Relatively few examples of Palaeohispanic writing have been recovered from the Vasconic territories of present-day Navarre, leading to the assumption that the Vascones were a pre-literate society. Here, the authors report on an inscription on a bronze hand recovered at the Iron Age site of Irulegi (Aranguren Valley, Navarre) in northern Spain. Its detailed linguistic analysis suggests that the script represents a graphic subsystem of Palaeohispanic that shares its roots with the modern Basque language and constitutes the first example of Vasconic epigraphy. The text inscribed on this artefact, which was found at the entrance of a domestic building, is interpreted as apotropaic, a token entreating good fortune.

Online, social media communication is often ambiguous, and it can encourage speed and inattentiveness. We investigated whether Actively Open Minded Thinking (AOT), a dispositional willingness to seek out new or potentially threatening information, may help users avoid these pitfalls. In Study 1, we determined that correctly assessing social media authors’ traits was positively predicted by raters’ AOT. In Study 2, we used data-driven methods to devise a three-dimensional picture of online behaviors of people high or low in AOT, finding that AOT is associated with thoughtful, nuanced, idiosyncratic actions and with resisting the typically fast pace of online interactions. AOT may be an important factor in accurate, socially responsible online behavior.

Abusive language is becoming a problematic issue for our society. The spread of messages that reinforce social and cultural intolerance could have dangerous effects in victims’ life. State-of-the-art technologies are often effective on detecting explicit forms of abuse, leaving unidentified the utterances with very weak offensive language but a strong hurtful effect. Scholars have advanced theoretical and qualitative observations on specific indirect forms of abusive language that make it hard to be recognized automatically. In this work, we propose a battery of statistical and computational analyses able to support these considerations, with a focus on creative and cognitive aspects of the implicitness, in texts coming from different sources such as social media and news. We experiment with transformers, multi-task learning technique, and a set of linguistic features to reveal the elements involved in the implicit and explicit manifestations of abuses, providing a solid basis for computational applications.

A recent editorial in this journal stressed the need to rearticulate the methodology – and thereby the distinctiveness – of international law in the context of blurring disciplinary lines between international law and international relations. The aim of this article is to contribute to the methodological aspect of the debate. First, the article outlines a legal empirical approach, which complements legal methodology of international law with empirical tools and techniques such as citation network analysis and corpus linguistics. Second, the article applies the approach on the case law of two European courts: the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). It demonstrates how the study of case citations and the language of courts enhance the validity, reliability, and transparency of the established legal method. In particular, scholars of international law gain a stable and complete quantitative basis for a further in-depth study of case law, precedent and interpretation. Additional benefit stems from a set of transparent criteria by which to criticize the jurisprudence of international courts. Firmer ground emerges from which to evaluate the courts’ role in the political process, their societal impact and their legitimacy. At the same time the approach preserves the main features of the distinct legal methodology of international law – especially its attention to legal detail.

This article presents an introduction to some potential applications of a critical discourse perspective to the field of traumatic brain injury. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) examines spoken and written texts as a means to understand the two-way relationship between discourse and cultural context. CDA is particularly interested in how language use reflects and creates power relationships between those involved in the communication. In order to illustrate this perspective, this paper discusses a purposively selected set of written texts about brain injury from a range of institutional contexts: a scholarly journal article, a submission to government from an advocacy group, the home web page of a support group, a newspaper article from the general media, and personal letters written by people with traumatic brain injury. The analysis involved investigation of key linguistic features reflecting the experiential, interpersonal and textual aspects of these texts. Three main lines of tension between competing discourses emerged from an examination. Tension emerged within each text between medical vs. lay terminology, and this was seen as reflecting the widespread power of the scientific paradigm. Tension was apparent between problem talk vs. positive talk. Talk about the problems associated with brain injury forms an essential component when seeking support, and yet talk about positive outcomes forms an essential component when describing the rehabilitation journey. There were also competing discourses in terms of the focus of the talk, between person centredness vs. other centredness. The methodology of CDA is proposed as a tool for reflective clinical practice at both an individual and professional level, as it provides a systematic means to examine health professionals' interactions and promotes the development of a critical understanding of the cultural ideologies and institutions in which practice is located.