Fundamentalists in the Russian Orthodox Church see contemporary state institutions as sources of threat because of their fragility and unreliability. Thus, in response, they engage in ritual and political actions aimed at restoring the spiritual unity of the Russian people (sobornost) that would allow the monarchy to be restored and resume the God-given mission of the Russian Orthodox Church to delaying the apocalypse. In this article, the author reveals the ways the concept of an averted or delayed apocalypse shapes fundamentalists’ approaches to institution and network building as alternatives to existing public institutions, which they consider incapable in the face of the approaching End Time. The author distinguishes between anti-systemic fundamentalists (those unwilling to have anything in common with the existing sociopolitical system) and symbiotic fundamentalists (those involved in provisional cooperation with state agencies). Anti-systemic fundamentalists insist on Russians’ verbal repentance for the sin of abandoning their mission of averting the Apocalypse; sometimes they live in walled communities. Symbiotic fundamentalists are building networks or communities that do not necessarily imply living together. Using these communities as a tool, symbiotic fundamentalists hope to rebuild the spiritual unity of the Russians. They envision their activities as repentance by works that in the future would allow the Orthodox monarchy to be restored and to resume the God-given mission of the church.

This article discusses how and why disorientation is used as an aesthetic strategy in breakdown sections of festival-house tracks and performances. Breakdowns in electronic dance music (EDM) have many sound layers removed from the mix. For house music at EDM festivals, this usually includes drums, therefore in many breakdowns it is easy for listeners to lose their metric entrainment. Breakdowns also often introduce a new sound layer, use metrical dissonance, and feature prominent ‘effects’. Through analyses and interviews, the article argues that festival-house breakdowns can be disorienting both physically and psychologically, but that this fulfils multiple purposes for performers, such as providing contrast that makes musical climaxes more exciting and allowing an opportunity for dancers to physically rest. Breakdowns also encourage visual interaction between performers and dancers and allow performers to communicate a narrative. The analyses in the article make interpretations about the meaning of tracks as communicated primarily in breakdown sections.

Previous studies show how religious affiliation and activity often facilitate the integration of migrants and their descendants, strengthens their sense of belonging, and increases their acceptance in the host society. However, the characteristics of immigrants who benefit from the church’s help in the integration process remain largely unknown. This article addresses this gap in the literature and analyzes the ways in which the Neo-Protestant Church supports Romanian migrants in their integration in the US. We use primary data from an online survey conducted in September-November 2021 and semi-structured interviews conducted in 2022 with Romanian immigrants in the US. The results indicate that the church provides extensive help to people who are involved in religious organizations or associations, and to those who frequently attend religious services.

This article describes the results of the Progetto di ricerca di interesse nazionale (Research Project of National Interest [PRIN]) ‘Il brigantaggio rivisitato’ (‘“Brigantaggio” Revisited’), which investigated the practices and imagery of brigandage (and the fight against it) in modern and contemporary Italy from a Euro-Atlantic perspective. A large community of scholars, both within Italy and further afield, tackled numerous historiographical issues: forms of rural criminality in the modern age; the profile of the brigands (both male and female); their level of politicisation and relationship with the Legitimists and the Catholic Church; the reaction of the security forces and the unification movement; the evolving definition of the word ‘brigand’; the politics and military strategy of the post-unification anti-brigandry campaign; and the interaction between the local dimension and global view of banditry and irregular warfare. In-depth work was also conducted on the image of the bandits spread through visual and material culture by the media and on their performative consequences in different eras, through to their present-day reuse.

This contribution summarises the scientific discussions that developed during a one-year cycle of international and interdisciplinary seminars focusing on the relationship between migration and citizenship in Italy. We considered human mobilities in their relation to the politico-administrative institutions of the state and observed the latter's attempt to define and govern them. The relative marginality of the Italian case in the literature about state building, nation building and citizenship is an opportunity to examine these processes with fresh eyes. The first section is a critical analysis of the policies regulating access to Italian citizenship. The second examines the entanglement between external and internal migrations and how they are governed, considering various administrative borders and statuses such as Italian municipal residency. The third section addresses the role of different field actors (from street-level bureaucrats to legal practitioners and activists) in shaping or negotiating the borders of citizenship while implementing the law.

This study examines the representation of Jamaican Creole and cultural stereotypes about Jamaicans in the BBC Three sketch Jamaican Countdown, produced for the British show Famalam. The parody, which sharply contrasts with the original intellectual and orderly game show Countdown, employs features of Jamaican Creole for comedic effect. However, it has faced criticism for reinforcing cultural stereotypes about Jamaicans. This article focuses on the linguistic features – phonetic, morphosyntactic and lexical – used in the sketch. Through qualitative methods, it examines these features and investigates how linguistic and visual elements contribute to the portrayal of cultural stereotypes. The results show that Jamaican Countdown introduces complex indexical relationships by enriching the portrayal of Jamaicans in popular culture but also perpetuating stereotypes. The sketch contrasts the original British game show’s formality with a sexualized, unruly Jamaican parody, which exhibits various semiotic resources to both parody and reinforce cultural stereotypes.

Fragment answers involve a type of ellipsis that occurs in answers to questions and these answers can be hosted by the negator not (e.g. What was his motive? Not money). The central research questions for such a negative fragment answer concern what licenses the fragment, how we can obtain a sentential meaning from its non-sentential status and what its syntactic structure is. In attempting to answer these questions, there have been two main approaches: deletion-based sentential approaches and surface-oriented, direct interpretation (DI) approaches. This article first discusses attested data of such negated fragment answers that could challenge both directions and argues for a direct interpretation approach in which the interpretation of negative fragments is achieved by discourse machinery. The suggested approach shows that once we have a system that represents structured discourse structures, we could have straightforward mapping relations from a negated fragment answer to its proper propositional meaning.

This article focuses on two fragmentary constructions in English: why-fragments (WFs), such as Why (deal with) why-fragments?, and Mad Magazine sentences (MMs), such as (Me) paint the house purple? While both types can be equivalent in meaning to their corresponding fully fledged interrogative sentences, they can also be used to convey a specific nuance of scepticism regarding a particular proposition. To explore the specific nuance enriching the canonical interpretation (i.e. equivalent to that of the corresponding complete questions) of WFs and MMs, and their potential constructionalisation in contemporary English, two corpus-based studies were conducted using data from the BNC1994 DS, Spoken BNC2014 and COCA. The results show that MMs seem to be fully constructionalised, while the significant trends attested for WFs indicate an ongoing process of constructionalisation, at least in contemporary British English. The evidence also shows that both may be classed as examples of an umbrella ‘Sceptical Small’ construction.

Scholarship on brewing in early modern London is torn between two irreconcilable stories, one positing stunning growth before 1560 and the other insignificant change until after 1720. Careful attention to company and court records as well as state papers, however, reveals that by 1600 London brewing had boomed, likely making it Europe’s largest brewing centre, led by individual houses operating on scales close to the largest of the mid-eighteenth century. Such breweries were accurately perceived to be large scale and highly profitable, clustered along the Thames in urban industrial zones.

This article examines fragment sentences and imperative clauses in carefully edited journalistic writing, specifically in editorials of The Economist. Fragments (e.g. What to do?) and imperatives (e.g. Take spending cuts as an example) share formal and functional properties, such as being shorter than canonical clauses and typically having non-truth-conditional semantics. As demonstrated in our analysis, both sentence types tend to appear prominently within a paragraph, typically at the beginning or the end. Additionally, within the entire editorial, they are often found in the second paragraph, where the writer presents a contrasting view from the opening paragraph, or in the concluding paragraph. This article argues for considering stylistic properties in the characterisation of grammatical constructions.

This work focuses on a pattern of tonal alternation that is intertwined with a pattern of reduplication in Nigerian Pidgin. In the language, verbs are reduplicated to iconically express iteration. To convey that the iterated event occurs in an irregular or dispersive manner, the verb bears a low tone (L) on all its tone-bearing units (TBU), while the reduplicant bears a high tone (H) on all its TBUs. The resulting L-H tonal melody is considered the exponent of an irregular marker, while the intertwined reduplication is considered the exponent of an iteration marker. Due to the similarity between the exponent of the irregular marker and the iconic tonal melody of ideophones that express the semantic notions of irregularity across languages, the form-meaning mapping of the irregular marker is regarded as a grammaticalised form of the tone melody in the substrate ideophones. This suggests that ideophones can contribute to the emergence and expansion of grammar, as well as the typology of grammatical tone. Considering that perceptual resemblance between linguistic structures and the structural components of real-world elements is the basis of iconicity, the pattern of tonal alternation in Nigerian Pidgin suggests that the notion of perceptual motivation in linguistic theory is not purely phonetic and phonological but also includes the crossmodal perception of sensory imagery.

Iceland was one of the last places in Europe to be settled. It thus has a relatively short population history as it was completely depopulated until about 871. Harsh climatic conditions, periodic epidemics, and numerous natural disasters were not conducive to robust population growth on the island. This article traces the demographic transition of Iceland’s population from the initial settlement to the present. This is the transition from high to low birth and death rates as a population modernises. Iceland has an impressive literary and historical record-keeping tradition beginning with the Saga Age in the 900s. It also has long had a well-developed statistical system which allows the study of population trends much further back in time than many countries. The results show slow population growth for much of Iceland’s history with many episodes of steep population decline. A series of technological innovations in the 19th century allowed the country to modernise, the population to grow, and its demographic situation to improve. Iceland has completed the demographic transition, the population is growing, in part due to high immigration, and it has some of the best demographic indicators in the world. Despite these favourable trends, the country faces some demographic challenges.

This study investigates fragments of the type last I heard/checked based on data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which shows a steep increase in frequency for this construction in recent decades. Syntactically, ‘last I fragments’ are disjuncts that are positionally mobile with respect to their host clause and their ‘elliptical’ form can be linked to different ‘full’ forms, viz. specificational sentences and temporal adjuncts. Functionally, their underlying evidential meaning gives rise to different, more specific discourse functions depending on contextual use: viz. downtoner, booster and ironic use. A comparison with unreduced (full) forms shows that these fragments are more likely to have evidential meaning, with reduced form thus acting as an important functional signal. Finally, it is argued that their grammatical status is best captured by a constructional account, which identifies them as constructionalizing units, rather than a simple ellipsis account.