Studies in modality comprise a complex canon of functional, formal, sociological and diachronic analyses of language. The current understanding of how English language speakers use modality is unclear; while some research argues that core modal auxiliaries are in decline, they are reported as increasing elsewhere. A lack of contemporary and representative spoken language data has rendered it difficult to reconcile such differing perspectives. To address this issue, this article presents a diachronic study of modality using the Spoken BNC2014 and the spoken component of the BNC1994. We investigate the frequency of core modal auxiliaries, semi-modals, and lexical modality-indicating devices (MIDs), as well as the modal functions of the core modal auxiliaries, in informal spoken British English, between the 1990s and 2010s. The results of the analysis are manifold. We find that core modal auxiliaries appear to be in decline, while semi-modals and lexical MIDs appear relatively stable. However, on a form-by-form basis, there is significant evidence of both increases and decreases in the use of individual expressions within each modal set. As a result, this study problematises form-based studies of change, and illustrates the value and coherence that functional analyses of modality can afford future work.

The article deals with Czech and German nationalist discourses and practices in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as they relate to tourism in the Krkonoše/Riesengebirge, the highest Central European mountain range between the Alps and Scandinavia. It will discuss the discourses developed in relation to mountain tourism and nationalism (metaphors of battlefields, wedges, walls, gates, and bastions), different symbolical cores of mountains, and practices of tourist and nationalist organizations (tourist trails and markings, excursions, the ownership of mountains huts, languages used, memorials, and the construction of roads). It will examine how these discourses and practices changed from the first Czech-German ethnic conflicts in the 1800s until the end of interwar Czechoslovakia. Finally, it will discuss the Czech culture of defeat in the shadow of the Munich Agreement, which meant the occupation of the Giant Mountains by Nazi Germany.

The literature on locative inversion in English currently disputes whether locative inversion differs from PP topicalization in permitting a quantifier in the fronted PP to bind a pronoun in the subject. In order to resolve this dispute, this paper runs two experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk, one an acceptability judgment task and the other a forced-choice task. Both find that PP topicalization does not differ from locative inversion: both permit variable binding. Locative inversion also does not differ from a minimally different sentence with the overt expletive there. These findings remove an argument against the null expletive analysis of English locative inversion, and they also show that weak crossover is not uniformly triggered by A-bar movement.

John Stuart Mill claims that free institutions are next to impossible in a multinational state. According to Will Kymlicka, this leads him to embrace policies kindred to those of Friedrich Engels, aimed at promoting mononational states in Europe through coercive assimilation. Given Mill’s harm principle, such coercive assimilation would have to be justified either paternalistically, in terms of its civilizing effects upon the would-be assimilated, or non-paternalistically, with reference to the danger that their non-assimilation would pose to others. However, neither possible interpretation is plausible; Mill takes Europe’s civilized status to shield Europeans from paternalistic coercion, and he opposes coercive assimilation where it could conceivably be justified in the name of defense. Although this much suggests that Kymlicka misinterprets Mill by ignoring his definition of nationality, it leaves scope for Kymlicka to argue that Mill favors policies that promote mononationality through neglecting the languages and cultures of national minorities.

A long-standing assumption in the syntactic literature is that coordination can only target constituents. This assumption has been a subject of much debate, with many authors questioning its validity. This article enters this debate by reconsidering a constraint on left-sharing in coordination which Osborne & Gross (2017) have recently introduced, namely left node blocking. To account for this constraint, Osborne & Gross propose the Principle of Full Clusivity which states that coordination cannot cut into a constituent. They couch their analysis in a Dependency Grammar, assuming that coordination does not have to conjoin constituents and that syntactic structures should be construed as flat. Given that the empirical ground on which the LNB is based is not firm, I seek to experimentally investigate it by conducting a large-scale experiment. The results of the investigation reveal that LNB is wrong; left-sharing is as permissive as right-sharing. The results of the investigation have the immediate consequence that the assumptions on which LNB is based are wrong as well, namely that syntactic structures should be construed as flat. I spell out an analysis couched in terms of left-to-right syntax to account for major cases of left-sharing in coordination.

Unbounded dependencies (UDs), in wh-interrogatives, relative clauses and other constructions, have been a major focus of syntactic research for more than half a century. The most widely assumed approach analyzes them in terms of movement and views island phenomena as largely a matter of syntax. Both these positions are problematic. Moreover, they stem from assumptions that have been at the heart of syntactic theorizing for many decades. Chaves and Putnam present evidence that both the dominant approach to UDs and the general approach to syntax from which it derives are flawed. They argue for a non-movement approach to UDs and a largely non-syntactic approach to island phenomena, and for an approach to syntax which has the relation between linguistic knowledge and language use and the complexity of acceptability judgements as central concerns. Their book is an important one that could have a major impact both on research on UDs and on syntactic research more generally.

This article provides new insights into long-standing debates on lord-tenant relations in medieval England and how they were negotiated through the manorial court. We examine an institution, which we term the stray system, that facilitated cooperation between lords and tenants to manage stray livestock. Specifically, we argue that the stray system is a clear example of a public good. In this context, the system was a social benefit provided by lords to their tenants as a collective. In a world where most of the population was dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods, any potential damage to a crop would have been of real concern. However, in managing the threat of wandering livestock, the property rights of owners had to be clearly protected to avoid disputes over ownership. The manorial court's management of strays provided an institution to resolve these countervailing pressures. Ultimately, that system helped to protect a community's arable land—the most vital source of income for lords and tenants alike—while simultaneously assuring the property rights of those who had lost important capital assets in the form of livestock.

Schmid and Mullins present what they call ‘the Aloneness Argument’ for the inconsistency of four theses from classical theism: the doctrine of divine simplicity, the doctrine of divine omniscience, the claim that God is free to create or not to create, and the claim that it is possible that God and nothing but God exist. We deny that they have shown an inconsistency between these theses. We maintain that, depending on how certain premises are interpreted, one or another premise is false. We also offer a positive proposal regarding a simple God's knowledge that he is alone in a world where he doesn't create anything.

In contemporary methodological thinking, replication holds a central place. However, relatively little attention has been paid to replication in the context of complex dynamic systems theory (CDST), perhaps due to uncertainty regarding the epistemology–methodology match between these domains. In this paper, we explore the place of replication in relation to open systems and argue that three conditions must be in place for replication research to be effective: results interpretability, theoretical maturity, and terminological precision. We consider whether these conditions are part of the applied linguistics body of work, and then propose a more comprehensive framework centering on what we call substantiation research, only one aspect of which is replication. Using this framework, we discuss three approaches to dealing with replication from a CDST perspective theory. These approaches are moving from a representing to an intervening mindset, from a comprehensive theory to a mini-theory mindset, and from individual findings to a cumulative mindset.