In the history of the religion-state relationship in China, a model of subordination of religion to the state has been dominant for centuries. In recent years, some Chinese Protestant churches have advocated the model of separation of church and state. Through a historical and theological analysis, this study argues that in order to relieve the tensions between Chinese Protestantism and the contemporary Chinese government, a better conceptual alternative is to reconsider the issue in terms of autonomy rather than separation or subordination, and to argue for legally allowing the coexistence of both official and nonofficial churches and grant different degrees of autonomy to each.

The foot–strut vowel split, which has its origins in 17th century English, is notable for its absence from the speech of Northerners in England, where stood–stud remain homophones – both are pronounced with the same vowel /ʊ/. The present study analyses the speech of 122 speakers from Manchester in the North West of England. Although the vast majority of speakers exhibit no distinction between the foot and strut lexical sets in minimal-pair production and judgement tests, vowel height is correlated with socio-economic status: the higher the social class, the lower the strut vowel. Surprisingly, statistical models indicate that vowel class is a significant predictor of foot–strut in Manchester. This means that, for a speech community without the split, there remains an effect in the expected direction: strut vowels are lower than foot vowels in the vowel space. We suggest that co-articulatory effects of surrounding consonants explain this instrumental difference, as they have significant lowering/heightening effects on the acoustics but are not fully captured by our statistical model. We argue that the perplexing nature of the historical split can be partially accounted for in this data, as the frequency of co-occurring phonetic environments is notably different in foot than in strut, resulting in cumulative effects of co-articulation. We also present evidence of age grading which suggests that middle class speakers may develop a phonetic distinction as they age.

This article presents the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) in the context of historical phonology and historical corpora. The eighteenth century witnessed the proliferation of works on elocution and orthoepy and yet the field lacks searchable digital sources comparable to those available in other disciplines like historical syntax or historical pragmatics. Because of this and for other reasons such as the difficulty in deciphering idiosyncratic notation systems in the original materials, there has been a certain disregard for the study of eighteenth-century phonological evidence. The ECEP database aims to redress this absence of research material by collecting data from eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries in the form of IPA transcriptions (c. 1,600 different example words totalling c. 17,600 transcriptions) and supplementary metadata, with a view to facilitating systematic analyses of phonological, chronological and geographic patterns, and also normative attitudes. The richness of the contents in ECEP will thus be of interest to phonologists, dialectologists and language variationists from the historical as well as the synchronic perspective, in that eighteenth-century orthoepists laid the ground for what became ‘Received Pronunciation’. Methodologically, the compilation of the ECEP database aims to contribute to the thriving field of corpus linguistics with a new research tool for the study of the history of English.

This paper investigates the reason why aggressively non-D-linked items such as wh-the-hell (WTH) are allowed in swiping, but not in sluicing. Investigating the potential syntactic, semantic and prosodic licensors of WTH in sluicing and swiping in the British English variety, we conclude that syntactic or semantic constraints cannot be the source of the difference. Instead, we propose a novel prosodic account in which the WTH must satisfy the prosodic licensing condition that it cannot bear nuclear accent. We show that this is satisfied in swiping, but not in sluicing contexts. On the basis of the novel findings of an acceptability rating study of swiping, which reveal that both ‘given’ and ‘new’ prepositions are equally acceptable for British English speakers, we argue that the preposition is accentuated in this elliptical construction because it is structurally the deepest element. The licensing condition on WTHs in sluicing and swiping is therefore not mediated directly by the conditions on ellipsis, but by the particular prosodic distribution that a WTH happens to have in sluicing and swiping. We extend the account to similar constructions in Dutch.

Writing about fascism and aviation has stressed the role technology played in Mussolini's ambitions to cultivate fascist ideals in Italy and amongst the Italian diaspora. In this article we examine Francesco De Pinedo's account of the Australian section of his record-breaking 1925 flight from Rome to Tokyo. Our analysis of De Pinedo's reception as a modern Italian in a British Australia, and his response to that reception, suggests that this Italian aviator was relatively unconcerned with promoting Fascist greatness in Australia. De Pinedo was interested in Australian claims to the forms of modernity he had witnessed in the United States and which the Fascists were attempting to incorporate into a new vision of Italian destiny. Flight provided him with a geographical imagination which understood modernity as an international exchange of progressive peoples. His Australian reception revealed a nation anxious about preserving its British identity in a globalising world conducive to a more cosmopolitan model of modernity.

One of the great interpretive arcs of history as an academic discipline is the opposition between pre-modern and modern societies. Stimulated by post-modern theory, historians have done much in the past decades to expunge the ideological baggage of history as a ‘great march of civilization’, but they continue to imagine the industrial revolution as a great hinge between two distinct epochs. For all its merits, this perspective also creates problems. Burdened by hindsight, medievalists and modernists are often inclined to understand a case-study as either a prefiguration of a nineteenth- or twentieth-century development, or as its foil. Some of the most important publications on the history of medieval European towns published in 2019 were about destroying such assumptions.

In his influential article on the ethics of eating animals, Alastair Norcross argues that consumers of factory raised meat and puppy torturers are equally condemnable because both knowingly cause serious harm to sentient creatures just for trivial pleasures. Against this claim, I argue that those who buy and consume factory raised meat, even those who do so knowing that they cause harm, have a partial excuse for their wrongdoings. Meat eaters act under social duress, which causes volitional impairment, and they often act from deeply ingrained habits, which causes epistemic impairment. But puppy torturers act against cultural norms and habits, consciously choosing to perform wrongful acts. Consequently, the average consumer of factory raised meat has, while puppy torturers lack, a cultural excuse. But although consumers of factory raised meat aren't blameworthy, they are partially morally responsible for their harmful behavior – and for this, they should feel regret, remorse, and shame.