Considered a staple of the French press since at least the nineteenth century, the fait divers—a catch-all category for short, often sensational news items such as murders, petty crimes, and suicides—has been taken up and transformed in West African cultural production. This essay focuses on the transformations and transpositions of the fait divers tradition in the work of Senegalese writer Aminata Maïga Ka (1940–2005), arguing that her short stories and novels inflect earlier treatments of the journalistic genre while staging a broader critique of the liberalization of the media in Senegal during the 1970s and 1980s. Ka’s works offer a window onto the entangled histories of postcolonial literary production and the emergent popular press in Senegal. Specifically, she updates and expands Ousmane Sembène’s rescripting of the French fait divers in his short story “La Noire de …” (1961/1962) and the landmark film from 1966 by the same title.

This article explores the use of speech representation verbs in Late Modern English. Drawing data from CLMET3.0, it focuses on paralinguistic verbs in narrative fiction texts from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, as in blubbered in ‘“And only last Sunday – afternoon,” Mr. Povey blubbered.’ (CLMET3.0; 1908, Bennett, Old Wives’ Tale). The results show a drastic increase of these verbs, both in tokens and types, across the Late Modern English period, especially in direct speech constructions. I argue that this trend is linked to developing conventions for and experimentation with speech representation in the growth of especially the novel in the first half of the nineteenth century and beyond: the paralinguistic verbs offer a flexible tool for writers not only to structure dialogue, but also to convey stance and hence influence reader interpretation of characters, roles, situations and themes. The results underscore the importance of studying literary texts for understanding the general development of speech representation mechanisms in the history of English.

Studies on household income and consumption in Southern Europe have primarily focused on rural areas and factory workers. In this study, we aim to incorporate evidence of household income, considering the earnings of all household members and not just the male wage, using the population list of Zaragoza (Spain) from 1924. This population list is the first (and the last) to systematically record the wages of all citizens regardless of their family role or age. Our results confirm that, in 1924, most working-class households still required the labour of women and/or children to meet basic consumption needs (on average, they contributed nearly sixty per cent of the household income). Based on different food consumption baskets, the results also show that, with household income, the majority of working-class families could afford a basic consumption basket but not a nutritionally more complete basket.

From a comparative perspective, this paper argues that early Chinese empires lacked the concept of talion or tort law when malicious violence or intent became factors. Instead, wrongdoers were required to pay fines to the government or received punishment as hard labor for the state. Victims not only could not receive compensation but were sometimes punished along with the offender if their loss was perceived as a loss to the empire. I argue that the absence of corrective justice in criminal cases can be traced back to the philosophical underpinnings of the body politic, a prominent discourse in early China that viewed the emperor and the people as a single, organic entity. When people were conceived of as constituting a unified, singular entity, criminal actions against an individual were interpreted as damage to the empire. Therefore, punishments for offenders were designed to compensate the empire, not the individual. Furthermore, in the context of the body politic, the suffering of both victims and offenders was regarded as metaphysically equal, which justified frequently pardoning culprits on a large scale to secure harmony within the empire. Originally, the body politic was employed to admonish and criticize the throne, urging the emperor to align his interests with the well-being of his people, but in practice, it compromised the practice of justice.

Several of the world’s languages exhibit double determination structures, including English dialects which have a construction with a demonstrative determiner and a locative adverb (e.g. this here book). Doubling in demonstratives has commonly been explained as a language’s response to a loss of deixis, leading to a linguistic cycle. However, this explanation cannot be sustained for English because demonstratives are fully functioning grammatical deictics (e.g. this book). In this article, we probe the role of doubling in the history and grammatical development of English double demonstratives with evidence from rural UK dialects. Using quantitative methods and the principle of accountability we calculate proportion of forms and patterning in simple and double demonstratives, enabling us to demonstrate that the doubled form has particular discourse-pragmatic functions, most notably, to flag topics in discourse. Our findings lead us to make two theoretical proposals. First, double demonstratives in English are used for discourse-pragmatic purposes; and second, doubling led to a new, complex determiner suitable to take over discourse-pragmatic functions from simple determiners (complexification of the determiner paradigm). Finally, we suggest that obsolescing features like the English double demonstrative offer key insights for understanding the development of linguistic systems.

Internationally, the home is legally protected as a bastion of private life, where one may retreat to and recollect oneself after a day’s work and enjoy family life. With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, working from home – facilitated by new collaborative information and communications technology (ICT) platforms and tools – became mandatory in several countries. For many, the workplace was brought into the home. This article examines how working from home on a mandatory basis during the pandemic affected employees’ perceptions and practices of privacy, and its implications for the legal understanding of privacy. With Norway as a case, it investigates the measures taken by employees and employers to safeguard privacy during this period. The data collection and method combine an interpretation of legal sources with qualitative interviews. The analysis shows experiences and practices that suggest a blurring of roles and physical spaces, and the adoption of boundary-setting measures to safeguard privacy.

Hanging Topic Left Dislocations are widely deemed to constitute root phenomena, though they occasionally appear in embedded contexts. I submit that the apparent embeddability of left dislocations is merely illusory: they are in actuality matrix phenomena in disguise. A novel cross-linguistic contrast is brought to light: in English, subordinate hanging topics are broadly attested, and they can occur with or without a secondary complementizer. In Spanish, by contrast, embedded hanging topics that are not followed by a secondary complementizer are not part of the grammar, a pattern that extends to Dutch. Left-peripheral analyses assuming an elaborated left periphery fall short of capturing this contrast non-stipulatively. Nevertheless, the recent paratactic approach to recomplementation (i.e. double-complementizer) structures, which assumes that such constructions involve two matrix sentences linked paratactically and that the secondary complementizer flags a restart in discourse, provides a more satisfactory account of the English–Spanish asymmetry: the difference between the two languages ultimately reduces to the possibility of omitting subordinating complementizers in English but not in Spanish. On this view, embedded left dislocations are in fact undercover root constructions, in line with their generally accepted characterization as Main Clause Phenomena.

There is a plurality of reasons for taking wildlife conservation seriously. These reasons include nonanthropocentric ones based on animal ethics. But in an unequal world, global conservation can impose disproportional burdens on people who are already disadvantaged. What are some of these costs, and how can we better reconcile what we owe to people as a matter of global justice with what we owe to animals? We can call this the global justice challenge of wildlife conservation. While advances in animal ethics and animal science have contributed to our understanding of the animal side of conservation morality, what we owe to people in the context of conservation is comparatively underdeveloped. The two books under review are valuable contributions to this discussion. Security and Conservation by Rosaleen Duffy is an exposé of the hidden conservation costs that are borne by people in the Global South. The author specifically scrutinizes the moral costs of the securitization and militarization of wildlife protection. Global Justice and the Biodiversity Crisis by Chris Armstrong is the first book-length normative inquiry into the global justice challenges that arise from biodiversity conservation. Together, these books draw our attention to the justice problems that can arise from conservation itself and point to where more work needs to be done if we want to harmonize our duties to animals and people.

I argue that alienation objections to housing markets face a dilemma. Either they purport to explain distributive injustices, or they hold that markets are objectionable on intrinsic grounds. The first disjunct is empirically dubious. The second undermines the motivation for objecting to housing markets, and overgeneralizes: if markets are objectionable due to alienation, so is all large-scale social cooperation.