Explore the vast range of titles available.

This rich cultural history set in Punjab examines a little-studied body of popular literature to illustrate both the durability of a vernacular literary tradition and the limits of colonial dominance in British India. Farina Mir asks how qisse, a vibrant genre of epics and romances, flourished in colonial Punjab despite British efforts to marginalize the Punjabi language. She explores topics including Punjabi linguistic practices, print and performance, and the symbolic content of qisse. She finds that although the British denied Punjabi language and literature almost all forms of state patronage, the resilience of this popular genre came from its old but dynamic corpus of stories, their representations of place, and the moral sensibility that suffused them. Her multidisciplinary study reframes inquiry into cultural formations in late-colonial north India away from a focus on religious communal identities and nationalist politics and toward a widespread, ecumenical, and place-centered poetics of belonging in the region.

INTERSUBJECTIVE MEANING Historians have been among the fiercest critics of originalism.1 Among the many virtues of Jack Balkin's book, Memory and Authority, is the deft way he analyzes and dismantles these efforts to insulate originalism from historical critique.2 In a short essay, it would be impossible to fully acknowledge the sophistication of Balkin's analysis. In this sense, originalists are about a century behind the times in terms of their ontological and epistemological assumptions.6 Recognizing that meaning is intersubjective requires shifting focus away from a search for an objective truth, referential theories of meaning, and instead focusing on meaning as a social construct, functional theories of meaning.7 Once one realizes that originalism rests on a serious mischaracterization of the way constitutional communication functioned in the Founding Era, one of originalism's foundational claims, the socalled fixation thesis, crumbles.8 Although originalism comes in almost as many flavors as the breakfast cereals lining the shelves in a modern American grocery store, it has about the same nutritional value, which is to say it is mostly empty calories offering little sustenance. The claim that historians do not understand the law and are therefore incompetent to evaluate the original meaning of legal texts, including the Constitution, has been frequently repeated by originalists, but it has never been well documented or substantiated with any hard evidence-a common failing of much originalist scholarship, which often has a thin veneer of empirical rigor, but generally relies on impressionistic assessments and cherry-picked evidence to support its interpretations.12 Moreover, this argument ignores the fact that modern lawyers are typically not well-schooled in the interpretive practices or legal culture of the Founding Era.13 Even among those who claim to employ original methods in their analysis of Founding Era law the results are deeply anachronistic and often riddled with errors.14 No originalist has been more strident in making this type of guild argument than Randy Barnett: \"[S]ome [historians] apparently believe that they, and they alone, can recover the meaning of a law enacted in the Eighteenth Century when they would not be able to understand the meaning of a law enacted in the Twenty-First. Take the issue of statutory interpretation raised by Barnett.25 Sophisticated empirical studies by Abbe Gluck have demonstrated that even those charged with writing and interpreting the nation's laws, whose staffs include scores of lawyers, are often not fully conversant with the rules of modern statutory construction.26 I think it is fair to say that most legal scholars who do not teach or publish in a particular area are typically not reliable guides on cutting-edge issues in legal analysis in fields outside of their expertise.

In this essay I intend to flesh out and discuss what I consider to be the groundbreaking contribution by the German historian and theorist of history Reinhart Koselleck to postwar historiography: his theory of historical times. I begin by discussing the view, so prominent in the Anglophone context, that Koselleck's idea of the plurality of historical times can be grasped only in terms of a plurality of historical periods in chronological succession, and hence, that Koselleck's theory of historical times is in reality a theory of periodization. Against this interpretation, to be found in works by Kathleen Davis, Peter Osborne, and Lynn Hunt, among others, I will argue that not only is Koselleck's theory of historical times, or, with a more phenomenlogical turn of phrase, his theory of multiple temporalities, not a theory of periodization, it is, furthermore, a theory developed to defy periodization. Hence, at the core of Koselleck's work is the attempt to replace the idea of linear, homogeneous time with a more complex, heterogeneous, and multilayered notion of temporality. In this essay I will demonstrate how this shift is achieved by means of three dichotomies: between natural and historical, extralinguistic and intralinguistic, and diachronic and synchronic time.

The objective of this work is to set a corpus-driven methodology to quantify automatically diachronic language distance between chronological periods of several languages. We apply a perplexity-based measure to written text representing different historical periods of three languages: European English, European Portuguese, and European Spanish. For this purpose, we have built historical corpora for each period, which have been compiled from different open corpus sources containing texts as close as possible to its original spelling. The results of our experiments show that a diachronic language distance based on perplexity detects the linguistic evolution that had already been explained by the historians of the three languages. It is remarkable to underline that it is an unsupervised multilingual method which only needs a raw corpora organized by periods.

In Abyssinia, the Mosaic law, the feudal system, and the most modern ideas jostle each other throughout, and the introduction of the new does not appear to displace, but to exist side by side with the old in the life of the nation, which, to quote a recent writer is 'young today, though it was powerful when the Book of Genesis was written, and we Christians when our own ancestors still worshiped Thor and Odin\"! G. W. Bowersock, extrapolating from a set of inscriptions which he describes as an \"extraordinary document\" found on the Adulis Throne, specifically emphasizes that one king's seat of power was in the \"Eritrean plain\" from where \"the king appears to have extended his belligerent activities to the south into Tigray, and the site of Aua, (which) may indicate the modern capital of the region, Adwa\" (Bowersock, G. W. 2013: 49). The unnamed king's central trading market was Aksum. Nonetheless, in his general analysis, Breasted acknowledges Ethiopian pharaohs as securing and defending Egypt from external adversaries and enriching its architectural and building projects during the centuries when Ethiopian pharaohs ruled.

This article presents a literary landscape of short expressive ensembles (SEEs) that appeared in Istanbul’s public locations between 2020 and 2023. By documenting the space and time of public literary genres, I follow in the footsteps of twentieth-century literary critics who explored literature in nontraditional locations. I supplement the work of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Marshall McLuhan, and more recently Katherine Hayles with “linguistic landscaping” methods from sociolinguistics to emphasize three important points about literary genres that are distributed in space and time. First, mapping literary fragments in public locations allows for them to remain in their diverse polysemic habitats rather than conform to book-length collections, the traditional medium of literary studies. Second, linguistic landscaping offers a more robust taxonomy for documenting where, when, and in what material and media writings appear, providing data for further study of diverse topics. Finally, by exploring urban areas for literary genres, we see neighborhoods provide multilingual instances of literature that do not conform to national and monolingual collecting practices. By mapping examples of short genres, this project reveals that urban spaces have their own literary landscapes that are in dialogue with, contribute to, and interrupt our historical and contemporary urban imaginaries.

We studied two fundamental linguistic channels—the sentences and the interpunctions channels—and showed they can reveal deeper connections between texts. The applied theory does not follow the actual paradigm of linguistic studies. As a study case, we considered the Greek New Testament, with the purpose of determining mathematical connections between its texts and possible differences in the writing style (mathematically defined) of the writers and in the reading skill required of their readers. The analysis was based on deep-language parameters and communication/information theory. To set the New Testament texts in the larger Greek classical literature, we considered texts written by Aesop, Polybius, Flavius Josephus, and Plutarch. The results largely confirmed what scholars have found about the New Testament texts, therefore giving credibility to the theory. The Gospel according to John is very similar to the fables written by Aesop. Surprisingly, the Epistle to the Hebrews and Apocalypse are each other’s “photocopies” in the two linguistic channels and not linked to all other texts. These two texts deserve further study by historians of the early Christian church literature at the level of meaning, readers, and possible Old Testament texts that might have influenced them. The theory can guide scholars to study any literary corpus.

Large language models (LLMs) show limited capability in processing low-resource historical languages due to insufficient training data and domain-specific linguistic structures. Korean Literary Sinitic (KLS), the principal written medium of the Joseon dynasty, remains particularly under-resourced despite its lexical overlap with modern Korean and shared script with classical Chinese. To enable systematic evaluation in this domain, we introduce KLSBench, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing LLM performance on KLS. KLSBench contains 7871 instances sourced from Joseon dynasty civil service examination archives and parallel corpora of the Four Books, and encompasses five task categories: classification, retrieval, punctuation restoration, natural language inference, and translation. Our evaluation suggests KLSBench could work as an effective diagnostic tool that distinguishes lexical recall from deeper linguistic comprehension in low-resource historical languages. Beyond establishing evaluation baselines, KLSBench provides practical frameworks for deploying LLM-based tools in digital humanities contexts, including automated annotation systems and intelligent search interfaces for classical text repositories.

Since Du Bois's (1987b) seminal paper, ergative alignment in morphosyntax has been claimed to correlate with a characteristic constellation of argument realization in discourse: both intransitive subjects (S) and transitive objects (P) serve to introduce new referents via full noun phrases (NPs), while transitive subjects (A) are dispreferred for this function and are thus mostly realized as pronouns or zero (e.g. Dixon 1995, Du Bois et al. 2003, Goldberg 2004). This ergative patterning in discourse is generally accounted for in terms of information-management strategies employed by speakers in dealing with the cognitive demands of introducing and monitoring referents in discourse. These claims have recently been questioned by Everett (2009), whose data (English and Portuguese) show no support for the claimed ergative bias in discourse and raise doubts about explanations in terms of information management. The present article subjects the claims of an ergative bias in discourse to more rigorous testing, drawing on the largest database compiled to date (nineteen spoken-language corpora from fifteen typologically diverse languages), and assesses the explanatory frameworks. We find that, with the exception of Du Bois's original Sakapultek data, there is very little evidence for the postulated ergative pattern in natural spokenlanguage discourse crosslinguistically. Although our findings do confirm low levels of full NPs in the A role (Du Bois's ' Non-lexical A' constraint), we concur with Everett (2009) that the semantic feature [± human] provides an empirically more sound and conceptually more economical account than earlier explanations framed in terms of information management. Finally, we address the plausibility of emergentist claims for a diachronic link between ergative alignment in morphosyntax and information flow in discourse. The raw data used in this article and extensive exemplification of the methodology employed are available as online supplementary materials.*

At first glance, the connection between the positivist-oriented Murko and structural aesthetics may seem inappropriate and paradoxical. However, his unpublished correspondence with his student, the renowned Czech Slavist and comparatist Frank Wollman (1888–1969), shows the convergence of thematic areas and disciplinary intersections that foreshadowed structural aesthetics. As the editor of Slavia, Murko made it possible for the key figures of Czech structuralism to publish in this journal even before the founding of Slovo a slovesnost (e.g., R. Jakobson, P. Bogatyrev, etc.). At the same time, as the main organizer of the First International Congress of Slavic Philologists in Prague in 1929, he agreed to set up a thematic section in which the theses of the Prague Linguistic Circle were announced. In the first issue of Slavia in 1922–1923, a survey study by Jakobson and Bogatyrev entitled “Slavjanskaja filologija v Rossii za gody 1914–1921” was published. Wollman, who after Murko was to become a candidate for the Chair of South Slavic Languages and Literatures at the Faculty of Arts in Prague, oriented himself towards the study of versology and stylistics, as reflected in his article “Njegošův deseterec” on the evolution of verse forms in the Serbo-Croatian verse (Slavia 1930–31). Murko also encouraged his student to write Slovesnost Slovanů (1928), a pioneering work that focused on the structural history of Slavic literatures as a history of timeless forms and structures.