Synopsis:

This volume contains a selection of papers that were originally presented at a workshop "Cross-disciplinary approaches to Information Structure in African languages", held in Porto-Novo, Benin in 2022. Eight papers explore information structure in Niger-Congo languages from different linguistic angles: phonetics, phonology, syntax and semantics. The papers address a range of topics in different Niger- Congo languages from both junior and senior scholars in the field of linguistics, reflecting both the diversity of languages and scholarship in African linguistics.

Synopsis

Locative and existential predications are fundamental linguistic constructions that exhibit significant formal overlap while serving distinct communicative functions. Locative clauses typically anchor a definite referent to a spatial context, whereas existential clauses introduce new, often indefinite, referents into discourse. Despite their central role in syntactic and typological research, the cross-linguistic diversity of these predications remains largely underexplored. This collective volume originates from workshops held in 2023 at the Annual SLE Meeting in Athens and the International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Heidelberg. It brings together in-depth analyses of locative and existential predications across a wide range of languages, drawing on diverse methodological and theoretical approaches. Rather than imposing a single framework, the volume deliberately allows for variation in how these constructions are defined and analyzed, reflecting the complexity and diversity of linguistic structures. A key theme of the book is the relationship between locative, existential, and possessive predication. Many of the included studies highlight the formal and functional connections between these domains, illustrating how different languages encode possession through structures that overlap with locative and existential constructions. The volume also challenges conventional assumptions about structural distinctions between these predications, showing that in many languages, such boundaries are blurred or even nonexistent. The introductory chapter reviews key findings from prior research and offers a refined typology of locative and existential predications. It also highlights the major insights from the remaining chapters, each of which provides a detailed empirical analysis of these constructions in one or several underdescribed languages. The contributions address (i) the structural and functional properties of locative and existential clauses, (ii) criteria for distinguishing these constructions in languages where formal differentiation is minimal, (iii) their frequency and usage in natural discourse, and (iv) grammaticalization pathways that link locative, existential, and possessive predication. By integrating data from a broad range of languages and perspectives, this volume advances our understanding of locative and existential predication and offers a foundation for future research in typology, syntax, and historical linguistics.

Synopsis

Humans are confronted everyday with an influx of sounds coming from several sources. In a given auditory environment, some of the sound events might be unexpected, rare, or new. Our cognitive system has the ability to detect such sounds, and consequently activate an attention orienting response.

This book provides an in-depth investigation of the interplay between prosody and attention orienting during online speech processing by using two complementary experimental methods, electrophysiology and pupillometry. In particular, it examines the cognitive and functional relevance of intonation for the orienting response in speech, emphasising the crucial role of rising contours. More specifically, it investigates the influence of prosodic structure, showing that rising tones at constituent edges attract attention similarly to accentual rising tones, challenging important tenets of prosodic theory and typology.

The book shows that contextual expectations shape the orienting response, extending insights beyond purely acoustic cues to pragmatically meaningful linguistic signals. Finally, much like cues from auditory cognition, rising tones activate both involuntary and voluntary attentional mechanisms – the former driven by signal-based acoustic cues, while the latter arise from contextual influences guiding voluntary attention orienting.

Taken together, the findings in this book enhance our understanding of the role of intonation in attention orienting, emphasising the significance of rising tones. The book establishes key connections to general cognition and individual variability while exploring potential extensions for an architecture of attention orienting in spoken language.

Synopsis:

With the exception of English and its varieties, all Present-Day Germanic languages display some kind of verb-second (V2) rule, according to which the finite verbal form has to be put in the second position of the clause in declarative utterances. But even within the Germanic domain, the exact contours of the V2 rule vary strongly in time and space. Above all, the so-called bottleneck demanding that one and only one constituent be placed before the finite verb is not equally respected in all Germanic varieties. The typology of V2 violations, apparent or real, is now regarded as a core question for the typology of V2 itself. The present volume is concerned with all kinds of alleged “cracks in the bottleneck”, involving argument stacking, remnant movement, or adverbial resumption. A general introduction by Modicom and Harchaoui discusses the current state of linguistic research on verb-third phenomena in Germanic languages, both in synchrony and diachrony. The introduction is followed by a diachronic panorama of V3 phenomena in the history of High German, by A. Speyer, who shows that behind the apparent stability of V2, the syntactic typology of apparent V3 in German has undergone significant changes over the last centuries. The other contributions to the volume follow this variational and historical thread: E. Klaevik-Pettersen and N. Catasso discuss the validity of the bottleneck hypothesis in present and ancient V2 varieties. E. Louviot, Th. Robin, Chr. Nilsen and B. Bloom focus on verb-third phenomena involving resumptive items in the history of English, High German, Low German and Swedish. In their paper on Old West Germanic verse corpora, Louviot and Robin concentrate on clause-initial tha/tho, investigating which factors determine its capacity to either be followed by the finite verb (V2) or by another constituent before the finite verb (V3). Nilsen is concerned with the semantic evolution of verb-third adverbial resumption involving da and så in Swedish. Bloom focuses on the V3 use of one resumptive, so, in Early New High German during the 16th century, tackling the discourse-organizational factors behind adverbial resumption. Finally, the chapters by L. Riccardelli, R. Madaro, A. Tomaselli and E. Bidese investigate how contact between Germanic and Romance may have interacted with language-internal dynamics in the history of several varieties of Rhaeto-Romance (Riccardelli) and Upper German (Madaro, Tomaselli and Bidese).

Synopsis

This collection of ten texts offers a unique glimpse into the language and culture of the Muyu, a Papuan people living in the heart of New Guinea. It features narratives from six storytellers, all of which have been transcribed, translated, and linguistically annotated.

The presentation follows a two-part structure: first, a parallel-text format with Muyu and English arranged in columns; second, an interlinearized version for detailed linguistic analysis. The texts revolve around two central themes—myths of origin and accounts of encounters with animals.

A brief introduction to the Muyu language and its speakers precedes the texts, providing essential context for readers from both linguistic and anthropological backgrounds.

Synopsis:

This book explores the development of prosodic and interactional competence in second language acquisition, drawing on data from peer interactions by Italian learners of German in both German and their native language, Italian, as well as from German native speakers. Three key aspects of spoken interaction are examined across proficiency levels: prosodic marking of information status, turn-taking, and backchannels. The analysis of prosodic marking of information status reveals that learners mark givenness using distinct fundamental frequency patterns, as in their native language, but apply a reduction in prosodic strength typically found postfocally in native German, irrespective of its function. This suggests that learners perceive deaccentuation as a salient marker of native German, which they adopt during their learning. This book also presents a novel approach to quantifying interactional competence, showing that lower proficiency negatively affects the smoothness of interactional flow, resulting in reduced speech time and increased overall silence. Finally, it provides new insights into backchannel use in second language and cross-linguistic contexts. Results show a complex, non-arbitrary mapping between lexical type, turn-taking function, and intonation in both native languages. In second language speech, dyad-specific behaviour was found to have a stronger effect on backchannel frequency and duration than second language proficiency. Furthermore, learners tend to transfer preferred lexical backchannel types from their first language into their second language. Overall, this book offers a multidimensional perspective on second language spoken interaction and lays the groundwork for future applications in language teaching and assessment.

The doctoral work, on which this book is based, was awarded the IPA PhD Thesis Award for the “Best PhD Thesis in the broad area of Phonetics, Speech Sciences, and Laboratory Phonology” in 2024.

Difference-in-differences (DiD) is one of the most popular approaches for empirical research in economics, political science, and beyond. Identification in these models is based on the conditional parallel trends assumption: In the absence of treatment, the average outcome of the treated and untreated group are assumed to evolve in parallel over time, conditional on pre-treatment covariates. We introduce a novel approach to sensitivity analysis for DiD models that assesses the robustness of DiD estimates to violations of this assumption due to unobservable confounders, allowing researchers to transparently assess and communicate the credibility of their causal estimation results. Our method focuses on estimation by Double Machine Learning and extends previous work on sensitivity analysis based on Riesz Representation in cross-sectional settings. We establish asymptotic bounds for point estimates and confidence intervals in the canonical 2 × 2 setting and group-time causal parameters in settings with staggered treatment adoption. Our approach makes it possible to relate the formulation of parallel trends violation to empirical evidence from (1) pre-testing, (2) covariate benchmarking and (3) standard reporting statistics and visualizations. We provide extensive simulation experiments demonstrating the validity of our sensitivity approach and diagnostics and apply our approach to two empirical applications.

The proceedings of a seminar held on June, 20, 2024 delves into the phenomenon of insurance-based investment products (so-called IBIPs). The analysis of the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union serves as the starting point for addressing the most relevant issues related to the distribution of IBIPs. The most significant rulings of the Luxembourg Court are thus, firstly, clarifying the application scope of the sector-specific regulations on IBIPs, as well as establishing the differences between the specialized rules provided for the insurance sector and those applicable to other contracts and regulated markets (such as the financial market, broadly speaking). Secondly, an attempt is made to understand how the issues arising from the circulation of these hybrid products can find efficient solutions through the adoption of intersectoral European disciplines, such as those concerning the protection of retail customers – for example, Directive 93/13/EEC on unfair terms in consumer contracts – and the prohibition of unfair commercial practices (Directive 2005/29/EC). In this context, the role played by the Court's precedents can only be appreciated. On the one hand, the interpretative effort of the European judge aims to ensure the so-called effet utile of Union law. On the other hand, the harmonizing scope of the decisions constitutes a necessary reference to reinforce the project of the Capital Market Union, in this case, applied to the insurance sector.

Despite being, by their own description, ‘the product of five hundred years of struggle,’ some external supporters of the Zapatistas have attempted to search for historical precedent for the movement, composed mainly of indigenous Maya people from Chiapas, Mexico, in pre-conquest Maya societies. This article interrogates the credibility of such interpretations and considers the motivations and assumptions underlying attempts to identify continuities between the Precolumbian Maya past and the Zapatista movement. It is argued that, besides from advocating a prefigurative politics that represents a radical departure from the Marxist revolutionary ideology that characterised the twentieth century, part of the novelty and appeal of neo-Zapatismo is that it is said to be rooted in indigenous Maya practices and traditions. The fixation on identity politics and hostility towards alternative political or economic possibilities in recent decades had resulted in an overemphasis on the ‘indigenous Maya-ness’ of the movement, to make public discourse more amenable to the Zapatistas’ wider goal of radical democratic transformation and struggle against neoliberal capitalism. The identification of links between the Precolumbian Maya and the Zapatistas form part of such attempts to ‘prove’ the indigenousness of the movement, which has become integral in constructing its revolutionary ‘authenticity.’

This study examines how scholars in Germany working on the Middle East have experienced the discussion of Israel and Palestine in research, teaching, and public debate since October 7, 2023. Drawing on a systematic online survey, it investigates across disciplines the perception of restrictions, practices of self-censorship, and perceived forms of institutional pressure. The findings indicate a marked intensification of political sensitivities shaping academic work and shifting boundaries of academic freedom. What becomes visible is a tension between respondents’ normative ideal of open debate and their actual experience of narrowing discourse, contestation, and sanctioning. Self-censorship and experiences of threat are widespread. In this context, respondents emphasize the protection of plural expression as a central task of academic institutions. The results correspond to U.S. surveys conducted by the Middle East Scholar Barometer and, for the first time, provide systematic evidence for the German context.

This paper examines whether giant oil and gas discoveries hinder the green transformation in post-Soviet space. Post-Soviet countries share a similar historical background but have pursued drastically different energy strategies, providing an ideal field to observe the influence of resource discoveries by minimizing the unobservable variables. Treating giant resource discoveries as natural experiments, it evaluates both short-term and long-term causal effects on the green transformation measured in four dimensions: total energy supply (TES), energy mix, energy efficiency, and international investment in renewables. The findings reveal that giant discoveries lead to a short-term decline in TES, fossil energy supply, and renewable energy supply; better (political) institutions deepen this short-term decline, while stronger economic institutions increase TES and renewable energy (excluding biofuels). However, these effects are short-lived. In the long term, discoveries result in increased TES and fossil energy supply, reduced renewable energy supply, and worsening energy efficiency. These results support the resource curse theory, showing that institutional quality moderates short-term disruptions but cannot prevent long-term fossil fuel dependence. The thesis contributes to the limited literature on the direct impact of resource discoveries on energy transition in post-Soviet countries and highlights the need for institutional strengthening and targeted international support in renewables in countries with recent resource shocks.

Nearly 2,000 forgotten letters from Hungarian Jews, sent to a Jewish aid organization in Stockholm during the summer of 1943, were uncovered in the Swedish National Archive by Elena Medvedev during her initial research into the personal micro-archive of historian Paul A. Levine. The discovered artefacts sought information about Jewish men conscripted into Hungary’s Jewish labor battalions under an increasingly repressive regime. The survival and decades-long neglect of this correspondence is both astonishing and revealing. Now housed for starting scholarly examination at the Osteuropa-Institut at Freie Universität Berlin, the letters will be studied through both quantitative and qualitative methods—initially analyzing socio- demographic variables and narrative content to explore patterns of assumed selective repression. Were intellectuals and cosmopolitan figures especially targeted? What mechanisms allowed these letters to bypass censorship? More than historical documents, the letters supposed to display logic that guided the regime’s repressive choices; they challenge us to claim the Holocaust details left in silence.

The Kyrgyz Republic forms a dynamic political context characterized by various shifts in its domestic and foreign political sphere. Thereby, informal cross-border trade has developed as a crucial pillar of the Kyrgyz economy and has become an essential source of income and stability for its citizens. Despite its relevance for society and the state, only limited research has set out to draw a connection between political shifts and informal cross-border trade, and the hidden nature of this trade has made it somewhat difficult to quantify its actual dimensions. Acknowledging the importance of informal cross-border trade, this paper analyses how shifts in the political sphere impact the informal cross-border trade of the Kyrgyz Republic between 2010 and 2022, focusing on its trade relationships with China, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. This process-tracing case study presents a theorized causal mechanism of how political shifts have increased informal cross-border trade founded in institutionalist theory and the everyday governance framework. The empirical analysis then tests the presence of the causal mechanism. The findings suggest that the causal mechanism is partially validated. Shifts in the political sphere of the Kyrgyz Republic did not consistently lead to an increase in informal cross-border trade during all the years under examination.

Lukashenka and his rule over Belarus are a striking example of how external autocracy support helps maintain authoritarian regimes. Still, little attention has been paid to the responses of anti- regime activists to autocracy support. Building on political opportunity literature and strategic interactionism approaches, this paper analyses qualitative interviews to study anti-regime activists’ perceptions of external autocracy support and with which strategies they respond to it. In the case of Belarus after 2020, this paper finds that anti-regime activists perceive the support by Russian president Putin to Lukashenka as a fundamental constraint to democratic change in Belarus. They respond strategically by engaging in reflection, advocacy, and support for Ukraine’s defence against Russia in the hope that Putin’s ability to support Lukashenka will be weakened. These findings show how autocracy support functions through the perception of domestic contentious actors. Also, finding that activists might decide to (support the) fight against a third player that provides autocracy support adds nuance to the variety of contentious players’ interactions in contexts of internationalized authoritarianism.

The main focus of the scholarly literature on authoritarian regimes is on the dynamics of political control and power preservation and hence tools the incumbents use against potential opposition. This paper argues that another, and a highly important, challenge for many authoritarian regimes is the behavior of actors loyal to the regime, i.e., trying to act in line with the regime goals. These actors, while incorrectly guessing the objectives of the regime, or overshooting in terms of implementation of the regime goals, could cause actual harm to the regime. We offer a sketch of the theory of this phenomenon, which we refer to as ‘excessive loyalism’, as well as test a number of hypotheses concerning the origins of excessive loyalism using the example of the reaction of Russian regional governors to the highly unpopular pension reform of 2018.

The paper offers an actor-centered perspective on the democratic backsliding, focusing in particular on the interplay of internal and international actors in preventing (or accelerating) the backsliding processes. Its main argument is without acknowledging the variation in actors’ constellations, it is also impossible to explain the variation in the outcomes of the backsliding processes. The paper is based on a mixed methods design: after the initial large-N investigation, it focuses on two empirical cases (Poland and Romania) to identify the role of actors and their interconnections in the backsliding processes.

The paper investigates how the Russian authoritarian regime managed two disastrous forest fires episodes Russia experienced in 2010 and 2021. It identifies key characteristics of the authoritarian forest fires management, as well as performs content analysis in order to identify the common features and the peculiarities of the forest fires management in both cases. It covers both response to disasters and the subsequent recovery. The paper both identifies the key characteristics of the official communication regarding forest fire management and looks at the general discourse about two forest fires episodes in the Russian media, including the role of different levels of the bureaucratic hierarchy in combatting forest fires and organizing recovery.

Die Studie widmet sich der Frage, wie Wissenschaftler*innen in Deutschland mit Arbeitsbe-zug zum Nahen Osten die Thematisierung von Israel und Palästina in Forschung, Lehre und öffentlicher Debatte seit dem 7. Oktober 2023 erfahren. Auf Grundlage einer systematischen Online-Erhebung untersucht sie disziplinübergeifend die Wahrnehmung von Einschränkun-gen, Praktiken der Selbstzensur sowie perzipierte Formen institutionellen Drucks. Die Be-funde deuten auf eine deutliche Intensivierung der politischen Sensibilitäten hin, die die wis-senschaftliche Arbeit in einschlägigen Disziplinen prägen und die Grenzen akademischer Freiheit neu verhandeln. Sichtbar wird dabei ein Spannungsfeld zwischen dem normativen Anspruch offener Debatten und der faktischen Erfahrung von Diskursverengung, Anfechtun-gen und Sanktionierung. Zugleich wird der Schutz pluraler Meinungsäußerung von den Be-fragten als zentrale Aufgabe akademischer Institutionen hervorgehoben. Die Ergebnisse kor-respondieren mit US-Erhebungen des Middle East Scholar Barometer und liefern erstmals systematische Evidenz für den deutschen Kontext.