Noun (N) and Adjective (A) are distinct word classes but share certain features. Some noun uses share more features with how adjectives are used, thus contributing (over time) to a shift from N to A. There is evidence that the use of nouns as adjectives is on the increase (Denison 2013). Earlier work (De Smet 2012) shows key and fun taking different paths shifting to A, apparently because the former is a count and the latter a noncount noun. This article provides a type-based study on the N>A shift during the Late Modern English period on the basis of data from the Oxford English Dictionary and diachronic corpora. Complementing previous research, we address the question of which functional slot (premodifying or predicative) dominates the N>A shift and whether countability of nouns plays an important role. Our findings challenge the view that there is a connection between countability of the nouns in question and the path of the N>A shift. A case study on genius, a noun that is both count and noncount, provides additional quantitative and qualitative analysis of the N>A shift.

Many pressing riverine problems in Asia today can be traced back to the development of a set of new conceptualizations, technologies, and institutions of river management between roughly 1800 and 1945, a period moulded by the expansion of modern imperial powers on a global scale. This special feature investigates the multifaceted entanglements between rivers and imperialism in modern Asia by bringing together cases in Japan, India, China, and Vietnam. Building on the understanding of the dual potential of rivers to support and resist imperial ambitions, the articles in this special feature reconstruct the complicated human-river interactions across Asia that confounded anthropocentric expectations and show how imperial ethos, technologies, and institutions of river management were carried out, resisted, or transformed in varied local contexts by human and non-human actors alike. Understanding the unruly history of rivers in imperial Asia can help us to better understand the precarious future of rivers and their management on the warming continent.

In the years 1803–1807, a dramatic triple murder case in Shouzhou, Anhui, convulsed officialdom in the Jiangnan region and drove the Jiaqing emperor to exasperation. At a time when many in power felt a sense of crisis as “High Qing” imperial ambitions receded, each stone turned over in this meandering investigation revealed another source of anxiety fitted to the age: incest, poisoning, negligent and corrupt officials, amoral and abusive local gentry, misbehaving yamen runners, pettifogging litigators, and, to top it all off, deadly serious rumors of a subversive opera. This article traces the investigations into both the murders and the theater rumor. What made the former so convoluted and vexing, while the latter was alarming yet easier to resolve? Surprisingly, the Imperial Household’s carefully cultivated relationship with the theater world of Jiangnan realized, in miniature, a level of state–society coordination Qing rulers wished for but which often escaped them elsewhere.

This article presents Bath as an urban crucible for global visitors, ideas and cultural brokers like Edmund Rack, a Quaker and former shopkeeper (1735/36–87). Rack seized opportunities to use his social networks to forge a scientific community in Bath. A study of members of Rack’s Bath Philosophical Society shows science was a pathway to social mobility for dissenters, physicians and men of marginal backgrounds. Scientific knowledge became the property of non-elites, whose interests over-rode socio-economic differences. The impact of knowledge brokers and Bath on eighteenth-century social and urban history is, thus, seen anew in its local, national and global contexts.

The idea that God must relate perfectly to our subjectivity is central to Linda Zagzebski’s work on omnisubjectivity. There is a hitherto undiagnosed tension, however, between different criteria one might use to judge what perfectly relating to our subjectivity consists in. God’s relationship to what Zagzebski calls ‘counteractuals’, individuals that do not exist but that could have, brings this tension into focus. On the one hand, if God does not know what the subjective experiences of counteractuals would be like, then God’s omnisubjectivity would appear to be unacceptably limited in scope. On the other hand, if God knows the subjectivity of actual creatures in the same way that God knows the subjectivity of counteractual creatures, then the motivation for omnisubjectivity ends up being undercut to a significant extent. This essay resolves this tension with a model that draws on interpersonal perception and divine introspection.

This study investigates teacher candidates’ transcultural awareness development in an English language teacher education program in Argentina. Baker’s recently revised model of intercultural and transcultural awareness was used retrospectively as theoretical and analytical foundation in an online project undertaken in 2013 between 100 Argentinian and 75 Italian language undergraduates who communicated online using English as Lingua Franca (ELF) to address the theme of mural art and graffiti. Data was comprised of recorded Skype conversations, collaboratively created murals and graffiti, the Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters, and civic action artefacts. Findings show that students deployed the various components of transcultural awareness in their intercultural encounters in fluid and dynamic ways. The study fills two gaps in the literature, namely the little existing research beyond the Asian Pacific region and Europe, and methodological limitations. Implications for the potential of Baker’s updated model in methodological and pedagogical terms are considered.