City of Melbourne and the state government of Victoria. Using a range of archival sources, including the Victorian Heritage Database, the article analyses the expanding building, conservation area and heritage overlay protections for Parkville from the 1950s to the 2020s, with a particular focus on the years 1971–85. This article interlaces policy and planning, heritage and conservation, and cultural and social change. It argues that Parkville’s designation was demonstrative of urban conservation in Melbourne and reflected evolving international approaches to urban heritage.

This article examines how, since the late 1980s, Hong Kong directors have reimagined China’s western frontiers in the wuxia genre through collaborations with the mainland amid a process of deepening cross-border integration. To contextualize these representations for English-language readers, this study employs a comparative lens. It first examines the cultural and historical significance of the American Old West and China’s premodern western borderlands and then analyzes how Hong Kong wuxia filmmakers construct particular forms of nationalism through mythic depictions of geopolitical peripheries in dialogue with Hollywood Westerns’ frontier portrayals. The analysis reveals that, as Hong Kong directors’ mainland coproduction has increasingly integrated into China’s film industry and cultural discourse, their depiction of frontier space has gradually shifted from an extralegal, anti-authoritarian martial world of cultural ambivalence and abstract nationalism – echoing the anti-establishment ethos characteristic of revisionist Hollywood Westerns – toward a symbol of state-centered nationalism and global cultural outreach, paralleling the golden-age Hollywood Western’s construction of the American frontier as a unified national myth reinforcing U.S. exceptionalism.