Delving into fraternal succession, intermarriage practices, and levirate marriages of the Northern Qi dynasty (550–577), this article demonstrates that these practices served as pillars of stability for the imperial family. In this exploration, Empress Dowager Lou 婁太后 (501–562) emerges as the central figure behind these practices, playing a pivotal role in their implementation and wielding immense power as kingmaker. Starting from before the official reign of the Northern Qi, she personally chose her husband, laid the groundwork for him to become regent of the preceding Eastern Wei (534–550) court, and controlled the succession system to seat her own sons as emperors of the Northern Qi. Drawing on her Xianbei 鮮卑 roots, Empress Dowager Lou enforced an agenda of Inner Asian practices and politics in her pursuit to consolidate the rule and identity of the Northern Qi imperial family.

The article explores the interplay between imperialism and ethnonationalism, revealing how these seemingly conflicting ideologies coalesced in Russian political thought. The period of 1989–1994 saw a struggle between civic nationalism, which sought to redefine Russia within its existing borders, and imperialist-nationalist currents that viewed Soviet disintegration as a geopolitical catastrophe. Within this ideological conflict, the “time bomb” metaphor emerged as a potent rhetorical device, encapsulating anxieties about territorial fragmentation and national decline. The study identifies Russian émigré intellectual Gleb Rahr as a key figure in introducing the metaphor, later popularized by figures such as Dmitry Rogozin and Vladimir Putin.

This article offers a new reconstruction of the phonological history of pre-Old English, building on a potential parallelism between English, Frisian and North Germanic. Pivotal to the reconstruction is the development of PGmc *a, which is the target of eight different sound laws in the traditional theory. A combination of a conditional early fronting and rounding, followed by a gradual i-mutation impact, both with parallels in Frisian, and a relatively late seventh-century application of breaking before ‑rC can account for most of the attested spellings of instances with PGmc *a in the language of the early Épinal and Erfurt glossaries. This approach is much simpler than the traditional theory and allows parallelisms to be (re)established between the earliest stages of Old English, Old Frisian and Old Norse.

If supposedly homophonous words were acoustically distinct despite sharing phonemic form, theories of mental storage may have to account for the consistent differences with separate storage for each homophone. Previous studies of the homophonous functions or word classes of the English word like showed such subphonemic differences between functions, though some studies also found effects of utterance context alongside these. Schleef & Turton (2018) argued that all these function effects reduce to context effects, since function is not independent of context – for example, quotative like typically occurs before a pause and thus is typically subject to lengthening because of its position, not due to a lexicalised acoustic distinction between functions. Testing this argument with new data from a different regional variety to those used by Schleef & Turton, we only find differences that can be explained by context, in line with their argument. This casts prior findings of acoustic distinctions between like functions in new light, and introduces the need for further research (especially including the frequency of different functions).

This article analyzes four war-themed exhibitions in Ukraine’s two leading national museums and studies their role in documenting, interpreting, and exhibiting the Russo-Ukrainian war. This research intends to prove that since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, museums have been conceptualizing the war through narratives of suffering and sacrifice, grounding tangible historical authenticity through the display of items such as war trophies and personal belongings. The narrative of suffering tends to be based on the opposition of “we” and “they,” where “we” focuses on civilian torment and resurrection as the main metaphor of physical and spiritual survival, and “they” are predominantly depicted as the military enemy, creating strong anti-Russian and anti-Soviet tendencies. The martyrdom narrative of sacrifice focuses on Ukraine’s (fallen) defenders, whose image is created by deep personalization, nationalization, and heroization. This article argues that musealization of the Russo-Ukrainian war exemplifies and represents “warring memory,” which is predetermined and justified by active engagement in an ongoing war while performing the functions of testimony, resilience, and mourning.

This article explores the extent to which listeners vary in their ability to notice, identify and discriminate variable linguistic features. With a view to improving speaker evaluation studies (SES), three types of experiments were conducted (noticing tasks, identification tasks and discrimination tasks) with regard to variable features using word- or sentence-based stimuli and focusing on three variables and their variants – (ING): [ɪŋ], [ɪn]; (T)-deletion: [t], deleted-[t]; (K)-lenition: [k], [x]. Our results suggest that the accurate noticing, identifying and discriminating of variants is somewhat higher in words than in sentences. Correctness rates differ drastically between variants of a variable. For (ING), the non-standard variant [ɪn] is more frequently identified and noticed correctly. Yet, for the variables (T)-deletion and (K)-lenition, the standard variants are identified and noticed more successfully. Results of the current study suggest that a more rigorous elicitation of identification and noticing abilities might be useful for a more complete understanding of the nature of social evaluation.