This thesis is the result of an investigative work on the formulations and defense ofreligious tolerance in the Catholic Enlightenment of Portugal, to a greater extent, butalso touching on some transits with Brazil. It is assumed that the secularization processthrough which the Iberian kingdom passed, during the eighteenth century, was…[Read more]

While the amount of digitally available data on the worlds’ languages is steadily increasing, with more and more languages being documented, only a small proportion of the language resources produced are sustainable. Data reuse is often difficult due to idiosyncratic formats and a negligence of standards that could help to increase the…[Read more]

This graduate reading seminar examines some of the historical literature on migration in a global perspective, focusing on the nineteenth century through the present. It focuses on theoretical approaches to the study of migration as well as on case studies, moving between longue-durée and comparative issues on the one hand and local effects of…[Read more]

Meaning understood in terms of teachability and learnability is crucial to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work. As regards the resolution of philosophical problems – and epistemological problems in particular – this approach seems to posit a hierarchy of meaning that excludes endless deferral. This is the basis of Wittgenstein’s attack on philo…[Read more]

This paper will look at the way the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem have utilised the theological narrative of marginalisation in their quest for identity and self-determination. The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are an expatriate black American group who have lived in Israel since 1969, when their spiritual leader, Detroit-born…[Read more]

While the amount of cross-linguistic data is constantly increasing, most datasets produced today and in the past cannot be considered FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reproducible). To remedy this and to increase the comparability of cross-linguistic resources, it is not enough to set up standards and best practices for data to be…[Read more]

This chapter examines the process by which Puerto Rican nationalists engaged with the Olympic Movement in their struggle for decolonization. Sotomayor shows not only shifting meanings of colonial Olympic sport for nationalists, but, more generally, that the Olympic Movement has been used and serves as a platform to negotiate nationalism and…[Read more]

By reviewing a recent quantitative study of rhyme patterns in Mandarin Chinese, this study shows how data handling and data analysis in the study of rhyme patterns can be improved. Suggestions for improvement include (a) a consistent annotation of rhyme data, which is exhaustive and facilitates data reuse, and (b) emphasizes the importance of…[Read more]

Program of the Sensory Histories of Place workshop, organized by me and Elvan Baştürk Cobb, at ANAMED in 2015.

Spanish Abstract: Presentamos una perspectiva pragmalingüística sobre la actuación discursiva inspirada en la sociología dramatística de Erving Goffman. En su actuación discursiva el hablante intenta justificar su postura con respecto a la afiliación con grupos e identidades sociales determinadas. Al posicionarse, perfila su identidad y modela…[Read more]

An imperfective TAM prefix of the form /r-/ (typically labeled a “Habitual”) is apparent in all branches of the Zapotec language family and can be reconstructed to Proto-Zapotec. Central Zapotec, however, has innovated a progressive prefix /ka(j)-/ (see Broadwell 2015; Smith-Stark 2004). This raises the question: how has the introduction of thi…[Read more]

In 2016-2017, a 10-person team worked for 3 months with the goal of creating a multi-use, balanced corpus, similar to the Brown Corpus (BROWN Corpus search online). The speech section of the completed Nanhai Corpus—named for its sponsors, the Nanhai Nunnery of Taiwan—is a 289,497 word corpus of collected, transcribed, and word-split natural spe…[Read more]

The objective of this study is to discuss the adoption of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in the Brazilian and Flemish contexts, considering the influence of globalization and internationalization on the languages in higher education. To reach this goal, a bibliographic research was carried out, in order to analyze documents related to…[Read more]

Given the degree of popular fascination with Gnostic religions, it is surprising how few pay attention to the one such religion that has survived from antiquity until the present day: Mandaism. Mandaeans, who esteem John the Baptist as the most famous adherent to their religion, have in our time found themselves driven from their historic…[Read more]

The ultimate cause of much historical, social and cultural change is the gradual accumulation of human knowledge of the environment. Human beings use the materials in their environment to meet their needs and increased human knowledge of the environment enables human needs to be met in a more efficient manner. When human knowledge of the…[Read more]

This short piece reviews Michael Kater’s recent overview of culture in Nazi Germany, taking issue both with its core scholarly contentions and its problematic use of language.

This co-authored piece introduces our co-edited volume ‘Dreams of Germany’. It explores how, where and by whom notions of ‘musical Germanness’ have been constituted in the modern era, and to what effect. Picking up on ideas first explored systematically by Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter in their 2002 collection ‘Music and German National…[Read more]