In and of itself, the category of the bestseller presumes neither literary status nor political consensus. As Ruth Miller Elson remarks, “bestselling books… offer clues to the world view of that mythical creature—the average American.” LGBT bestsellers likewise offer clues about the average queer American—and a perspective on dominant trends and themes in queer culture and consumption since the 1970s. This chapter charts the history of the LGBT bestseller alongside a broader history of LGBT culture in the post-Stonewall era. It traces a shift in popular LGBT literature and publishing from separatism to assimilation, from its roots in the independent gay presses of the 1970s through the peak of the AIDS epidemic to the post-AIDS bestsellers popular with both queer and straight readerships. Texts considered include Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Larry Kramer’s Faggots (1978), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978-2014), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015).

This chapter examines consonants in Slavic languages primarily from a synchronic perspective. I begin by reviewing the consonant inventories. Key properties of the inventories are secondary palatalization, a large inventory of coronal fricatives and affricates, and a voicing contrast in obstruents. The remainder of the chapter reviews four types of consonant patterns: palatalization, voicing, other local alternations, and long-distance alternations. Palatalization is inherited from Proto-Slavic, but the contemporary languages differ in terms of segments undergoing it, morphological triggers, and phonological conditioning. Slavic voicing alternations offer typological insight into the extent of cross-linguistic variation. The key differences are in final devoicing, directionality, and participation of sonorants. Slavic languages also exhibit limited place assimilation, dissimilation, and consonant decomposition. As for long-distance patterns, I review both assimilatory (sibilant consonant harmony) and dissimilatory (consonant co-occurrence restrictions) phenomena in two Slavic languages.

We investigate acoustic correlates of the laryngeal contrast in intervocalic stops in three speech communities – homeland Polish speakers and first- and second-generation heritage Polish speakers in Toronto. Using a sample of 1,187 tokens extracted from conversational speech, we show that the employment of some parameters signaling laryngeal contrast differs between the homeland and heritage speakers. Some parameters are suppressed (i.e., closure phonation and duration) and some are amplified (i.e., vowel and release duration). We interpret these processes in light of proposals by Flege and Bohn (2021) and Polinsky (2018) regarding contact-induced interaction (i.e., assimilation versus dissimilation between languages). We propose that the interaction between systems occurs at a low level of granularity, that is, at the level of individual phonetic properties of a single phoneme.

This chapter recovers the voices of marginalised US communities – Native, Jewish, and African Americans – bringing out of oblivion their Tercentenary contributions. It asks whether underprivileged racial and ethnic groups accepted the alleged superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cultural heritage, and whether, by appropriating Shakespeare, they attempted to become part of that heritage or to challenge its exclusivity. It demonstrates that 1916 America was torn between competing impulses of assimilation and diversity. The white majority held out ostensibly universal cultural standards to which all should aspire, while believing that they were unattainable to some groups. The minorities faced the irreconcilable demands of trying to conform to these standards at the cost of renouncing their distinct identity, while sensing that white supremacists would never accept them as equal no matter what they did. The Tercentenary celebrations registered these tensions and allowed the members of American minorities to produce hybrid Shakespearean appropriations, which accommodated a far-reaching critique of dominant ideology. They helped them to express their distinctive identities, while highlighting the entrenched inequality that they endured.

This chapter examines the politics of American immigrant fiction in the twentieth century, a time period that saw three large waves of immigration. The first took place between 1880 and 1924 and consisted primarily of European immigrants and Asian immigrants. The second wave ranged from 1924 to 1965 and was much smaller than the first, largely due to shifting political views toward immigrants which resulted in legislation that significantly restricted the flow of newcomers. The third wave was triggered in 1965 by another change in both national attitude and policy and it lasted into the early decades of the twentieth century. During this time, the immigrant novel reflected political realities through its portrayal of how migration to the United States brought success for some and marginalization for others. The genre confronted the myth that all newcomers enjoy equal potential to achieve the “American Dream” by exposing how racialization, the process of assigning individuals to categories based on characteristics such as skin color or facial features, significantly determined inclusion or exclusion.

Informal borrowings can be classified according to several criteria. As for the typology by borrowed material, one can distinguish loanwords, which are the most frequent in the database, followed by other types, including loanblends and loan translations. As for typology by part of speech, the majority are nouns, followed by adjectives and verbs, which is consistent with the part-of-speech distribution patterns found in noninformal borrowings; however, there are a few surprises. As for assimilation, one can distinguish partially assimilated borrowings, which are most frequent, followed by fully assimilated and unassimilated expressions. As for modification, unmodified borrowings are the most frequent, followed by partly modified and highly modified ones. There are many more criteria proposed in the text.

Chapter 1 introduces the pattern of /str/-retraction and then lays the theoretical groundworkfor the variationist approach to this sound change. The chapter first defines language variation and change and then provides an overview of research paradigms in interspeaker and intraspeaker variation. These approaches are completed with a section on meaning in language.

This chapter serves the purpose of introducing readers both to the paradigms and theoretical expectations in language change research as well as providing the foundation for the types and the nature of language-external variables that will later find their way into the methods and the statistical models developed.

Chapter 2 explains the phonetic and phonological background of sibilant analysis.It first establishes a definition of the phoneme and then continues to describe the sounds involved based on an articulatory point of view. These are then connected to acoustic theories of speech production that illustrate how prototypical articulatory gestures create the resulting sound waves that are perceived as phonemes. It specifically explains how source filter theory and turbulence are important to the production of sibilants. It then illustrates how the acoustic output created can be quantified and classified based on characteristics such as spectral mean, skewness, and kurtosis of the speech signal.

The chapter then moves on to suprasegmental theories and fundamentals of /str/-retraction research. It explains how exemplar models of the mental lexicon are suitable to describe the sound change at hand. It then briefly illustrates the uniqueness of triple-consonant clusters in English. As important processes in this sound change, coarticulation and assimilation are then differentiated.

Discussion of the confrontation between Socrates and Callicles in the Gorgias has mostly focused on its first two phases: Callicles’ statement of his views and Socrates’ attempted refutations (481–500), and Socrates’ subsequent attempt to substitute his own conception of the good life (501–9). Much less attention has been paid to the final phase (509–22). But Plato stages here the most sustained debate in the dialogue between alternative answers – with their consequences – to what has proved to be its central question: is committing injustice or falling victim to it the greatest evil? This chapter examines the key moves in this debate, in which Callicles is again tempted by Socrates to participate, after previously refusing to continue. I argue that Plato’s aim here is to show just why and how Socrates might successfully initiate and sustain intellectual engagement with an intelligent young politician hoping to rise within the Athenian democracy, such as Callicles is portrayed as being. He fails to persuade him. But this is not, as sometimes supposed, a failure of intellectual communication. It is a matter of what Plato wants us to understand as different fundamental commitments.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

In the following chapters, I analyse several attempts to interrupt the abyssal nature of the modern state emerging from my previous research on sociology of law. I try to identify the reasons why most of such attempts failed. In this chapter, I analyse some of the most salient features of the state and the legal system in Mozambique proposing the concept of heterogeneous state to highlight the breakdown of the modern equation between the unity of the state and the unity of its legal and administrative operation. The centrality of legal pluralism is analysed in light of an empirical research focused on community courts and traditional authorities. I use the concept of legal hybridisation with the purpose of showing the porosity of the boundaries of the different legal orders and cultures in Mozambique and the deep cross-fertilisations or cross-contaminations among them. Special attention is given to the multicultural plurality resulting from the interaction between modern law and traditional law, the latter conceived of as an alternative modernity.

Individual speech sounds are modified by the phonetic environment in which they are found in connected speech. In this book, the term accommodation is used generically for any and all articulatory modifications that arise from the phonetic environment. The term assimilation is used for accommodation that crosses phonemic boundaries, and coarticulation is used for sub-phonemic accommodations. Accommodation occurs not due to laziness, but through these forces: (1) the fundamental constraints on producing a number of segments in rapid, connected succession, and (2) the efficiency of speech production – not producing gestures, or extending gestures beyond what is required for the production of highly intelligible speech. Accommodations might be informally called shortcuts, and some shortcuts are required by physical constraints and some are not; others are required by the grammatical rules of the language in question, defined by language-specific rules.

Based on immersive and extensive participant observation across six Islamic funeral homes in Berlin, this chapter focuses on the mediating role that Muslim undertakers play between immigrant families and the German state. As intermediaries, undertakers guide minority families through the cultural, religious, political, and legal landscapes structuring the transitions from life to death. In reconciling competing sets of administrative and cultural norms, they preside not only over end-of-life decisions and their theological implications, but also over pedagogical moments of sociocultural integration in contemporary Germany. Undertakers teach lessons about the state to minoritized citizens but also offer lessons to the state about its own citizenry, often by countering negative stereotypes about Islam and Muslims in Germany.

Art. 325 TFEU aims to establish an effective and standardised protection of the European Union’s financial interests across all Member States, and in all of the EU’s institutions and bodies. This regime is underpinned by two key principles: assimilation and minimum protection. They require the Member States to take the same measures to counter fraud affecting the financial interests of the EU as they take to counter fraud affecting their own financial interests and to prevent and combat EU-fraud and other financial misconduct with effective, proportionate and dissuasive measures. National provision that is incompatible with this so-called ‘minimum trias’ is neutralized and rendered inapplicable. Moreover, the EU is empowered to adopt the necessary measures for the prevention of and fight against EU fraud. Arguably, this includes the right to enact legislation in the area of criminal law, to harmonise the respective national criminal laws of the Member States, and even to introduce directly applicable European criminal provisions. And yet, despite these sweeping powers, the EU has thus far proven reluctant to use them. Instead, it has generally opted for a restrictive interpretation of its anti-fraud competencies.

Chapter 8 concludes our analytic narrative. We describe the politically frozen, yet militarily hot conflict from 2015 until 2022. Russian military intervention in the Battles of Ilovaisk (end of summer 2014) and Debaltseve (February 2015) produced the Minsk Agreement, backed by France, Germany, and eventually the UN Security Council, whereby Russia sought to impose conditions on Ukraine over the status of the disputed Donbas territories and the sequence required for Ukraine to regain control of its borders. Kyiv rejected this interpretation of Minsk, resulting in a diplomatic stalemate. The stabilization of the de facto frontier in the East took on familiar characteristics of a frozen conflict. On its side of the line of control Ukraine became more Ukrainian in terms of national cohesion and language/memory policies. On the other side of the line, the DNR/LNR became more Russian. Consistent with our model predictions, the policy preferences of the Ukrainian West met less resistance. In the final part of the chapter, we describe Putin’s decision to abrogate the Minsk Process and initiate a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s account of the conflict is formalized in a mathematical appendix (Appendix B).