This special issue presents the perspectives of five composers—Hilda Paredes, Andile Khumalo, Marisol Jiménez, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Philippe Manoury—on music and politics today. Originating in the online lecture series ‘Poetics and Politics of Twenty-First-Century Music’, presented in 2021–22 by Universität Bern, McGill University, and Université de Montréal, the articles in this issue expand the composers’ original lectures into statements on the political contexts of their music and the potential of contemporary composition to effect social change. Their works address inequality, discrimination, exploitation, and violence, as well as the global threat of irreversible climate change. Another shared theme is the legacy of colonialism, both as a driving force of these social crises and a continuing challenge for composers who must reckon with Eurocentric attitudes and assumptions. These reflections on the transformative possibilities of musical creation illustrate a wide range of strategies for political engagement and praxis.

Cross-linguistically, the existence of ‘double case’ configurations (e.g., nom-subject and nom-object) presents an empirical challenge to theories of case where anti-identity, or distinctness between two NPs, plays a key role (e.g., Yip, Maling & Jackendoff 1987). This study investigates the factors that influence the distribution of nominative object constructions in Korean. In a novel acceptability judgment experiment, we find that sentences with nom-objects are rated less acceptable than those with acc-objects. In a corpus survey, sentences with nom-objects commonly have topic-marked subjects. We propose the Morphological-Thematic-Grammatical (MTG) Alignment Hypothesis, which posits that sentences are maximally acceptable when there is maximal alignment between morphological case marking, thematic role, and grammatical function. In nom-acc constructions, this alignment is achieved because the highest-ranked subject (Keenan & Comrie 1977) is marked with highest-ranked nominative case (Otsuka 2006) and functions as a higher-ranked agent or experiencer. The lower-ranked object, meanwhile, has lower-ranked accusative case and functions as a lower-ranked patient. In contrast, nom-nom (and dat-nom) constructions fail to achieve this alignment. Our analysis treats the relevant constraints (e.g., distinctness, alignment) as interacting with each other to produce cumulative effects on acceptability.

Rates of judicial dissent vary dramatically between Southern Africa’s appeal courts, even though judges frequently circulate between their benches. This variation cannot be explained by the ideological distance between judges or by their judicial philosophies. Differing institutional arrangements provide better but still incomplete explanations. These arrangements reflect dramatic transformations in the region’s judicial cultures. Analysing these diverging cultures illuminates why some forms of dissent have proved particularly contentious, and why styles of adjudication favouring dissent in some areas of the law have aroused particular hostility. There is thus no straightforward ‘norm’ that promotes or undermines judicial consensus in the region.

This festschrift essay honors the academic life and work of Douglas Laycock, one of the most important scholars and advocates in American law and religion. This essay offers tribute to a mentor from whom I took three classes and an independent study in law school, for whom I worked as a research assistant, and with whom I have remained in close conversation during my two decades in the academy. It also offers an insider’s account of Laycock’s intellectual project and influence—punctuated with stories, observations, and nuggets of wisdom drawn from a close reading of his scholarship and briefs. This essay traces Laycock’s career from his early academic work to his later role in landmark Supreme Court litigation, ultimately seeing Laycock’s deepest legacy as lying not only in the doctrines he helped shape, but in a model of intellectually serious, cross-ideological engagement that both inspires us and calls us to account.

The two books discussed in this review essay speak to issues of projections implied in Western political thinking in the distinction between the “West” and the “East”. This includes a tradition in “Western” discourse to project features with negative connotations, such as “despotism”, onto a construed “Eastern other”, thus obliterating comparable structures of hierarchy in the “own”, and it is also linked to the heavy ideological load that concepts of “East” carry when it comes to geopolitical projections of otherness, and often enmity. In Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Mobilizing, Jie-Hyun Lim undertakes a sweeping critique of the projections just mentioned and links this with a critique of nationalism as well as current mass politics. In Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism, Kolja Lindner is concerned with reconciling postcolonial perspectives with at least some of Karl Marx’s work, insofar as it has been criticized for Orientalist and modernist bias.

This work aims to describe and analyze a relatively new, puzzling construction that has become very productive in informal registers of English. It is primarily used by younger generations, especially on the web and social-media platforms, but also in spoken language. It appears with the configuration negative marker + subject in the accusative case + gerund (e.g. Not me taking the train at 5 a.m.; meaning: it is ironic and unexpected that I took the train early at 5 a.m.). These constructions, which we dubbed not-ACC-ing constructions, are strictly root phenomena where negation does not reverse the polarity of the sentence. They convey a peculiar ironic, sarcastic, self-deprecating flavor. The existence of the not-ACC-ing construction raises the following questions, which we will address in this article: (i) How come negation does not have its prototypical function of reversing the polarity of the sentence? (ii) How come the subject is in the accusative case, despite not-ACC-ing constructions being invariably root? (iii) How is their peculiar interpretation obtained? We propose an analysis that captures all their structural and interpretive properties by combining some crucial ingredients of Lowe’s (2019) analysis of ACC-ing constructions and Greco’s (2020) analysis of Expletive Negation.

The article critically reviews the main claims in the recent literature on the semantics of English at least, at the least and at the very least, as members of a larger family of scalar markers, and it focuses on the common meaning of at least, at the least and at the very least. This semantic ‘common core’ is described in terms of a scalar component, a positive component and a restrictive component. The context can highlight the latter two components and this is argued to explain the distinction described in the literature in terms of a positive evaluation and a rhetorical retreat. The article also proposes to explain the emphatic character of at the very least in terms of a double scalar comparison.

This article examines Turkey’s position as an aid recipient during the Cold War, benefiting from assistance provided by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Adopting a comparative approach, this study investigates the impact of these investments on the development of two major iron and steel plants: the Ereğli Iron and Steel Plant (ERDEMİR), constructed with American financial and industrial support, and the İskenderun Iron and Steel Plant (İSDEMİR), established with Soviet assistance. Both projects sparked political controversy in Turkey during the 1960s and 1970s, shaped not only by the ideological rivalries of the Cold War but also by material realities on the ground. In terms of the conditions attached to aid, transfer of technology, and ownership structures, there were significant differences between the support offered by the capitalist and socialist countries. These differences were evident in the cases of ERDEMİR and İSDEMİR, where two distinct models were used for practical testing. This article argues that comparing the construction and operation of these plants provides valuable insights into the nature of Cold War aid and contributes to the broader global literature on the subject.