Die von dem Bündnis Meine Landwirtschaft organisierte Großdemonstration Wir haben es satt! findet seit zehn Jahren zum Auftakt der Agrarmesse Grüne Woche in Berlin statt. Das Bündnis setzt sich für eine nachhaltige, faire Landwirtschaft und Lebensmittelproduktion ein und unterstützt deutschlandweit bäuerliche Betriebe. Am 18. Januar 2020 haben Forscher*innen der Freien Universität Berlin in Kooperation mit dem Institut für Protest- und Bewegungsforschung eine umfassende Befragung der Beteiligten der Wir haben es satt!-Demonstration durchgeführt. Die so gewonnenen Daten geben Aufschluss darüber, wer die Demonstrant*innen waren, was ihre Anliegen und politischen Haltungen sind und, nicht zuletzt, wie sie durch ihr eigenes Verhalten in Konsum und Lebensführung eine andere Landwirtschaft unterstützen. Ein Großteil der Befragten der Wir haben es satt!-Demonstration identifizierte sich als weiblich und ordnete sich politisch als links der Mitte ein. Ältere Kohorten waren insgesamt etwas stärker vertreten. Wie bei vielen Protesten in Deutschland stellen die Befragten einen spezifischen sozio-ökonomischen Ausschnitt der Bevölkerung dar: zwei Drittel geben an, einen Universitätsabschluss zu haben, die meisten verfügen über ein mittleres bis hohes Einkommen. Vor allem waren die Demonstrant*innen stark politisch engagiert; viele von ihnen sind Mitglieder in politischen Organisationen, sehr erfahrene Demonstrant*innen und vertraut mit den gesellschaftspolitischen Kämpfen zu Klima- und Umweltpolitik. Für weniger als zwei Prozent war dies die erste Demonstration überhaupt. Da es bei der Demonstrationsbefragung nicht möglich war, auch den an die Wir haben es satt!-Demonstration angegliederten Traktoren-Umzug fußläufig zu befragen, handelt es sich zudem bei den Teilnehmer*innen der Befragung vor allem um Konsument* innen. Nur sehr wenige der Befragten produzieren selbst Lebensmittel zu kommerziellen Zwecken. Diese spezifische Gesellschaftsgruppe kann als ernährungsbewusst bezeichnet werden. Sie trifft ethische Kaufentscheidungen und hat ein großes Interesse daran hat, die eigenen Anliegen zu äußern.

This paper examines the effect of weather shocks on violent crime using disaggregated data from Brazilian municipalities over the period 1991-2015. I document that adverse weather shocks in the form of droughts lead to a significant increase in violent crime, with the effect appearing to persist beyond the growing season and over the medium run. To explain this persistence, I show that weather uctuations are positively associated not only with agriculture yields, but also with the overall economic activity. Moreover, evidence shows the dominance of opportunity cost mechanism reected in the uctuations of the labor income especially for the agriculture and unskilled workers, giving credence that it is indeed the labor income that matters and not the general socio-economic conditions. Other factors such as local government budget capacity, (un)-employment, poverty, inequality, and psychological factors do not seem to explain violent crime rates.

This paper explores the underlying aspects surrounding emotional labor in everyday life inside news-rooms and how these aspects contribute to discursively (de)stabilize journalism as an institution. In order to do this, we apply the literature on affect and emotion in journalism as well as on discursive institutionalism to the analysis of a particular moment of crisis: the fraud scandal around Claas Relo-tius, an award-winning German reporter for the news magazine Der Spiegel. The discovery of his massive fake feature stories caused a fierce and controversial discussion on the media about struc-tural problems in journalism as well as the use of emotion in feature stories and exclusion mecha-nisms inside the newsroom. In our textual analysis of 138 articles on this case published in German and selected international media between December 2018 and December 2019, we uncovered four main areas in which the role of emotions is discursively negotiated (1) Form: feature stories and their use of emotions, (2) Actor: emotional attributions to Relotius, (3) Practice: emotions as part of edito-rial practices, understood here as emotional labor in the newsroom, and (4) Institution: the descrip-tion of the event and its affective implications for journalism as a whole.

Synopsis:

This volume offers a selection of papers presented during the 14th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS XIV, Paris, 2017). Part I brings together studies dealing with descriptive concepts. First examined is the notion of “accidens” in Latin grammar and its Greek counterparts. Other papers address questions with a strong echo in today’s linguistics: localism and its revival in recent semantics and syntax, the origin of the term “polysemy” and its adoption through Bréal, and the difficulties attending the description of prefabs, idioms and other “fixed expressions”. This first part also includes studies dealing with representations of linguistic phenomena, whether these concern the treatment of local varieties (so-called patois) in French research, or the import and epistemological function of spatial representations in descriptions of linguistic time. Or again, now taking the word “representation” literally, the visual display of grammatical relations, in the form of the first syntactic diagrams. Part II presents case studies which involve wider concerns, of a social nature: the “from below” approach to the history of Chinese Pidgin English underlines the social roles of speakers and the diversity of speech situations, while the scrutiny of Lhomond’s Latin and French textbooks demonstrates the interplay of pedagogical practice, cross-linguistic comparison and descriptive innovation. An overview of early descriptions of Central Australian languages reveals a whole spectrum of humanist to positivist and antihumanist stances during the colonial age. An overarching framework is also at play in the anthropological perspective championed by Meillet, whose socially and culturally oriented semantics is shown to live on in Benveniste. The volume ends with a paper on Trần Đức Thảo, whose work is an original synthesis between phenomenology and Marxist semiology, wielded against the “idealistic” doctrine of Saussure.

Synopsis:

This volume collects novel contributions to comparative generative linguistics that “rethink” existing approaches to an extensive range of phenomena, domains, and architectural questions in linguistic theory. At the heart of the contributions is the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy which has long animated generative linguistics and which continues to grow thanks to the increasing amount and diversity of data available to us.

The chapters address research questions in comparative morphosyntax, including the modelling of syntactic categories, relative clauses, and demonstrative systems. Many of these contributions show the influence of research by Ian Roberts and collaborators and give the reader a sense of the lively nature of current discussion of topics in morphosyntax and morphosyntactic variation.

This book is complemented by volume I available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/275 and volume III available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/277.

The Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) was the first university in Germany to declare a state of climate emergency in December 2019, including a commitment to achieve carbon neutrality by 2025. This decision highlights the universities’ commitment to embed sustainability systematically and climate protection in their institutions and international networks. In the last years, the university has made great progress in both quantifying and reducing many greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. One of the areas in which there is still potential for reducing CO2 emissions is that of academic business, research and study-related air travel. The goal of this report is to provide insights into UAS-participants habits and attitudes about flying, travelling, carbon offsets and virtual communication as a key step to create and implement emissions reduction strategies.

This paper analyzes higher education funding in Germany from a distributional perspective. For this, I first compare the quantitative importance of different funding instruments, from free tuition to subsidized health insurance for students. I show that free tuition is, by far, the most important instrument. Then, I take a lifetime perspective and assess how individuals of different expected lifetime incomes benefit from higher education funding. I distinguish between different fields of study as there are large differences in both the expected lifetime earnings of graduating from a specific field and the social cost of tuition associated with each field. Finally, I focus exclusively on the instrument of subsidized tuition and simulate the introduction of different tuition fee schemes with income-contingent loans. While the distributional effects would be sizable in absolute terms, I estimate that they would cause few individuals to change their educational decisions.

We quantify the private and fiscal lifetime returns to higher education in Germany accounting for the redistribution through the tax-and-transfer system, cohort effects, and the effect of income pooling within households. For this purpose we build a dynamic microsimulation model that simulates individual life cycles of a young German cohort in terms of several key variables, such as employment, earnings, and household formation. To estimate the returns to higher education, we link our dynamic microsimulation model to a tax-benefit simulator that allows converting gross wages into disposable incomes. On average, we find private and fiscal returns that are substantially higher than current market interest rates. However, analyzing the distribution of returns we also find that there is a considerable share of young adults for whom we forecast vocational training, the alternative to higher education, to be financially more rewarding. We demonstrate how the taxtransfer system and income pooling within couple households affect private returns and decompose the fiscal returns into its major components.

This volume explores the versatility of the concept of pneuma in philosophical and medical theories in the wake of Aristotle’s physics. It offers thirteen separate studies of how the concept of pneuma was used in a range of physical, physiological, psychological, cosmological and ethical inquiries. The focus is on individual thinkers or traditions and the specific questions they sought to address, including early Peripatetic sources, the Stoics, the major Hellenistic medical traditions, Galen, as well as Proclus in Late Antiquity and John Zacharias Aktouarios in the early 14th century. Building on new scholarly approaches and on recent advancements in our understanding of Graeco-Roman philosophy and medicine, the volume prompts a profound re-evaluation of this fluid and adaptable, but crucially important, substance, in antiquity and beyond.

A project team, made up of scholars and experts from the Chinese Academy of Governance, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing Normal University, and Chongqing Academy of Governance, has studied the economic reach of the nonprofit sector in China, in response to calls from peers in the field and entrusted by the Narada Foundation. Under the leadership of Professor Ma Qingyu from the Chinese Academy of Governance, the project team measured the economic scope of China’s nonprofit sector to the end of 2016, using a stratified systematic sampling method.

In railway transportation, each train needs to have a timetable that specifies which track at which time will be occupied by it. This task can be addressed by automatization techniques both in generating a timetable and in optimizing an existing one. In this paper, we give an overview on the state of the art of these techniques. We study the computation of a technically valid slot for a train that guarantees a (short) spatial and temporal way through the network. Furthermore, the construction of a cyclic timetable where trains operate e.g. every 60 minutes, and the simultaneous construction of timetables for multiple trains are considered in this paper. Finally, timetables also need to be robust against minor delays. We will review the state of the art in the literature for these aspects of railway timetabling with respect to models, solution algorithms, complexity results and applications in practice.

This volume contains thematic papers on semantic change which emerged from the second edition of Formal Diachronic Semantics held at Saarland University. Its authorship ranges from established scholars in the field of language change to advanced PhD students whose contributions have equally qualified and have been selected after a two-step peer-review process. The key foci are variablity and diachronic trajectories in scale structures and quantification, but readers will also find a variety of further (and clearly non-disjoint) issues covered including reference, modality, givenness, presuppositions, alternatives in language change, temporality, epistemic indefiniteness, as well as - in more general terms - the interfaces of semantics with syntax, pragmatics and morphology. Given the nature of the field, the contributions are primarily based on original corpus studies (in one case also on synchronic experimental data) and present a series of new findings and theoretical analyses of several languages, first and foremost from the Germanic and Romance subbranches of Indo-European (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish) and from Semitic (with an analysis of universal quantification in Biblical Hebrew).

This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on manner demonstratives, which have been little studied from a crosslinguistic perspective. The volume thus broadens the scope of investigation of demonstratives to look at how their core functions interact with a wider range of discourse functions in a number of different languages. The volume covers languages from a range of geographical locations and language families, including Cushitic and Mande languages in Africa, Oceanic and Papuan languages in the Pacific region, Algonquian and Guaykuruan in the Americas, and Germanic, Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in the Eurasian region. It also includes two papers taking a broader typological approach to specific discourse functions of demonstratives.

The papers in this volume address to different degrees issues on the relationship of articles systems and the pragmatic notions of definiteness and specificity in typologically diverse languages: Vietnamese, Siwi (Berber), Russian, Mopan (Mayan), Persian, Danish and Swedish. The main questions that motivate this volume are:

1.) How do languages with and without an article system go about helping the hearer to recognize whether a given noun phrase should be interpreted as definite, specific or non-specific? 2.) Is there clear-cut semantic definiteness without articles or do we find systematic ambiguity regarding the interpretation of bare noun phrases? 3.) If there is ambiguity, can we still posit one reading as the default? 4.) What exactly do articles in languages encode that are not analyzed as straightforwardly coding (in)definiteness? 5.) Do we find linguistic tools in these languages that are similar to those found in languages without articles?

Most contributions report on research on different corpora and elicited data or present the outcome of various experimental studies. One paper presents a diachronic study of the emergence of article systems. On the issue of how languages with and without articles guide the hearer to the conclusion that a given noun phrase should be interpreted as definite, specific or non-specific, the studies in this paper argue for similar strategies. The languages investigated in this volume use constructions and linguistic tools that receive a final interpretation based on discourse prominence considerations and various aspects of the syntax-semantics interface. In case of ambiguity between these readings, the default interpretation is given by factors (e. g., familiarity, uniqueness) that are known to contribute to the salience of phrases, but may be overridden by discourse prominence. Articles that do not straightforwardly mark (in)definiteness encode different kinds of specificity. In the languages studied in this volume, whether they have articles or do not have an article system, we find similar factors and linguistic tools in the calculation process of interpretations. The volume contains revised selected papers from the workshop entitled Specificity, definiteness and article systems across languages held at the 40th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS), 7-9 March, 2018 at the University of Stuttgart.

Smart Farming, Drohnen, per Satellit gesteuerte Traktoren, die Nutzung von Klima- und Wetterdaten durch Big Data oder die Anwendung von synthetischer Biologie: Ist die Digitalisierung von Landwirtschaft und Ernährung tatsächlich das neue Wundermittel, um Hungerkrisen zu beenden, den Verlust an Biodiversität zu stoppen oder den Klimawandel aufzuhalten? Im Policy Paper „Breaking the Chain – Konzernmacht und Big-Data-Plattformen im globalen Ernährungssystem“ setzt sich Pat Mooney, Träger des Alternativen Nobelpreises, kritisch mit der Digitalisierung in der Landwirtschaft auseinander. Er analysiert, wer die zentralen Akteure im Digitalisierungsgeschäft sind und beleuchtet die Bedeutung der Digitalisierung für kleinbäuerliche Erzeuger*innen und Arbeit*innen in Landwirtschaft und Nahrungsmittelindustrie weltweit. Neue Technologien versprechen Effizienzsteigerungen und Nachhaltigkeit bei der Erzeugung. Dabei geht es im Kern um das massenhafte Sammeln und Auswerten von Hof-, Anbau- und Verbraucher*innendaten. Agrarkonzerne wie Bayer und Deere, aber auch Internetkonzerne wie Amazon und Google sind längst dabei, sich die Hoheit über die Digitalisierung der Landwirtschaft anzueignen. Durch Fusionsprozesse konsolidieren sie ihre Dominanz nicht nur in einem Sektor, sondern vertikal entlang mehrerer Schnittstellen der Lebensmittelkette. Ihre Bemühungen werden durch politische Entscheidungsträger*innen in Deutschland und anderswo unterstützt, die vor allem die Vorteile der Digitalisierung betonen und Investitionshemmnisse aus dem Weg räumen wollen. Mooney zeigt die problematischen Auswirkungen dieser Tendenzen ebenso wie die Grenzen der Digitalisierung auf und diskutiert, inwieweit die Digitalisierung für den Umbau hin zu einer sozial-ökologisch gerechten Landwirtschaft genutzt werden könnte. Die Studie „Breaking the Chain – Konzernmacht und Big-Data-Plattformen im globalen Ernährungssystem“ ist eine gemeinsame Publikation von ETC Group, GLOCON, INKOTA und der Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.