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This book considers the syntax of the left periphery of clauses in relation to the extra‐sentential context. The prevailing point of view, in the literature in this field is that the external context does not intervene at all in the syntax of the sentence, and that the interaction between sentence and context takes place post‐syntactically. This monograph challenges this view and proposes that reference to indexicality is syntactically encoded in the left‐most position of the clause, where the speaker's temporal and spatial location is represented. To support this hypothesis, it analyses various kinds of temporal dependencies in embedded clauses, such as indicative versus subjunctive, and proposes a new analysis of the imperfect and the future‐in‐the‐past. The book also compares languages such as Italian and English with languages which have different properties of temporal interpretation, such as Chinese. Finally, analysis of the literary style known as Free Indirect Discourse also supports the hypothesis, showing that it may have a wide range of consequences.

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a virtual cottage industry in all things “Abrahamic.” Directly proportionate to the rise of religious exclusivism, perhaps best epitomized by the attacks of 9/11 and the current problems plaguing the Middle East and Afghanistan, there has been a real desire both to find and map a set of commonalities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This is often done, however, not for the sake of scholarship, but interfaith dialogue. Recently, however, the term “Abrahamic religions” has been used with exceeding frequency in the academy. We now regularly encounter academic books, conferences, and even positions (including endowed chairs) devoted to the so-called “Abrahamic religions.” Often lost in contemporary discussions of “Abrahamic religions” is a set of crucial questions: whence does the term “Abrahamic religions” derive? Who created it and for what purposes? What sort of intellectual work is it perceived to perform? In order to answer these and related questions, the book examines the creation and dissemination of this category. Part genealogical and part analytical, this study seeks to raise and answer questions about the appropriateness and usefulness of employing “Abrahamic religions” as a vehicle for understanding and classifying data. In so doing, this book can be taken as a case study that examines the construction of categories within the academic study of religion, showing how the categories we employ can become more an impediment than an expedient to understanding.

The British empire was a huge enterprise. To foreigners, it more or less defined Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Its repercussions in the wider world are still with us today. It also had a great impact on Britain herself: for example, on her economy, security, population, and eating habits. One might expect this to have been reflected in her society and culture. Indeed, this has now become the conventional wisdom: that Britain was steeped in imperialism domestically, which affected (or infected) almost everything Britons thought, felt, and did. This book examines this assumption critically against the broader background of contemporary British society. It argues that the empire had a far lower profile in Britain than it did abroad. Although Britain was an imperial nation in this period, she was never a genuine imperial society. As well as showing how this was possible, the book also discusses the implications of this attitude for Britain and her empire, and for the relationship between culture and imperialism more generally, bringing his study up to date by including the case of the present-day United States.

This volume charts the rise and decline of absolutism in Milan from the early fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. The study shows how authority above the law, once the preserve of pope and emperor, was claimed by the ruling Milanese dynasties, the Visconti and the Sforza, and why this privilege was finally abandoned by Francesco II Sforza (d. 1535), the last duke. As new rulers, the Visconti and the Sforza had had to impose their regime by rewarding supporters at the expense of opponents. That process required absolute power (also known as plenitude of power), meaning the capacity to laws and the rights of subjects, including titles to property. The basis for such power reflected the changing status of Milanese rulers, first as signori and then as dukes. Contemporary lawyers were at first prepared to overturn established doctrines in support of the free use of absolute power: even Baldo degli Ubaldi accepted the latest teaching. But eventually lawyers regretted the new approach, reasserting the traditional principle that laws could not be set aside without compelling justification. The Visconti and the Sforza also saw the dangers of absolute power: as legitimate princes they were meant to champion law and justice, not condone arbitrary acts that disregarded basic rights. Black traces the application of plenitude of power in day‐to‐day government, and demonstrates how the rulers of Milan kept pace with the initial acceptance and subsequent rejection by lawyers of the concept of absolute power.

Abstract objects such as properties, propositions, numbers, degrees, and expression types are at the centre of many philosophical debates. Philosophers and linguists alike generally hold the view that natural language allows rather generously for reference to abstracts objects of the various sorts. The project of this book is to investigate in a fully systematic way whether and how natural language permits reference to abstract objects. For that purpose, the book will introduce a great range of new linguistic generalizations and make systematic use of recent semantic and syntactic theories. It will arrive at an ontology that differs rather radically from the one that philosophers, but also linguists, generally take natural language to involve. Reference to abstract objects is much more marginal than is generally thought. Instead of making reference to abstract objects, natural language, with its more central terms and constructions, makes reference to (concrete) particulars, especially tropes, as well as pluralities of particulars. Reference to abstract objects is generally reserved for syntactically complex and less central terms of the sort the property of being wise or the number eight.

The criminal courts have a power to stop a prosecution from proceeding altogether where it would be inappropriate for it to continue. This power to stay proceedings which constitute an abuse of the process of the court has assumed great practical significance and is potentially applicable in many situations. There is at least one consideration of the abuse of process doctrine in virtually every major criminal trial today. This fully updated second edition of Abuse of Process and Judicial Stays of Criminal Proceedings blends doctrinal discussion with a thorough consideration of the underlying theory to provide a searching analysis of the theory and practice of abuse of process in England and Wales, with comparative examinations of many other jurisdictions including the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This edition focuses in particular upon the profound impact of the European Convention on Human Rights on the judicial discretion to stay criminal proceedings. It explores substantial amounts of important recent case law, taking into account ECHR jurisprudence and discussions in English courts of the interplay between Article 6 ECHR and abuse of process.

As a very young man, one of the most celebrated English authors of the eighteenth century translated a tome about Ethiopia. This experience permanently marked Samuel Johnson, leaving traces of the African discourse he encountered in that text in his drama Irene;several of his short stories; and his most famous fiction, Rasselas. This book provides a much needed perspective in comparative literature and postcolonial studies on the power of the discourse of the other to infuse European texts. This book illuminates how the Western literary canon is globally produced by developing the powerful metaphor of spirit possession to posit some texts in the European canon as energumens, texts that are spoken through. The model of discursive possession offers a new way of theorizing transcultural intertextuality, in particular how Europe’s others have co-constituted European representations. Through close readings of primary and secondary sources in English, French, Portuguese, and Gəʿəz, the book challenges conventional wisdom on Johnson’s work, from the inspiration for the name Rasselas and the nature of Johnson’s religious beliefs to what makes Rasselas so strange.

Decades of research indicate the important connections among academic motivation and achievement, social relationships, and school culture. However, much of this research has been conducted in homogenous American schools serving middle class, average achieving, Anglo-student populations. This book argues that school culture is a reflection of the society in which the school is embedded and comprises various aspects, including individualism, competition, cultural stereotypes, and extrinsically guided values and rewards. Chapters address three specific conceptual questions: How do differences in academic motivation for diverse groups of students change over time? How do students' social cognitions influence their motivational processes and outcomes in school? And what has been done to enhance academic motivation? To answer this last question, the chapters describe empirically validated intervention programs for improving academic motivation in students from elementary school through college.

This book is a study of prominent and less‐familiar works of U.S. literary modernism that reveals a long history of English‐only Americanism: the political claim that U.S. citizens must speak a nationally distinctive form of English. This perspective presents U.S. literary works written between the 1890s and the 1940s as playfully, painfully, and ambivalently engaged with language politics, thereby rewiring both narrative form and national identity. This consideration of the continuing presence of fierce public debates over U.S. English and domestic multilingual cultures demonstrates their symbolic and material implications in naturalization and citizenship law, presidential rhetoric, academic language studies, and the artistic renderings of novelists. Against the backdrop of the period's massive demographic changes, this book brings into conversation a broadly multiethnic set of writers, including Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Henry Roth, Nella Larsen, John Dos Passos, Lionel Trilling, Américo Paredes, and Carlos Bulosan. These authors shared an acute sense of linguistic standardization during the interwar era and the defamiliarizing sway of radical experimentation with invented and improper literary vernaculars. Mixing languages, these authors spurned expectations for phonological exactitude to develop multilingual literary aesthetics. Rather than confirming the powerfully seductive subtext of monolingualism—that those who speak alike are ethically and politically like minded—multilingual modernists composed interwar novels as characteristically U.S. American because, not in spite, of their synthetic syntaxes and enduring strangeness.

The right of access to justice, at national and international levels, is a fundamental cornerstone of the protection of human rights. It conforms a true right to the Law. Such right, lato sensu, amounts to the right to the realization of justice. In such understanding, it comprises not only the formal access to a tribunal or judge, but also respect for the guarantees of due process of law, the right to a fair trial, and to reparations (whenever they are due), and the faithful execution of judgments. The right to an effective domestic remedy is a basic pillar of the rule of law in a democratic society. In its turn, the right of international individual petition, and the safeguard of the integrity of international jurisdiction, are the basic foundations of the emancipation of the individual vis-à-vis his own State.This is a domain that has undergone a remarkable development in recent years. The very notion of “victim” has been the subject of a considerable international case-law. The direct access of victims to international justice has been taking place in the most diverse circumstances, including situations of great adversity, or even defencelessness, of the complainants (e.g., abandoned or “street children”, undocumented migrants, members of peace communities in situations of armed conflict, internally displaced persons, individuals in infra-human conditions of detention, surviving victims of massacres). It is submitted that the right of access to justice belongs today to the domain of jus cogens. Without it, there is no legal system at all. The protection of the human person in the most adverse circumstances has evolved amongst considerations of international ordre public. Such recent evolution has been contributing to the gradual expansion of the material content of jus cogens.