Recent research has shown that rhetorical questions (RQs) have certain prosodic characteristics in terms of voice quality, tempo, and intonation, which distinguish them from genuine, information-seeking questions (ISQs). This paper focuses on the interaction between prosodic cues to rhetorical meaning on the one hand, and lexical and morpho-syntactic means, on the other, in German. The production experiment reported on here addresses three research questions, in short: (i) do speakers prefer a specific syntactic construction for an RQ, (ii) do they make use of specific lexical and morpho-syntactic means to signal rhetorical meaning, and (iii) what is the interaction between those means and prosodic cues. The answers are: (i) yes (wh-questions), (ii) yes (especially discourse markers (DiPs)), and (iii) we find an additive effect enforcing the rhetorical message. When lexical (or morpho-syntactic) cues to rhetorical meaning are used, we do not observe a reduction in or lack of prosodic means at the same time. For example, when a DiP is present, an RQ will still have a typical nuclear accent and edge tone, i.e., cues are used in an additive, rather than an exclusive way. There are, however, RQs that are marked only in the prosody, without any lexical or morpho-syntactic cues present.

The purpose of this case study was to examine the short-term development of performance and aerobic endurance following prolonged low-intensity ski trekking (LIST) in an Arctic region. Two male recreational athletes (aged 24 and 26 years) with high aerobic fitness performed LIST 7 ± 2 h·day−1 for 23 consecutive days, while hauling sledges (∼80 kg initially) with supplies from the north to the south of Svalbard (∼640 km). Time to exhaustion, maximal oxygen uptake (V̇O2max), lactate threshold (LT) and work economy were evaluated at pre- and post-trek. The results showed that the absolute and relative exercise intensity during LIST were ∼3.9 km·h−1 and ∼60% of maximal heart rate, respectively. Time to exhaustion during a ∼4–6 min ramp walking test, and a >45 min stepwise walking test, while pulling 12.5 kg weights (simulation of ski trekking with loaded sledge), increased by 11–17% and 3–9%, respectively, following LIST. Body mass and V̇O2max relative to body mass (ml·kg−1·min−1) decreased by 5–8% and increased by 3–8%, respectively. Furthermore, the workload associated with LT and LT percentage of V̇O2max increased by 39–69% and 12–13%, respectively. No notable change in work economy was observed. The mean pace during LIST (∼3.9 km·h−1) corresponded to the treadmill walking speed (4 km·h−1) with the lowest oxygen cost (mL·kg−1·m−1) in both participants. It can be concluded that short-term prolonged LIST can improve ski trek-simulated performance and fractional utilisation of V̇O2max in recreational athletes with high aerobic fitness. Moreover, highly aerobically fit ski trekkers appear to instinctively choose the most energy-efficient pace during LIST.

Papers in this Special Issue fill a gap in French sociolinguistics by providing a coherent and yet diverse sample of empirical studies on a variety of structural aspects of French digital media. Collectively, their thematic focus reflects a traditional framing of language variation, well known from variationist sociolinguistics, correlating empirically observed phonological, morphological, and lexical patterns with social and linguistic variables, among them age, gender, and genre. In this commentary, I reflect on each paper’s unique contribution to recent sociolinguistic research on digital media, and the volume’s goal to examine socially conditioned variation in selected contexts of twenty-first-century digital writing in French.

Non-standard orthography on social media provides a useful supplementary data source for sociophonetic research. Regarding an ongoing chain shift in Northern Metropolitan French nasal vowels, spellings reflecting shifted vowel targets are observed on Twitter. These non-standard spellings, e.g. avont [avɔ̃] for avant /avɑ̃/ ‘before’, provide insight into speakers’ awareness of this change and its lexical distribution. Tweets with shifted and standard spellings of 306 word forms containing the phonemes /ɛ̃/, /œ̃/, /ɑ̃/ and /ɔ̃/ were collected from an 870-million word Internet Archive corpus of French tweets from 2011–2017. Shifted spellings were found for all four vowels and 168 words. The shifted spelling rate is lower than that of comparable variables in English and is not conditioned by stress, grammatical category, frequency, or phonological context, which affect the distribution of shifted nasal vowels in speech. However, frequent words show more indications of intentional misspelling, such as repetition and capitalization of the target vowel, suggesting that some speakers are conscious of the variation and comment on it using salient words. The results also contribute to an ongoing debate about a possible merger between /ɛ̃/ and /œ̃/, supporting the hypothesis of an incomplete merger where /ɛ̃/ shifts towards [ɑ̃] but /œ̃/ does not.

Digital discourse, often referred to as computer-mediated communication, has revolutionized communication practices since the advent of the personal computer (Crystal, 2011), with ever-growing effects, as smart devices proliferate in every aspect of twenty-first-century human existence. Linguists in the francophone world first took note of these new digital interactional practices in the 1980s with the onset of conversation via Minitel (Levy, 1993), a French-born service that consisted of a computer terminal that connected via telephone lines to remote services like chatrooms, interactive games, and purchasing platforms, years before most Americans had ever heard of the world wide web (Mailland, 2017). Minitel terminals remained functional some 30 years later; the service was ultimately decommissioned in 2012 on account of outdated modems, an inability to support advancements in graphics and the earlier mass migration (in France and beyond) to the present-day internet (Mailland, 2017). But the introduction of virtual interactional spaces – in the francophone world and beyond – had marked the beginning of a new linguistic trend in which users found themselves regularly engaged in the production of written language infused with vernacular tendencies.

Cet article, qui porte sur les messages textes en français québécois, considère cette pratique langagière comme un lieu privilégié de l’expression du vernaculaire. L’analyse situe la langue des textos dans le débat qui a cours sur la diglossie et la variation en français. S’appuyant sur une analyse de textos tirés du corpus Texto4Science, l’article explique comment cette pratique vernaculaire s’appuie, comme l’oral familier, sur une grammaire qui se distingue de façon systématique du français de référence. De l’examen des données se dégage une grammaire à la fois variable et perméable. Enfin, l’article examine l’émergence d’une scripta vernaculaire et une néographie qui révèlent un effort délibéré de représenter des variantes vernaculaires.

As other chapters in this special issue demonstrate, social media proposes widely available data for sociolinguistic analysis. Twitter is an ideal resource to implement variationist approaches regarding regional differences, features specific to gender, and metrics of social media influence. At the same time, official intervention on language use, while somewhat studied in other corpora, is less explored on Twitter. French shows a long tradition of purist and prescriptive ideologies, embodied by the Académie française in France and the Office québécois de la langue française in Québec. The injection of recommended terminology aimed to eradicate foreign influence often has questionable success rate, especially in such an informal setting as Twitter. This article thus investigates lexical variation, in particular, the implantation of official new French translations mot-dièse and mot-clic between 2010 and 2016 that are meant to replace the English word hashtag. Results corroborate previous findings on the lacklustre implantation of the prescribed terms, while also revealing that users in Québec are more inclined to adapt them. Furthermore, diffusion online reflects face-to-face patterns that is cascading spread from large urban areas to smaller cities.

As part of a project aiming to determine the lichenised fungal biodiversity of James Ross Island (Eastern coast of Antarctic Peninsula), we identified three infrageneric taxa which were previously not reported from Antarctica: Farnoldia micropsis (A. Massal.) Hertel, Gyalolechia epiphyta (Lynge) Vondrák and Placidium squamulosum var. argentinum (Räsänen) Breuss. Detailed morphological and anatomical properties of these species along with photographs based on the Antarctic specimens are provided here. In addition, the nrITS, mtSSU and/or RPB1 gene regions of the selected specimens are studied and the phylogenetic positions of the species are discussed. The DNA sequence data for Farnoldia micropsis are provided for the first time. Farnoldia micropsis and Gyalolechia epiphyta are also new to the Southern Hemisphere.

The paper provides a neurophilosophical assessment of a controversy between two neuroeconomic models that compete to identify the putative object of neural utility: goods or actions. We raise two objections to the common view that sees the ‘good-based’ model prevailing over the ‘action-based’ model. First, we suggest extending neuroeconomic model discrimination to all of the models’ neurophilosophical assumptions, showing that action-based assumptions are necessary to explain real-world value-based decisions. Second, we show that the good-based model’s presumption of introducing a normative neural definition of economic choice would arbitrarily restrict the domain of economic choice and consequently of economics.

This article examines a key ambiguity in the Opium War treaties of 1842-1843, which concerned the legal status of Hong Kong’s native Chinese population. Overlooked in existing studies, the question was whether the cession of Hong Kong entailed British jurisdiction over crimes involving Chinese people inter se. To British minds, the idea of territorial sovereignty pulled against the reciprocal premise of the treaties, by which China and Britain enjoyed an absolute right to discipline their own offenders. To square the circle, British officials mooted various compromises steeped in extant ideas of sovereignty and subjecthood. Subsequently, all efforts at a principled policy were abandoned following a pivotal murder in eastern Hong Kong. Seven Chinese suspects were examined at the colonial magistracy for possible surrender to China, but the hearing was construed after the fact as a full trial and acquittal, which anchored exclusive British jurisdiction on the island. Thus, Hong Kong lay at the intellectual centre of Britain’s incipient Chinese Empire. The meaning of the Opium War treaties was shaped through iterative domestic discourse, in which the ideas of territorial sovereignty, extradition, and extraterritoriality were mutually constitutive, and law-making involved the retrospective rationalization of equivocal events and decisions on the ground.

This article reviews selected research on foreign language teaching and learning published in local, high-impact journals in China over the past ten years (2012–2021). A bibliometric analysis was conducted to elicit the most frequently researched topics in the field, which were grouped into four categories, that is, language learning and use, language pedagogy, language learners and teachers, and Teaching English as a Foreign Language approaches/theories, and a number of sub-categories. This was then followed by an in-depth and critical review of 71 studies corresponding to those categories and sub-categories. The review concluded with a discussion of inadequacies and recommendations for future research. It is hoped that a review on the experience of Chinese practitioners and researchers’ efforts to promote foreign language education may contribute to language teaching research and development in the international field.

In 1907, the Second International adopted a resolution on migration that rejected restrictions on the free movement of workers. In this article, we contend that, despite this official stance, the issue of migration was a highly controversial one for the international socialist community. We present a multi-level analysis, in which we detail the migration debate as it took place on the platforms of the Second International (roughly between 1903 and 1907) and the way in which this debate played out domestically for the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands and the Socialist Party of America – two parties that openly rooted for restrictions at the international level. We discern three ideal-typical stances on immigration – internationalism, on the one hand, and protectionist nativism and xenophobic nativism, on the other – and argue that it was the incompatibility of the internationalist and nativist positions that caused internal divisions to arise during the debates. Apart from speaking to the classic historiography on the Second International, which deals with the incompatibility of internationalism and nationalism, this article traces the influence of additional racist and culturalist ideologies on the debate and further historicizes it within the broader context of the modern international migration system that was taking shape at the time.

Court records for infanticide present several mysteries. In three centuries of colonial rule, Venezuela’s Mérida province had just one court case for infanticide. During the first three decades of Venezuela’s independence, the province had over thirty cases, while the country’s other provinces had none. The defendants in these cases were all poor, illiterate, single women. Curiously, court officials endeavored to acquit even in the face of incriminating evidence, such that the courts convicted only those mothers that confessed. This article explores how these women explained to officials why they killed and/or hid the body, and why the judicial system prosecuted these cases, given that the colonial system did not and officials were inclined to acquit. The investigation finds that the mothers explained their actions as principally due to economic and emotional desperation, including fear of punishment from their parents, rather than an intent to preserve their feminine honor. Further, the provincial judicial system began to prosecute this crime as part of a larger project to build a liberal, patriarchal republic. The prosecutions facilitated civilian-state relations, legitimized nascent institutions, sought to protect the mothers and “reform” their morals, and shielded fathers from responsibility for illicit sex.

Since 2012, judges and prosecutors in Benin have repeatedly protested against political interference and demanded compliance with their statutorily guaranteed independence. In 2014 and 2017, magistrates demonstrated in their judicial robes in the streets, protesting against the government's bill to deprive them of their right to strike and other freedoms. Benin has been described as a ‘success story of democracy’ (Stroh and Never, 2006, p. 1) and even as a ‘model democracy’ (cf. Kohnert, 1996, p. 78; Magnusson, 2001, p. 211; Bierschenk, 2009) since its peaceful transition to democratic conditions and its participation in a national conference in 1990/91. So why were magistrates in Benin demonstrating in the streets for the first time in the history of their profession? Based on fieldwork in Benin in 2009 and 2015 and archival research in 2017 in France, my paper analyses the change in the style of interactions between parts of the executive and parts of the judiciary in the history of the profession – a change from political negotiation to confrontation. Through their strikes and industrial action, magistrates fought for judicial independence; yet, at the same time they constructed legality and strengthened democracy because their actions emphasised the rule of law. My paper also considers the specifics of their strikes in the context of other striking civil servants. When magistrates, as bureaucrats, become politically active, it marks a transformation in their self-conception, as they are usually reserved and withdraw themselves from political and public spheres.

How is policy implementation affected by increased polarisation and extreme shifts in politics? In order to address this question, the paper focuses on frontline workers’ (street-level bureaucrats’) interpretations of political shifts and how these are then translated into practice. Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among social workers in Northeast Brazil, the paper proposes a theoretical framework for analysing the influence of political landscapes on policy implementation by foregrounding the political processes in which these agents play a critical role. Drawing on empirical data, the paper proposes ideal types of possible outcomes of translation practices – counterbalance, collaboration, resistance – that function as a guiding framework for future research.