Ownership has been a key tool in the exploitation of nature for centuries. However, ownership could also shield natural entities from extraction and pollution if it were vested in them, rather than in humans or corporations. Through a case study of German constitutional property law, this article examines the normative content of this constitutional right. It argues that in owning themselves, natural entities would have numerous tools to fend off human interference with their self-determination. Constitutional property law would require any harmful activity affecting the natural entity to be based upon legislation and necessary to achieve a public purpose. The natural entity would enjoy broader access to justice. Courts would also often award appropriate remedies; where the natural entity would be awarded only compensation, this would be unsatisfactory because money cannot replace nature. The article finds that constitutional property law offers the potential for further protection from human interference, which has not been realized because of anthropocentric value judgments prevalent in German legal doctrine. Ecocentric approaches to ownership and invalidity as a standard remedy would play an important role in unlocking the full potential of ownership for environmental protection.

Typical headed relatives in English include a relative pronoun which takes the head as its antecedent. However, some modifying when-clauses in this language are peculiar relatives in that their heads are not the antecedent of when and they do not even have temporal referents. In view of the peculiarity of this type of relative clause, a novel account of the syntactic generation and interpretation of temporal when-clauses is pro- posed. Under this account four lexical entries of when, which have different semantic and syntactic properties, are recognized. The semantics of various whens are analyzed based on existing work, while the syntactic properties of different whens in non-interrogative sentences are characterized in the form of lexical information, which is implemented in the framework of Dynamic Syntax. The work in this article enriches the description of the diversity of relatives and suggests that the analysis of relatives can be unified semantically but not syntactically.

This multifactorial study reviews the determinants of particle alternation after uninflected try in varieties where English is native. The effects of a number of previously discussed and novel predictors are probed in data from well-known corpora. The results confirm the inclinations of North American varieties (try to) in contrast with those of the Australasian, British and Irish varieties (try and in speech but try to in writing). The previously reported general effects of the tense of try, mode and horror aequi are also corroborated. As regards the effect of register, the study contributes the finding that following Latin-based infinitives favor try to in most varieties, especially in writing. The article discusses the status of the substantiated effects with respect to the notions of conventionalization and entrenchment: crucially, the higher degree of conventionalization of try to in North American varieties (a) makes the use of this variant less conditional on the sequential need to license euphony and (b) neutralizes the general contextual/register distinction for the alternation. From a usage-based viewpoint, the findings suggest that the higher frequency of a multiword sequence in a specific variety, and the higher degree of activation in the language users’ minds, can make it less contingent on general probabilistic constraints.

Perfectionism is the view that what is intrinsically good is the fulfillment of human nature or the development and exercise of the characteristic human capacities. An important objection to the theory is what Gwen Bradford calls the “Deep Problem”: explaining why nature-fulfillment is good. We argue that situating perfectionism within a Thomistic metaethical framework and adopting Aquinas's account of the metaphysical “convertibility” of being and goodness gives us a solution to the Deep Problem. In short, the fulfillment of human nature consists in the actualization of human potentialities or fullness of human being, and because being is ultimately the same thing as goodness, the fulfillment of human nature is good. We show that Thomistic perfectionism meets the requirements for an answer to the Deep Problem, provides the best explanation possible for the goodness of nature fulfillment, and is a natural foundation for perfectionist theories of value.

Smallpox, caused by the variola virus (VARV), is prominent in modern histories of the ancient Mediterranean world. The disease, or the diagnosis of it, has shaped estimations of the scale and significance of epidemics and pandemics, notably the 2nd-c. Antonine plague, and the burden of disease in large cities and regions densely populated in antiquity. Here we synthesize recent paleogenetic and evolutionary biological literature that casts significant doubt on the existence of a VARV that caused a disease we would recognize – clinically, ecologically, or epidemiologically – as smallpox in antiquity. On the basis of current data, it is time archaeologists and historians began to eradicate smallpox from their histories of the ancient world.

Legal narratives about collective violence have given an outsized explanatory role to propaganda in conflicts such as the Rwandan genocide and the Yugoslav Wars. While post-conflict ethnographies have examined what Rwandans remember about propaganda and collective violence, similar studies have not been undertaken in territories of the former Yugoslavia. The present ethnographic study fills this gap. After introducing the theoretical and empirical problems that have stemmed from recent speech crime trials in international criminal law, I examine the causes of collective violence in the Yugoslav Wars as remembered by former combatants, survivors, and the greater populations of post-conflict regions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia. I show that remembered causes, including the role of propaganda, vary significantly between former combatants and the greater populations. Nevertheless, local perspectives, especially among former combatants and survivors, converge on the effects of populist movements following Yugoslavia’s economic crisis and the rise of ethnic, religious, and nationalist leaders who engaged in inflammatory rhetoric and misinformation to mobilize war efforts. This article thus corroborates key findings from other post-conflict ethnographies which show that propaganda plays a secondary but significant role in the cultural manufacturing of state-sponsored ethnicity and cultural logics of violence.

This article examines the reception of Shostakovich's symphonies in the Parisian press, from the late interwar period to the years immediately following the Second World War. In doing so, it continues the conversation around international responses to Shostakovich's music in the twentieth century, adding a consideration of the composer's symphonies in France from 1936 to 1946 to the existing literature on Shostakovich reception in the United States, Britain, and Germany. By interrogating the commentary of Parisian critics and music writers during this period, the article reveals how the reception of Shostakovich's symphonies in Paris reflects the rising and falling influence of the French Communist Party, and offers a novel way to view the shifts in Franco-Soviet relations either side of the Second World War.

This article studies how people, especially the business community, in the southern Chinese city of Canton, responded to the government's fund-raising campaigns in the early phase of the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45). It challenges the conventional views that the whole city of Canton had wholeheartedly united together in the face of their encroaching enemy, and that people from all walks of life displayed a high degree of patriotism with their self-denying participation in the city's war efforts. Despite the common concern about the threat of looming attack on Canton by the Japanese, this commonality, however, did not help cement the populace into a nationalistic whole with great solidarity, as the state and its publicists hoped. This article also reveals the problem with interpreting socio-political events in this turbulent time through the narrow lens of Chinese nationalism.

Vietnam has tried to maintain a delicate balance between the United States and China by pursuing a hedging strategy. In a shifting strategic environment marked by structural uncertainty caused by the rise of China, weaker Southeast Asian states like Vietnam are projecting a non-alignment posture. However, this rational behavior is not the product of systemic factors alone but also certain domestic political dynamics. We argue that regime legitimation – how the Vietnam Communist Party seeks to generate and sustain internal and external legitimacy – weighs heavily on Vietnam's strategy toward US–China competition. In particular, three legitimation strategies employed by the Vietnam Communist Party – performance-based legitimation, nationalism-based legitimation vis-à-vis China, and defensive legitimation vis-à-vis “hostile forces” – produce dynamics that ensure Hanoi does not get inadvertently pulled into the orbit of either Beijing or Washington. Theoretically, this article contributes to the literature on domestic determinants of foreign policy with a focus on regime legitimation. Empirically, we seek to supplement the discussion on the salience and relevance of domestic politics in informing Southeast Asian states' strategic calculation amid great-power competition.

This article identifies just so as a newly emerging purpose subordinator. Using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Corpus of Historical American English, it traces its development and steady increase in frequency from its first attestation in the mid nineteenth century to the present day. Just so is shown to represent a case of semantic specialization where the purpose meaning wins out over the conditional meaning, thus filling the niche of an informal purpose subordinator and providing an alternative to its multifunctional and semantically ambiguous competitors so that and so. With increasing grammaticalization the just so purpose subordinator also exhibits signs of intersubjectification, being coopted for syntactically independent, interpersonal uses (e.g. just so we're clear) and culminating in the emergence of a new discourse marker in the form of just so you know in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. To account for the emergence of purpose just so, a constructional network approach is adopted, which considers the network links to other purpose subordinators, notably so that and so.