This article examines the eviction of tenants and squatters from a Renaissance palace in Ferrara, purchased by the Italian state in 1920. The case stands at the crossroads of three processes in European history between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the social and material ‘decadence’ of aristocratic residences, the birth of ‘national heritage’ and preservation policies and the explosion of the ‘housing problem’, following changes in urban demography and social structure. Considering a large range of sources, the article offers new insight into the conflict between different urban bureaucracies and inside them. It also explores the different forms of agency of working-class dwellers against the background of troubled post-war years followed by the advent of fascism.

Historical research has turned in the last years more intensively toward entangled and transnational histories of biopolitics, the family, and the welfare state, but without renewed interest in aging and pension policy, a sphere of human experience that is often interrogated in parochial terms, if at all. An analysis of the culture and policies of old age in East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s shows the importance of a transnational history of this subject. The GDR, the Communist state with the greatest proportion of elderly citizens, needed to create a socialist model of aging. Neither the Communist tradition in Weimar Germany, nor the experience of the other states in the Communist bloc provided substantial guidance. East Germans looked instead for inspiration to West Germany, which was itself engaged in a debate about aging and pension policy. By grappling with the Western experience, including its perceived and real limitations, the GDR in the Ulbricht developed a vision of what it meant to age as a socialist.

The usual development of OE [ɑld] in words such as old in Scots is to auld, reflecting the development of this sequence in northern dialects more generally. But in some Scots dialects other pronunciations of these words, reminiscent of dialects of English south of the Ribble–Humber Line, are found. These forms, of the type owld, are found across Lowland Scotland, with particular concentrations in the far north and southwest. Origins in Irish English and English in England have been suggested for this feature of Scots but these hypotheses have not been explored. Aitken & Macafee (2002: 61–2) instead argue for an endogenous origin of both auld and owld, but this proposed double endogenous development of OE [ɑld] is problematic in a number of ways. In this article, I examine the history of these developments in Scots in comparison to their development in dialects of English in England and Ireland. The lack of evidence for the owld development in Older Scots suggests that these forms are of relatively recent origin. Crucially, the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) reveals that the owld pronunciations were in fact a feature of early forms of Standard English. Furthermore, several characteristic features of Irish English have spread into southwest Scotland, and the distribution of owld forms in the area fits this pattern. Thus Scots forms such as owld are not the result of endogenous development, but have their origin in English, in the case of southwest Scotland at least in part from Irish English, and elsewhere in Scotland from early forms of Standard English. These owld forms have been ‘localised’ and reinterpreted as ‘Scots’, alongside or replacing original auld. The analysis of the origins of this feature highlights not only the role of contact with varieties of English in the development of Scots, but also the importance of sources such as the ECEP database for understanding the historical phonology of Scots and English.

Arguments about the sociopolitical significance of the informalisation of English have been central to the critical study of language in society since the 1980s. This article demonstrates that informalisation was also a key concern of ordinary users of British English in the 1980s. Correspondents in the British Mass Observation Project articulated judgements of informalisation that were in many ways continuous with those of academic linguists. The article argues that such critical arguments about language were part of a ‘structure of feeling’ (Raymond Williams) of late twentieth-century Britain. This suggests a rethinking of ordinary language users’ relations to their linguistic experience, not as unthinkingly ‘prescriptivist’, nor as merely ‘commonsensical’, but as exhibiting a nuance which academic linguists would do well to engage with more fully. The article makes the case for the use of social-historical archives in investigations of metalanguage, as a means by which the social significance of language can be better understood. (Critical linguistics, folk linguistics, terms of address, informalisation, synthetic personalisation, prescriptivism)

This study compares the prosodic properties of French wh-in-situ echo questions and string-identical information seeking questions in relation to focus. Thirty-six (12 $\times$ 3) wh-in-situ questions were embedded in dialogues designed to elicit (A) echo questions expressing auditory failure, (B) information seeking questions with broad focus or (C) information seeking questions with narrow focus on the wh-phrase, i.e. a focus structure similar to the one of echo questions. Analyses regarding the F0, duration and intensity of the utterances produced by 20 native speakers of French show clear prosodic differences between the three conditions. Our results indicate that part of the prosodic properties of echo questions can be attributed to the presence of narrow focus (A and C vs. B) while another part is truly characteristic of echo questions themselves (A vs. B and C). In combination with known differences regarding their pragmatics, semantics and syntax, this sets echo questions apart as a separate question type. At the same time, our results offer evidence for prosodic encoding of focus in French wh-in-situ questions, confirming and adding to existing claims regarding the prosody of focus marking in French on the one hand and the presence of focus marking in wh-interrogatives on the other.

In her book that explores Turkish migrant organizations in Germany, sociologist Gökçe Yurdakul detects a historical transformation in the political representation of migrants and minorities from the 1970s through the 2000s. She marks six historical events that lead to this transformation: labor migration (1961–1972), the introduction of family reunification law (1973–1979), post-1980 military coup asylum seekers from Turkey (1980–1988), the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath of exacerbating xenophobia against non-German minorities (1989–1998), the introduction of the new citizenship law (1999), and finally the terrorist attacks on September 11 (2001–present). According to Yurdakul, these events mark a gradual shift in the minority rights debate. While the first minority organizations were formed around labor rights, gradually, due to these landmark events and laws, their demands shifted toward political and social rights of citizenship, and identitarian rights, such as the right “to exist as Muslims and as Europeans.”