This article addresses the Jewish ethical approach to refugees. According to Jewish ethics, help must be offered to refugees of a foreign people, and sometimes, for the sake of peace, even to those of an enemy state. Reviewing the Jewish sources, I conclude that from an ethical point of view, preference should be given to refugees who are near the border over those from farther away. Priority must be given to those in acute distress who lack the basic items of sustenance. Sometimes there is a special value in finding a way to assist even one's enemies in the hope that such help will break down the barriers of hatred. Similarly, it is ethically preferable to offer help to blameless children over adults, whose intentions might be suspect.

The article discusses how promising outlooks and favourable memories of past and distant mining ventures are employed in the view of a mine in spe. The study utilises interview quotes and written narratives pertaining to a case of mine development in Swedish Pajala and neighbouring Finnish Kolari (the Northland project 2004–2014), located above the Arctic Circle, for explicating this. Its theoretical framework includes the concept of minescape and the ideas of past presences and anticipated futures, which support capturing (the temporality of) the sociocultural and discursive dimensions of mining alongside with its physicality. Previous and distant experiences with mines appeared readily abstracted and brought into the current debate, forgetting about contexts, that is, about any historical or geographical contingencies. This kind of temporal and spatial referencing is seen to represent an imaginative practice which, as it is argued, gains an enhanced role in tandem with the increasing market dependency and volatility of the extractive business. By attending to the meaning-making based on remembering, and forgetting, in the context of experiences made with mining in the past or elsewhere, the article contributes to our understanding of the present-day role of mining heritage.

In not-negated English sentences with indefinite expressions following the verb, there is variation between the indefinite article and any as determiners of nouns. The standard view is that singular count nouns take the indefinite article and singular non-count and plural nouns take any. However, it is possible to encounter examples like it isn't any threat, there isn't any lock or I don't have any problem.

The article studies variation between the indefinite article and any as post-verbal determiners of singular nouns in 21,084 not-negated sentences in the spoken component of The Corpus of Contemporary American English, COCA SPOK. The indefinite article is dominant with 90 per cent of the tokens. Variation is extremely rare in sentences with copular be and much more frequent in sentences with existential be and have. Among the reasons for variation between verb types is the use of do-support with have (but not with be). Expressions such as have a job/car/home or there's not a/an with uncontracted not may also prevent the use of any. Variation occurs mostly with abstract nouns such as problem, choice, way, place, reason. This finding is surprising as abstract nouns have rarely been discussed in the literature on varying countability of nouns.

This article concentrates on the development of an inner-city imaginary, and a linked suburban imaginary, in the era of post-war reconstruction and post-colonial migration. It argues that these two historical processes – reconstruction and migration – need to be seen as interlinked phenomena, which bound the histories of race and class together. First, it proposes that understanding how the inner city developed and was lived as a structure of feeling requires attending to its meaning both among those who peopled its often-nebulous borders, and among those who escaped it but nonetheless measured their escape by it. Second, it proposes that understanding the popular force of inner city and suburb as imaginative spaces means recognizing how they became crucial landscapes in a revived culture of respectability, which in the second half of the twentieth century became a racialized culture. This was the other migration that defined what the inner city meant.

In this article I make two main critiques of Kaczmarek and Beard's article ‘Human Extinction and Our Obligations to the Past’. First, I argue that there is an ambiguity in what it means to realise the benefits of a sacrifice and that this ambiguity affects the persuasiveness of the authors’ arguments and responses to various objections to their view. Second, I argue that their core argument against human extinction depends on an unsupported assumption about the existence and importance of existential benefits.

Supporting Antarctic scientific investigation is the job of the national Antarctic programmes, the government entities charged with delivering their countries’ Antarctic research strategies. This requires sustained investment in people, innovative technologies, Antarctic infrastructures, and vessels with icebreaking capabilities. The recent endorsement of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) Polar Code (2015) means that countries must address challenges related to an ageing icebreaking vessel fleet. Many countries have recently invested in and begun, or completed, builds on new icebreaking Polar research vessels. These vessels incorporate innovative technologies to increase fuel efficiency, to reduce noise output, and to address ways to protect the Antarctic environment in their design. This paper is a result of a Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs (COMNAP) project on new vessel builds which began in 2018. It considers the recent vessel builds of Australia’s RSV Nuyina, China’s MV Xue Long 2, France’s L’Astrolabe, Norway’s RV Kronprins Haakon, Peru’s BAP Carrasco, and the United Kingdom’s RRS Sir David Attenborough. The paper provides examples of purposeful consideration of science support requirements and environmental sustainability in vessel designs and operations.

This study reports on recent changes in the use of the hedges kind of and sort of in spoken British English over the past twenty years. A quantitative analysis of these features within subsets of the original BNC 1994 (BNC Consortium 2007) and BNC 2014 (Love et al. 2017) suggests a systematic encroaching of kind of into contexts that are traditionally occupied by sort of. This is highlighted in apparent-time patterns in which younger speakers are leading in use as well as real-time patterns that show a significant increase in use between 1994 and 2014.

The hedges sort of and kind of are often treated as semantically equivalent, yet show distributional differences across different varieties of English. This article reports on an ongoing shift in the use of kind of as well as a relatively stable use of sort of. Its main focus is a detailed sociolinguistic analysis of both variants, which, in addition to social factors involved, teases apart some of the linguistic aspects of this shift.

In line with the theme of this special issue, the article draws attention to the usefulness of comparable, or comparably made, corpora that allow for focused studies of linguistic change across speakers, generations, registers and communities.

In search of justice in income distribution and easy access to necessities by everyone, basic income (BI) has become one of the main topics of conversation. However, there is no comprehensive study on the cost and effect of BI in Turkey. This study aims to set a theoretical framework for BI, compare different views on the topic, evaluate implementations from the world, and analyze the feasibility of a BI program in Turkey by estimating its costs and distributional consequences using a tax–benefit microsimulation. The results show that, although it improves the income distribution, implementing a basic income scheme financed by income tax would impose a significant burden on the upper half of the income distribution due to widespread poverty and income inequality. In the baseline, individual-based scenario, every individual aged 15 or above is granted a BI equal to the poverty line, while children below age 15 are granted 30 percent of this amount. This plan costs 17.77 percent of the gross domestic product and it is covered by multiplying current income tax by 3.54. Implementation of this plan decreases the poverty rate from 12.43 percent to zero and the Gini index from 0.388 to 0.181.

This article addresses the question of how speakers manage information flow in specificational it-clefts by balancing grammatical and prosodic choices in real time. We examine this in a qualitative and quantitative corpus study of both full and reduced it-clefts extracted from the first London–Lund Corpus (LLC–1), whose prosody we studied combining auditory and instrumental analysis. Our empirical analysis resulted in the following findings about cleft usage in speech. Speakers have considerable freedom to choose what information to make prominent irrespective of the actual discourse-givenness of the constituents. Clefts allow speakers to highlight elements by means of two strategies, syntactic and prosodic, which may reinforce each other or create their own different types of prominence in sequence. It-clefts always have a high first pitch accent, which signals some form of reset of the expectations generated by preceding utterances. The choice of whether or not to produce a cleft relative clause is not purely informationally motivated. Rather, reduced clefts achieve specific unique rhetorical effects. All of this makes clefts a particularly useful device for speakers responding moment by moment to informational needs and shifting communicative goals.

This essay explores the musical life of a German-American ‘Forty-Eighter’ and his family, with particular attention to their domestic musical preferences as reflected in five surviving sheet-music albums. Otto Dresel, easily confused with the far more prominent German musician of the same name who settled in Boston, was a gifted amateur whose public musical activities, both choral and instrumental, typified those of many German arrivals of that generation. This was a largely male realm of affirmative, expansive ideals; here the stress was on civic virtues, happy fraternal bonds, and the celebration of German musical culture as an elevating force in America. The family albums suggests that the music he shared with his wife and children at home in Columbus, Ohio, served quite different purposes. It was performed intimately, in an often melancholy and even mournful mode that reflected the need for personal consolation and was thus more in keeping with typical Victorian attitudes toward the domestic, womanly sphere. Evidence about the troubled course of Dresel's life helps us understand his growing need to take refuge in his home and family as well as in music that helped him and his loved ones deal – for a time, at least – with deepening feelings of regret, failure and loss. This marked contrast between the public and private sides of the Dresels’ musical lives points to a need for greater attention to the distinctive character and functions of intimate family music-making in nineteenth-century America, especially during the years of widespread disillusionment and cultural reorientation that followed the Civil War.