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Deponency is a mismatch between form and function in language that was first described for Latin, where there is a group of verbs (the deponents) that are morphologically passive but syntactically active. This is evidence of a larger problem involving the interface between syntax and morphology: inflectional morphology is supposed to specify syntactic function, but sometimes it sends out the wrong signal. Although the problem is as old as the Western linguistic tradition, no generally accepted account of it has yet been given, and it is safe to say that all current theories of language have been constructed as if deponency did not exist. In recent years, however, linguists have begun to confront its theoretical implications, albeit largely in isolation from each other. There is as yet no definitive statement of the problem, nor any generally accepted definition of its nature and scope. This volume brings together the findings of scholars working in the area of morphological mismatches, and represents a typological and theoretical treatment of the topic.

This book explores the extent to which forced migration has become a defining feature of life in the Middle East and North Africa. The chapters present research on refugees, internally displaced peoples, as well as ‘those who remain’, from Afghanistan in the East to Morocco in the West. Dealing with the dispossession and displacement of waves of peoples forced into the region at the end of World War I, and the Palestinian dispossession after World War II, the volume also examines the plight of the nearly 4 million Iraqis who have fled their country or been internally displaced since 1990. The chapters are grouped around four related themes — displacement, repatriation, identity in exile and refugee policy — providing a significant contribution to this developing area of contemporary research.

India's society, economy, and polity have been transformed at a gathering pace since the early 1990s, and India's growing role on the world stage makes it imperative to understand the roots and consequences of these changes. The eleven chapters in this interdisciplinary volume review the growing body of data that help to make sense of these changes and to understand their likely significance. The volume provides systematic, macro-level studies of economic, demographic, social, and political change in India but also micro-level analyses of the detailed mechanisms ‘on the ground’ of how Indian society is being re-shaped. This combination of micro- and macro-level analyses thus gives a picture not only of national trends but also of the underlying processes of change. Each of the chapters showcases the fruits of previously unpublished scholarship across the social sciences.

This book shows how analysis of past experiences contributes to a better understanding of present-day economic conditions; chapters offer important insights into major challenges that will occupy the attention of policy makers in the coming decades. The seventeen chapters are organised around three major themes, the first of which is the changing constellation of forces sustaining long-run economic growth in market economies. The second major theme concerns the contemporary challenges posed by transitions in economic and political regimes, and by ideologies that represent legacies from past economic conditions that still affect policy responses to new ‘crises’. The third theme is modern economic growth's diverse implications for human economic welfare — in terms of economic security, nutritional and health status, and old age support — and the institutional mechanisms communities have developed to cope with the risks that individuals are exposed to by the concomitants of rising prosperity.

This book offers a challenging and original normative approach to some of the most pressing practical concerns in world politics —including the contested nature of the prohibitions against torture and the targeting of civilians in the war on terror. The author’s vision of ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’ responds to the charge that conventional cosmopolitan arguments neglect the profound importance of community and culture, particularity and passion. Bringing together insights from communitarian and feminist political thought, the author defends the idea that community membership is morally constitutive—while arguing that the communities that define us are not necessarily territorially bounded and that a moral perspective situated in them need not be parochial. The book employs this framework to explore some of the difficult moral dilemmas thrown up by contemporary warfare. Can universal principles of restraint demanded by conventional laws of war be robustly defended from a position that also acknowledges the moral force of particular ties and loyalties? By highlighting the links that exist even between warring communities, the author offers new reasons for giving a positive response—reasons that reconcile claims to local attachments and global obligations. The book provides an account of where we stand in relation to ‘strangers’ and ‘enemies’ in a diverse and divided world, and provides a theoretical framework for addressing the relationship between our moral starting point and the scope of our duties to others.

This study looks at the relationship between popular recreations and the spaces in which they took place, and in doing so it provides a history of how England enjoyed itself during the long eighteenth century. Because the poor lacked land of their own, public spaces were needed for their sports and pastimes. Such recreations included: parish wakes and feasts; civic fairs and celebrations; football, cricket and other athletic sports; bull- and bear-baiting; and the annual celebrations of Shrove Tuesday and Guy Fawkes. Three case studies form the core of this book, each looking at the recreations and spaces to be found in different types of settlement: first, the streets and squares of provincial market towns; then the diverse vacant spaces to be found in industrialising towns and villages of the west Midlands and West Riding of Yorkshire; and finally the village greens of rural England. Through a detailed examination of contemporary books, diaries and newspapers, and records in over forty archives, the book addresses the questions of what spaces were used, and what was the interaction with those who used and controlled the land. The Industrial Revolution has been seen to have had a negative impact on popular recreation; through its use of the concept of space, this book provides an alternative to this traditional view.

This volume publishes all but three of the plenary lectures that were delivered during the XIIIth International Congress of Greek and Roman Epigraphy, held at Oxford in September 2007. Its format differs from traditional Congress Proceedings, but this is not the only innovation. The aim of the Oxford Congress, reflected in the title of the volume, was to present epigraphy as a specialism to a wider readership, both academic and other, and in that way to embed it more firmly within the wider discourse of ancient world studies in general. So to this end, a number of scholars were invited to give plenary lectures of two kinds. Some reported on the various ways in which epigraphic information is helping to reshape and extend our knowledge of the religious life, the languages, the populations, the governmental systems and the economies of the Graeco-Roman world. Others reported on the ways in which new techniques and technologies are helping to make epigraphically based information more accessible, whether in terms of public display or in terms of the ever-widening possibilities of information technology. In addition, the more wide-ranging addresses that opened and closed the Congress showed how the act of looking at the Graeco-Roman world through the window provided by the epigraphic record offers a distinctive gaze of unique and exceptional value. The Congress thereby gave the impression of a discipline that knew what it wanted to do, have the tools with which to move forward and in general was in very good shape. The volume is intended to communicate that zest and impetus to as wide a readership as possible. To that end, all contributions that were originally delivered in other languages have been translated into English, and translations have also been inserted for all but the briefest citations of Greek and Latin.

Evidence — its nature and interpretation — is the key to many topical debates and concerns such as global warming, evolution, the search for weapons of mass destruction, DNA profiling, and evidence-based medicine. In 2004, University College London launched a cross-disciplinary research programme ‘Evidence, Inference and Enquiry’ to explore the question: ‘Can there be an integrated multidisciplinary science of evidence?’ While this question was hotly contested and no clear final consensus emerged, much was learned on the journey. This book, based on the closing conference of the programme held at the British Academy in December 2007, illustrates the complexity of the subject, with seventeen chapters written from a diversity of perspectives including Archaeology, Computer Science, Economics, Education, Health, History, Law, Psychology, Philosophy, and Statistics. General issues covered include principles and systems for handling complex evidence, evidence for policy-making, and human evidence-processing, as well as the very possibility of systematising the study of evidence.

This book presents an interdisciplinary discussion of the important methodological tool known as prosopography — the collection of all known information about individuals within a given period. With the advent of computer technology it is now possible to gather and store such information in increasingly sophisticated and searchable databases, which can bring a new dimension to traditional historical research. The book surveys the transition in prosopographical research from more traditional methods to the new technology, and discusses the central role of the British Academy, as well as that of French, German and Austrian academic institutions, in developing prosopographical research on the Later Roman Empire, Byzantium and now Anglo-Saxon and other periods. The chapters discuss both national histories of the discipline and its potential for future research. The book demonstrates mutual benefits and complementarity in such studies between the use of new technology and the highest standards of traditional scholarship, and in doing so it sets forth new perspectives and methodologies for future work.

This book is about traditional songs. Folk song scholarship was originally obsessed with notions of completeness and narrative coherence; yet field notebooks and recordings (and, increasingly, publications) overwhelmingly suggest that apparently ‘broken’ and drastically shortened versions of songs are not perceived as incomplete by those who sing them. This study turns the focus on these ‘dog-ends’ of oral tradition, and looks closely at how very short texts convey meaning in performance by working the audience's knowledge of a highly allusive idiom. What emerges is the tenacity of meaning in the connotative and metaphorical language of traditional song, and the extraordinary adaptability of songs in different cultural contexts. Such pieces have a strong metonymic force: they should not be seen as residual ‘last leaves’ of a once complete tradition, but as dynamic elements in the process of oral transmission. Not all song fragments remain in their natural environment, and this book also explores relocations and dislocations as songs are adapted to new contexts: a ballad of love and death is used to count pins in lace-making, song-snippets trail subversive meanings in the novels of Charles Dickens. Because they are variable and elusive to dating, songs have had little attention from the literary establishment: the authors of this book show both how certain critical approaches can be fruitfully applied to song texts, and how concepts from studies in oral traditions prefigure aspects of contemporary critical theory. Coverage includes English, Welsh, Breton, American, and Finnish songs.