Early in 1789 Charles Burney declined a chance to purchase the score of an unnamed Mozart opera, offered to him by Franz Anton Weber, the composer's uncle-in-law, in an unsolicited letter from Hamburg. For several years Weber had been active in supplying new Viennese repertory to northern cities such as Uppsala, Hanover and Hamburg, but in a career change, he decided to launch an itinerant opera troupe. Among the family members employed in this company was Franz Anton's daughter Jeanette, who, he claimed, had been a pupil of Mozart and Aloysia Lange. In the light of Burney's missed opportunity, my article revisits the well-researched story of Mozart reception at the King's Theatre in the late 1780s.

What is faith? Lara Buchak has done as much as anyone recently to answer this question in a sensible and instructive fashion. As it turns out, her writings reveal two theories of faith, an early one and a later one – or two versions of the same one if you like. In what follows, we aim to assess those theories with an eye to highlighting both their good- and bad-making features, marking choice points for theorizing about faith along the way, and defending the choices we make. The result is an alternative theory of faith, one that we hope extends our common pursuit of understanding what faith is.

This study uses data from a shoe-repair shop, supplemented by data from medical and mundane contexts, to analyze three progressively minimal grammatical formats used to implement offers and requests in interaction (i.e. do you want…?, you want…?, and want…?). We argue that this cline of minimality reflects a cline of the action-initiator's stance, from relatively weak to strong (respectively), regarding their expectation that the action will be accepted or complied with. In doing so, we illustrate that, as part of the design of requests and offers, participants rely on more granular distinctions than a simple binary between interrogative and declarative morphosyntax. We conclude with a discussion of the interactional logic that undergirds the normative use of these grammatical formats, and of our findings’ implications for action formation and preference organization. (Conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, offer, request, stance, grammar, morphosyntax)*

This paper reviews 20 representative Ph.D. dissertations on second language (L2) writing and technology completed in the USA over the past decade (2010–2019). These dissertations were selected using advanced search via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. Five thematic categories were examined: (1) computer-mediated teacher/peer feedback; (2) automated writing evaluation; (3) computer-based collaborative writing; (4) technology-based writing instruction/assessment; and (5) digital composing/literacy. Each dissertation study was closely reviewed, with the presentation of illustrative tables. After analyzing and discussing the research designs, findings, and contributions of these studies, the authors identified the research trend and highlighted directions for future dissertation research in the field of L2 writing and technology.

In the context of the arrival of Syrians as of 2011 and the subsequent humanitarian assistance received in light of the EU–Turkey deal in 2016, there has been increased control over civil society organizations (CSOs) in Turkey. Through the case study of language education, this paper examines the relationship between the state and CSOs as shaped by the presence of Syrian refugees and how it evolved through the autonomy of state bureaucracy. It demonstrates that increased control led to the proliferation of larger projects, the deterrence of smaller CSOs, and a hierarchy between organizations prioritizing those that are aligned with the state. It argues that this policy is not only the result of the increased lack of trust between state and civil society but also an attempt to channel funds through state institutions to handle an unprecedented number of refugees while externalizing some of its functions. At the same time, this emerging relationship effectively allows the state to avoid making long-term integration policies and facing growing tensions among the public. This study is based on a qualitative study encompassing interviews with state officials as well as stakeholders in different types of CSOs that deliver language education for adults.

This article demonstrates the potential for phonological variables to be a resource for the expression of ideology and identity in historical circumstances such as those experienced recently in the Catalonian procés. Based on a corpus consisting of communicative events from sixteen leading Catalan politicians, four Spanish linguistic variants are analyzed. Apart from a handful of structural predictors, the mixed-effects logistic regression analysis shows the robustness of (only) two extralinguistic factor groups: the social origin and the identification of the politicians as Catalan nationalist (mainly pro-independence) or not nationalist. As regards the latter, the most significant of all predictors, the analysis shows how nationalist politicians always favor the sounds mainly associated with vernacular pronunciation in eastern Catalan speech communities ([-ɫ] and [-t]), but at the same time also favor other sounds associated with more canonical and pan-Hispanic prestige variants ([-ð] and [-ð-]). These apparently contradictory results can be explained if the social meaning of all variants is considered around the same indexical field, that of authenticity. In this sense, nationalists seem to ‘appropriate’ the Spanish language by tingeing its expressive habits with uses closer to their language. (Phonological variation, nationalism, ideology, languages in contact, Spanish, Catalan)*