The letters exchanged between Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne in 1766 have encountered considerable attention, as have those passages in Sterne’s works that seemingly engage with antislavery discourse. Some critics suggest these passages fail to address slavery directly; Sterne, in turn, has been viewed as readily capitalizing on his connection with Sancho to promote a philanthropic image that his writings do not support, and even to exploit it for financial gain. This article suggests a recalibration, partly based on the chronology of this exchange and its first public appearance in 1775. It argues that a richer understanding of Sancho’s and Sterne’s reception histories, and especially the role played by the eighteenth-century press in recirculating reviews of and excerpts from this exchange, helps to establish a more nuanced approach toward how the public image and the texts of both writers were subsequently incorporated into antislavery and Abolitionist debates.

Ethics has become a central concern in applied linguistics, with researchers from both qualitative and quantitative paradigms increasingly engaging with ethical considerations. While methodological guidelines have been proposed to support ethical research practices (De Costa, 2024), it remains unclear to what extent these are implemented and reported. Narrative inquiry, in particular, poses complex ethical challenges due to its relational and often deeply personal nature. Although qualitative traditions have long led ethical reflections in applied linguistics, ethical enactment and transparency in narrative inquiry remain inconsistent. To explore this issue, we conducted a methodological synthesis of 332 narrative inquiry studies published between 2012 and 2023, examining ethical practices across study design, recruitment, data collection, and analysis. Findings reveal that while issues like anonymity were commonly addressed, other areas – such as IRB approval, participant incentives, considerations for vulnerable populations, and data sharing – showed marked variation. Drawing on current literature, we propose empirically grounded recommendations to strengthen ethical reporting in narrative research. Rather than associating macro-ethics and micro-ethics with specific paradigms, we integrate both to explore how ethical principles are enacted in context. Given the relational and situated nature of narrative inquiry, this review responds to a timely need for more transparent and reflexive ethical practice in the field.

This paper argues for a revised approach to religious literacy that I call the interreligious attentiveness (IA) approach. I argue that this approach is better than those endorsed by other scholars in the academic study of religion – namely, knowledge, analysis, and skills approaches. I draw attention to the limitations of these approaches by virtue of three challenges: conversion (exclusivist groups), multiple religious belonging, and motivation. I then argue that the IA approach offers a more effective response to these challenges and should be regarded as the preferred approach.

This study provides an account of the puzzling difference in case marking of the object of two-argument verbs like aider (accusative) and obéir (dative) in French. Cross-linguistically, these two verb types usually mark their object identically (e.g., accusative in English, dative in German), but French historically shows divergent trajectories. Employing logistic regression modelling and clustering techniques, this corpus-based study examines 77 verbs over 1000 years of textual record to show that aider-type verbs and obéir-type verbs systematically diverge in their case selection by the 16th century and that they have been stable ever since. We argue that their trajectories reflect the narrowing of an oblique linking rule, defined in terms of Talmy’s theory of force dynamics, which targets the difference between helping and hindering verbs on the one hand and verbs of reacting and resisting on the other. The analysis dispels long-held views that the diachronic changes were random or based strictly on analogy, and methodologically, it provides an empirical basis for connecting historical change to developmental approaches to grammar.