RG: So, Yannis, having read and reread the essays, I thought we might exchange a few impressions and respond to some of the challenges that have been offered in them, whether directly or indirectly. One of the first things that struck me, both in this set of papers and in other reactions to ANR (published, online and in academic settings), is how varied and “undisciplined” they are: each response seems to spin off in a different direction! I know that it was our intent and hope to engage a diverse readership, but I began to wonder whether there is true communication, as Despina Lalaki suggests there should be, or if we are talking to ourselves and past each other. I’m also thinking of the eye-rolling reproach that I often encounter, not least from colleagues within the profession, of those who would prefer that we ‘stay in our lane,’ do what we do best and what we are paid public money to do; that is, dig, publish and tell stories about the past. Why trouble the world with our half-baked meditations? And now we have gone and lured more well-intentioned, mostly young scholars to join us in this pointless exercise!

In recent years there has been growing scholarly interest in the social context of archaeology in Israel. As amply demonstrated, ideologies, politics and religions have been entangled with the practice of archaeology in the southern Levant since Ottoman times, and they form the foundations of common current approaches. True, interpretive frameworks and methodological approaches gradually changed in response to studies of the history of scholarship during the 1980s and 1990s, as well as exposure to critical archaeological studies, and the perspective of archaeologists educated in recent decades differs from that of their predecessors, but many still adhere to paradigms and concepts that developed and crystallised almost a century ago by agenda-driven scholars. Accordingly, this contribution joins the call for a reflective discourse – which is needed now more than ever. It deals with the entanglement of the ancient, the recent and the present, as reflected in the ongoing work at Tel Ḥadid, a multilayer mound in central Israel, following Raphael Greenberg and Yannis Hamilakis’ (2022) call to “demystify” the ancient and imagination and consequently our scholarly approaches.

The first object that was accessioned by the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre Museum was a statue of the ruler Gudea (c. 2120 BC) from Tello (ancient Girsu) in southern Iraq (Fig. 1). When one looks at the hands of this statue closely, signs of damage and restoration can easily be discerned. In fact, the earliest photographs published in the excavation reports show this statue without its hands (Fig. 2). This absence was interpreted by the Louvre curator André Parrot as an ancient act of iconoclasm carried out in the late third millennium BC, after the time of Gudea: “By breaking the hands, the vandal believed to annihilate more completely the effectiveness of the statue erected in the Eninnu [temple of Ningirsu]” (Parrot 1948: 162).

Raphael Greenberg and Yannis Hamilakis argue for archaeology’s revolutionary potential, borne of its ability to see what is hidden by typology, process and projection. I admire the project that these scholars advance in their individual life’s work which includes actions of professional commitment, archaeological expertise, and activism that draws others to enhanced awareness. Their interchanges, as captured in Archaeology, Nation, and Race left me newly aware of potentials and responsibilities for me as an archaeologist, as an agent engaging in activities that span pasts and presents. I particularly appreciated their willingness to lay bare the possibilities for an archaeologist to do better in understanding and even untangling, rather than reproducing, structures of power and advantage. The maneuvers that diminish those who experience systemic limits on their access to knowledge, opportunity and narrative control are more apparent to me following my engagement with these interpretations of Israel and Greece. I am prompted to consider anew the processes of typologization, of defining archaeologies as plural, and also allowing space for concern with things which may possess “sentient, affective and emotive properties” (Greenberg and Hamilakis 2022: 91).

Across contexts as disparate as the United States, Australia, China, Japan, India, Russia, Spain and Europe more broadly, concepts of national identity are deeply intertwined with racial “purity” (Segal 1991; Weiner 1995; Dikötter 1997; Ang and Stratton 1998; Collins 1998; Tolz 2007; Goode 2009; Ghoshal 2021). Scientific rhetoric and technologies, from phrenology to genetics, have often been co-opted into shoring up myths about homogeneity and purity, and archaeology is no exception (Díaz-Andreu 1995; Epperson 1997; Arnold 2006; Challis 2013; Hakenbeck 2019; Pai 2020). What Rafi Greenberg and Yannis Hamilakis add to this discussion with their book Archaeology, Nation, and Race (2022) is a deep consideration of the myriad ways in which the metaphor of purification shows up throughout archaeological practice. Their discussion invites a consideration of what it is about archaeology in particular that lends it to arguments about the salience of nationalist racial categories and homogeneity.

The book of Raphael Greenberg and Yannis Hamilakis (2022) comes at a time when archaeology could be said to be at an inflection point. For many of the reasons outlined in this book, it is less and less possible to undertake business as usual as we recognize the politically charged nature of our work and the absolute necessity of engaging with communities and the public more broadly. I therefore want to focus on two pressing archaeological themes that emerge throughout the text, namely the archaeology of coloniality (or the coloniality of archaeology) and archaeological epistemology.

Following the authors’ lead I would like to introduce my commentary on the book Archaeology, Nation and Race: Confronting the Past, Decolonizing the Future in Greece and Israel (Greenberg and Hamilakis 2022) with a short autobiographical note explaining my way into and out of the field of archaeology. I am a sociologist working in the areas of historical and cultural sociology. My first degree, however, from the University of Athens is in archaeology. It is still unclear to me why I chose to study the subject, but I am convinced that it had something to do with the Indiana Jones franchise that was popular in Greece at the time and the fact that I wasn’t that good in math. If that was the case, I would have probably become an architect. At the university I quickly developed an interest in prehistoric archaeology. Moving beyond the formalism of classical archaeology that still dominated the discipline, the “anthropological” questions raised in the field of the Greek Bronze Age – questions about culture, social and political organization and so on – were rather intriguing.

I read this book (Greenberg and Hamilakis 2022) with enormous excitement and admiration. I also read it with a strong feeling of solidarity as I tried to imagine the resistance the authors must have faced from some of their fellow archaeologists in their respective countries. I feel honored to be given a chance to express my feelings, unprofessional as they are. Still, speaking as a person with zero expertise in the field of archaeology and, what is worse, as an unrepentant modernist, I also feel an obligation to do some conceptual quibbling from the sidelines, and that’s what I’ll do.

Archaeology, Nation, and Race: Confronting the Past, Decolonizing the Future in Greece and Israel (Cambridge University Press, 2022; henceforth ANR) was conceived in the wake of an undergraduate seminar conducted jointly by the authors at Brown University in 2020. Our initial, recorded conversations at the end of the course were transcribed and formed the basis of a manuscript which was expanded, incorporating new research and ideas. Emerging from the dialogue between ourselves and with our students, the published work, also in dialogic form, is intended primarily as a stimulus to further discussion among archaeologists, anthropologists, classicists and anyone concerned with the way archaeology impacts the public imagination.

Die Einführung neuer Technologien stellt für Organisationen mit hoher Zuverlässigkeit (HROs) oder solche die danach streben (RSOs) eine erhebliche Herausforderung dar. Die vorliegende Arbeit analysiert die mit diesem Prozess verbundenen Herausforderungen, insbesondere in Hinblick auf mögliche Produktionsunterbrechungen, die Einführung neuer Arbeitslogiken und die Unsicherheit im Umgang mit neuer Technologie. In Zusam-menarbeit mit spezialisierten Partnern versuchen Organisationen, Fehler und Kontinui-tätsunterbrechungen während der Implementierung zu vermeiden. Die Arbeit fußt auf einer kritischen Literaturübersicht und untersucht 72 Forschungsbei-träge aus einer Reliabilitätsperspektive. Ziel ist die Identifikation relevanter Diskurse in der bestehenden Literatur sowie die Ableitung von Handlungsempfehlungen für die Technologieimplementierung. Die Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass der Diskurs der Service-Dominant-Logic aus der Marketingforschung und die Reliabilitätsperspektive aus der Managementliteratur als kohärente Perspektiven betrachtet werden können. Diese Arbeit schlägt vor, diese Verbindung in zukünftigen Beiträgen zu überprüfen und trägt damit zur Integration von Erkenntnissen aus verschiedenen Forschungsdisziplinen bei.

Aufbauend auf im Rahmen eines Delphi-Verfahrens erhobenen Daten und Erkenntnissen werden ökonomische Verwertungs- und Geschäftsmodelloptionen für ein Blockchain-basiertes Gesundheitsdatenmanagement- und Zugriff-/Rechteverwaltungssystem zur Einbettung in den ersten deutschen Gesundheitsmarkt diskutiert und reflektiert. Im Fokus steht hierbei die im Rahmen eines BMBF-geförderten Verbundprojekts entwickelte und im Entlassmanagement für onkologische Patientinnen prototypisch umgesetzte BloG³-Lösung. Eine reibungslose sektorenübergreifende, interdisziplinäre Versorgung im Behandlungsprozess von Onkologie-Patientinnen ist als Anwendungsfall von besonderer Relevanz, da hier zahlreiche sowohl stationäre als auch ambulante Versorgungsanbieter eingebunden sind und es hier bei der Überleitung oft noch zu Versorgungs-, Medien- und Informationsbrüchen kommt. In dem Diskussionsbeitrag beschreiben und analysieren wir sowohl den aktuellen und zukünftig zu erwartenden Stand der digitalen Transformation des Gesundheitswesens, als auch die Besonderheiten des deutschen Gesundheitswesens mit Fokus auf die Möglichkeiten für digitale Innovationen profitabel in den regulierten ersten Gesundheitsmarkt in Form von erstattungsfähigen Gesundheitsleistungen zu gelangen. Unter Berücksichtigung der aktuellen und absehbaren zukünftigen Rahmenbedingungen werden mithilfe der Expertinnenmeinungen aus dem Delphi-Verfahren mögliche Szenarien für die Verwertung der BloG³-Lösung für verschiedene Zeithorizonte (kurz-, mittel-, langfristig) reflektiert und diskutiert.

Synopsis: Contact linguistics is the overarching term for a highly diversified field with branches that connect to such widely divergent areas as historical linguistics, typology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and grammatical theory. Because of this diversification, there is a risk of fragmentation and lack of interaction between the different subbranches of contact linguistics. Nevertheless, the different approaches share the general goal of accounting for the results of interacting linguistic systems. This common goal opens up possibilities for active communication, cooperation, and coordination between the different branches of contact linguistics. This book, therefore, explores the extent to which contact linguistics can be viewed as a coherent field, and whether the advances achieved in a particular subfield can be translated to others. In this way our aim is to encourage a boundary-free discussion between different types of specialists of contact linguistics, and to stimulate cross-pollination between them.

Synopsis: This landmark publication brings together 28 papers on reflexive constructions in languages from all continents, representing very diverse language types. While reflexive constructions have been discussed in the past from a variety of angles, this is the first edited volume of its kind. All the chapters are based on original data, and they are broadly comparable through a common terminological framework. The volume opens with two introductory chapters by the editors that set the stage and lay out the main comparative concepts, and it concludes with a chapter presenting generalizations on the basis of the studies of individual languages.

Synopsis: This volume brings together contributions by researchers focusing on personal pronouns in Ibero-Romance languages, going beyond the well-established variable of expressed vs. non-expressed subjects. While factors such as agreement morphology, topic shift and contrast or emphasis have been argued to account for variable subject expression, several corpus studies on Ibero-Romance languages have shown that the expression of subject pronouns goes beyond these traditionally established factors and is also subject to considerable dialectal variation. One of the factors affecting choice and expression of personal pronouns or other referential devices is whether the construction is used personally or impersonally. The use and emergence of new impersonal constructions, eventually also new (im)personal pronouns, as well as the variation found in the expression of human impersonality in different Ibero-Romance language varieties is another interesting research area that has gained ground in the recent years. In addition to variable subject expression, similar methods and theoretical approaches have been applied to study the expression of objects. Finally, the reference to the addressee(s) using different address pronouns and other address forms is an important field of study that is closely connected to the variable expression of pronouns. The present book sheds light on all these aspects of reference to discourse participants. The volume contains contributions with a strong empirical background and various methods and both written and spoken corpus data from Ibero-Romance languages. The focus on discourse participants highlights the special properties of first and second person referents and the factors affecting them that are often different from the anaphoric third person. The chapters are organized into three thematic sections: (i) Variable expression of subjects and objects, (ii) Between personal and impersonal, and (iii) Reference to the addressee.

Synopsis: This book is a grammatical description of Ulwa, a Papuan language spoken by about 600 people living in four villages in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. Ulwa belongs to the Keram language family. This grammatical description is based on a corpus of recorded texts and elicited sentences that were collected during a total of about twelve months of research carried out between 2015 and 2018. The book aims to detail as many aspects of Ulwa grammar as possible, including matters of phonology, morphology, and syntax. It also contains a lexicon with over 1,400 entries and three fully glossed and translated texts. The book was written with a typologically oriented audience in mind, and should be of interest to Papuan specialists as well as to general linguists. It may be useful to those working on the history or classification of Papuan languages as well as those conducting typological research on any number of grammatical features.

Synopsis: It is well-known that derivational affixes can be highly polysemous, producing a range of different, often related, meanings. For example, English deverbal nouns with the suffix -er can denote instruments (opener), agents (writer), locations (diner), or patients (loaner). It is commonly assumed that this polysemy arises through a compositional process in which the affix interacts with the semantics of the base. Yet, despite intensive research in recent years, a workable model for this interaction is still under debate.

In order to study and model the semantic contributions of the base and of the affix, a framework is needed in which meanings can be composed and decomposed. In this book, I formalize the semantic input and output of derivation by means of frames, that is, recursive attribute-value structures that serve to model mental representations of concepts. In my approach, the input frame offers an array of semantic elements from which an affix may select to construct the derivative's meaning. The relationship between base and derivative is made explicit by integrating their respective frame-semantic representations into lexical rules and inheritance hierarchies.

I apply this approach to a qualitative corpus study of the productive relationship between the English nominalizing suffix -ment and a semantically delimited set of verbal bases. My data set consists of 40 neologisms with base verbs from two semantic classes, namely change-of-state verbs and verbs of psychological state. I analyze 369 attestations which were elicited from various corpora with a purposeful sampling approach, and which were hand-coded using common semantic categories such as event, state, patient and stimulus.

My results show that -ment can target a systematically restricted set of elements in the frame of a given base verb. It thereby produces a range of possible readings in each derivative, which becomes ultimately interpretable only within a specific context. The derivational process is governed by an interaction of the semantic elements provided by the base on the one hand, with properties of the affix (e.g. -ment's aversion to [+animate] readings) on the other. For instance, a shift from the verb annoy to a result-state reading in annoyment is possible because the input frame of verbs of psychological state offers a RESULT-STATE attribute, which, as is fixed in the inheritance hierarchy, is compatible with -ment. Meanwhile, a shift from annoy to an experiencer reading in annoyment fails because the value range of the attribute EXPERIENER is fixed to [+animate] entities, so that -ment's animacy constraint blocks the inheritance mechanism.

Furthermore, a quantitative exploration of my data set reveals a likely blocking effect for some -ment readings. Thus, while I have found most expected combinations of nominalization and reading attested, there are pronounced gaps for readings like instrument or stimulus. Such readings are likely to be produced by standardly subject-denoting suffixes such as -er or -ant, which may reduce the probability for -ment derivation. The quantitative analysis furthermore shows that, within the subset of attested combinations, ambiguity is widespread, with 43% of all combinations of nominalization and reading being only attested ambiguously.

This book shows how a derivational process acts on the semantics of a given verbal base by reporting on an in-depth qualitative study of the semantic contributions of both the base and the affix. Furthermore, it demonstrates that an explicit semantic decomposition of the base is essential for the analysis of the resulting derivative's semantics.

Synopsis: In spoken language comprehension, the hearer is faced with a more or less continuous stream of auditory information. Prosodic cues, such as pitch movement, pre-boundary lengthening, and pauses, incrementally help to organize the incoming stream of information into prosodic phrases, which often coincide with syntactic units. Prosody is hence central to spoken language comprehension and some models assume that the speaker produces prosody in a consistent and hierarchical fashion. While there is manifold empirical evidence that prosodic boundary cues are reliably and robustly produced and effectively guide spoken sentence comprehension across different populations and languages, the underlying mechanisms and the nature of the prosody-syntax interface still have not been identified sufficiently. This is also reflected in the fact that most models on sentence processing completely lack prosodic information.

This edited book volume is grounded in a workshop that was held in 2021 at the annual conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS). The five chapters cover selected topics on the production and comprehension of prosodic cues in various populations and languages, all focusing in particular on processing of prosody at structurally relevant prosodic boundaries. Specifically, the book comprises cross-linguistic evidence as well as evidence from non-native listeners, infants, adults, and elderly speakers, highlighting the important role of prosody in both language production and comprehension.

Synopsis: Sonority is a central notion in phonetics and phonology and it is essential for generalizations related to syllabic organization. However, to date there is no clear consensus on the phonetic basis of sonority, neither in perception nor in production. The widely used Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) represents the speech signal as a sequence of discrete units, where phonological processes are modeled as symbol manipulating rules that lack a temporal dimension and are devoid of inherent links to perceptual, motoric or cognitive processes. The current work aims to change this by outlining a novel approach for the extraction of continuous entities from acoustic space in order to model dynamic aspects of phonological perception. It is used here to advance a functional understanding of sonority as a universal aspect of prosody that requires pitch-bearing syllables as the building blocks of speech.

This book argues that sonority is best understood as a measurement of pitch intelligibility in perception, which is closely linked to periodic energy in acoustics. It presents a novel principle for sonority-based determinations of well-formedness – the Nucleus Attraction Principle (NAP). Two complementary NAP models independently account for symbolic and continuous representations and they mostly outperform SSP-based models, demonstrated here with experimental perception studies and with a corpus study of Modern Hebrew nouns.

This work also includes a description of ProPer (Prosodic Analysis with Periodic Energy). The ProPer toolbox further exploits the proposal that periodic energy reflects sonority in order to cover major topics in prosodic research, such as prominence, intonation and speech rate. The book is finally concluded with brief discussions on selected topics: (i) the phonotactic division of labor with respect to /s/-stop clusters; (ii) the debate about the universality of sonority; and (iii) the fate of the classic phonetics–phonology dichotomy as it relates to continuity and dynamics in phonology.