Although it has been proposed that all languages may have some lexical stress property, recent studies of (Standard) Indonesian have concluded, based primarily on perception, that lexical stress is not present in this language. While it is philosophically problematic to prove the non-existence of a phenomenon, we examine data from a large-scale production study for both direct and indirect evidence of stress, contributing to the growing body of literature in this field. In the first case, evidence is sought that indicates that a particular syllable in a word exhibits acoustic properties typically associated with prominence (i.e. fundamental frequency (f0), duration, intensity, vowel quality). In the second case, evidence of enhancement of these properties on a particular syllable under focus is sought, for a more abstract stress property that is not overtly manifested at the word level. Although we find no evidence of lexical prominence, we observe acoustic patterns consistent with a higher level prominence corresponding to focus, manifested by strong (Intonational Phrase) boundary properties. Overall, our findings reveal that there is strong support for a class of languages lacking lexical stress, and in the absence of a stressed syllable to enhance, focus may be manifested prosodically as boundary properties.

The standard version of sufficientarianism maintains that providing people with enough, or as close to enough as is possible, is lexically prior to other distributive goals. This article argues that this is excessive – more than distributive justice allows – in four distinct ways. These concern the magnitude of advantage, the number of beneficiaries, responsibility and desert, and above-threshold distribution. Sufficientarians can respond by accepting that providing enough unconditionally is more than distributive justice allows, instead balancing sufficiency against other considerations.

As the Cold War prompted anxieties throughout Asia about the status of postcolonial state-building and decolonization, the possibility of friendship and cooperation between China and India despite their differing political and economic systems inspired hope and political repercussions far beyond their borders. This paper reveals how Japanese commenters, in their analysis of Sino–Indian friendship and both countries' respective political trajectories, saw the two countries as providing a rubric for a new type of politics. Utilizing an array of published, unpublished, and archival sources, I will study how diverse individuals, from the historian Uehara Senroku to burakumin activist Jiichirō Matsumoto, believed that Sino–Indian friendship, unlike the failed project of Japanese imperialism, could unite “Asia” in its struggle against imperialism amid the Cold War and accelerating decolonization. In following this model, they also believed that Japan could escape American hegemony and become “Asian” again. Japanese analyses of “China–India” as offering an “Asian” recipe for overcoming imperialism and navigating bloc politics help showcase how ideas of Asia continued to serve as a space for contemplating political possibilities during the early Cold War, transforming Japan from the region's former tutor to its pupil.

This paper examines vernacular weather observations amongst rural people on Sakhalin, Russia’s largest island on the Pacific Coast, and their relationship to the ice. It is based on a weather diary (2000–2016) of one of the local inhabitants and fieldwork that the author conducted in the settlement of Trambaus in 2016. The diary as a community-based weather monitoring allows us to examine how people understand, perceive and deal with the weather both daily and in the long-term perspective. Research argues that amongst all natural phenomena, the ice is the most crucial for the local inhabitants as it determines human subsistence activities, navigation and relations with other environmental forces and beings. People perceive the ice as having an agency, engage in a dialogue with it, learn and adjust themselves to its drifting patterns. Over the past decade, the inability to predict the ice’s behaviour has become a major problem affecting people’s well-being in the settlement. The paper advocates further integrating vernacular weather observations and their relations with natural forces into research on climate change and local fisheries management policies.