The chapter traces the emergence of the notion of ‘gnostics’ as a classification, from originating confusion in the use of this language by ancient Christian anti-heresy writers to ongoing debates over this category among modern scholars. Progress in understanding the relevant ancient sources may benefit from analyses of specific themes and features in individual texts but without the encumbrance of disputes over a troubled classification (‘gnosticism’) that ultimately is a relic of ancient heresiology.

This appendix lists some examples of presentations of classical monoids and categories by a 2-polygraph.

The key grouping structures relevant to metrical stress theory are the categories of the prosodic hierarchy. Prosodic categories can be divided into two types: interface categories and rhythmic categories. The interface categories are the utterance, the intonational phrase, the phonological phrase, and the prosodic word. The rhythmic categories are the foot, the syllable, and the mora. The key principles governing prosodic grouping are Constituency, Strict Succession, and Headedness. Constituency insists that prosodic groupings occur in the dominance relationship specified by the prosodic hierarchy. Strict Succession insists that phonological representations not skip prosodic categories moving lower to higher in hierarchy. Headedness insists that every instance of a prosodic category designate one of its immediate constituents as its head (its most prominent constituent). The combination of Headedness and Strict Succession insists that phonological representations not skip prosodic categories moving in the either direction, either lower to higher or higher to lower. Two special configurations play key roles in the theory: recursion and overlap. Interface categories may exhibit recursion, but recursion of rhythmic categories is prohibited by the Simple Layering condition. Instances of the same prosodic category may overlap so that they share a constituent.

Retraces how Cassirer transforms Kant’s transcendental philosophy into a philosophy of culture in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. First, Cassirer abandons Kant’s notion of the category and instead models his conception of the symbol on the schema from The Critique of Judgment (2.1). Second, he understands such symbols as constituting not only the theoretical, practical, and aesthetic sphere, but all cultural domains, including myth, language, and the human sciences (2.2). This forces Cassirer to adopt two conceptions of objectivity: a constitutive conception that pertains to each cultural domain (or ‘symbolic forms’) and a regulative conception that befits human culture as a whole (2.3).

If you’re coming to this book from a traditional grammar or with little or no background in grammar, or if you plan to read only individual chapters, then this chapter was written to orient you to our approach and make your life easier.

We start by discussing words, different senses of what a word is, and the ways that words are categorized. Then show how words can be combined into phrases with heads and dependents, where each phrase category is named after the category of its head word. These phrases build into a special larger phrase called a clause.

With this framework in hand, we move into the core of the chapter. Beginning with §2.3, each of the sections corresponds with a chapter. So, Ch. 3 and §2.3 are Verbs and verb phrases, Ch. 4 and §2.4 are Complements in clauses, etc.

The chapter also includes an appendix explaining the book’s notational conventions.

This chapter sets out the book’s main theoretical claims. It argues that understanding the emergence of revolutionary challenge along ethnic lines requires a focus on local-level interactions between social actors and state agents and how they vary over time. This approach directs attention to variation within ethnic groups and, specifically, to linkages between sub-ethnic units and the state. The chapter then presents the book’s main theoretical intervention: state linkages often condition the participation of “ethnically excluded” populations, and incumbent response to challenge is often not focused singly on dividing the population on ethnic lines but includes important forms of conciliation aimed at preserving cross-ethnic clients. This conciliation often fails, however, because informal, ethnically dominated autocratic regimes resort to violence to deal with immediate threats posed by prolonged urban demonstrations and challenger violence, shattering many of the linkages forged across ethnic lines. This view of challenger–incumbent interaction under ethnically dominated rule challenges the dominant view that regimes intentionally polarize their polities on ethnic lines to cling to power; the patchwork of bargains such regimes strike with various elements of the populations they rule can channel contention toward ethnic violence, even when ethnicization is not in the incumbent’s interest.

This chapter sets the political and social context for the events of the 2011 Syrian uprising. It describes the topography of ethnic boundaries and, using original quantitative data, shows that ʿAlawis were disproportionate beneficiaries of state largesse, accessed through informal ties and formal positions in the civil service and military. Nonetheless, substantial segments of the Sunni Arab population were also tied to the state through personalistic ties and public institutions. Then it describes the relationship between ethnicity and state access in historical and theoretical terms, arguing that the Baʿth regime instrumentalized existing social structures in some cases, building ties to local leaders with customary status, and worked to break down these ties in other cases, building new ties with individual citizens through corporatist development and state employment. Finally, the chapter examines the effects of neoliberal policies, enacted after 2000, on these linkages. It argues that these policies exacerbated the suffering of many Syrians already lacking state access but left the cross-ethnic structure of state–society ties intact.

This chapter is a brief reminder of point-set topology including examples of the most prominent topologies needed later on in the text. Further topics include ordinal numbers and the ordinal space (as a topological space), cardinality and counting and the construction of the Cantor middle-thirds set and the Cantor function (devil’s staircase) and its inverse function.

Two non-native phones can be discriminated well if each one is perceived as a different native phonological category. In that case, the perceiver’s prior attunement to a phonological distinction in the native language supports discrimination in the non-native language. Discrimination of non-native phones is more challenging when both are perceived as similar to the same native phonological category, but a perceived difference in phonetic goodness-of-fit to the native category can nevertheless support discrimination. There are four different sources of information that a perceiver might use to discriminate contrasting non-native phones: 1) sensitivity to a native phonological contrast; 2) sensitivity to the phonetic goodness-of-fit to a native phonological category; 3) language-independent phonetic distance, and; 4) perceptual salience of a non-linguistic auditory difference. Using the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best, 1995) as an example, the aim of this paper is to outline how a theoretical model of cross-language speech perception might account for these sources of information. On the basis of that review an evaluation will be made of the methodological requirements for determining which sources of information listeners use for discrimination.

Taking as an initial example Donald Trump’s promise to “build a wall” on the southern border of the United States to keep out undesirable immigrants, I take the symbol “wall” to show the four meanings that the term “symbolic” can have in its relation to language and power. The first is that language, like music or painting, is called a symbolic system because it is composed of signs and symbols that combine together in a rule-governed, systematic way to make meaning. The wall incident also gives us a glimpse into a second meaning of the term “symbolic,” namely the power of symbols to create semiotic relations of similarity, contiguity or conventionality with other symbols, that listeners interpret as such. The meanings given to the wall by the various actors are more or less conventional/arbitrary, more or less non-arbitrary or motivated by the actors’ desire to pursue their own political interests. The power to manipulate the meaning of signs and to impose those meanings on others and make them “stick” is a third aspect of symbolic power; it acts not through physical force but through our mental representations as mediated by symbolic forms. The fourth meaning of “symbolic” is the power to construct and perform a social reality that people believe is natural and given. The chapter discusses each of these four aspects of symbolic power – the power to signify, the power to interpret, the power to manipulate, the power to represent .

This chapter is a brief review of standard material on categories and functors, including limits and the Yoneda Lemmas. A reader who is familiar with this material can skip this section, yet we recommend looking at our notational conventions, which are spelled out in Conventions 1.2.4 and 1.2.5.