A growth point captures the moment of speaking, taking a first-person view. It is thought in language, imbued with mental/social energy, and unpacked into a sentence. It is not a translation of gesture into speech. It is a process of processes. One is the psychological predicate (a notion from Vygotsky), a differentiation of context for what is newsworthy, the growth point’s core meaning – the context reshaped into a field of equivalents to make the differentiation meaningful. The core meaning has dual semiosis – opposite semiotic modes – a global-synthetic gesture and analytics-segmented speech, synchronized and coexpressive of the core. The gesture phases foster the synchronization. Cohesive threads to other growth points (a “catchment”) enrich it. A dialectic provides the growth point’s unpacking – the gesture becoming the thesis, the coexpressive speech the antithesis. Jointly, they create the dialectic synthesis. The dialectic synthesis and the unpacking are the same summoned construction-plus-gesture. The growth point, its processes fulfilled, inhabits the speaker’s being, taking up a position in the world of meaning it has created (conception from Merleau-Ponty).

150 words: The books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah contain oracles that address problems in and around ancient Judah in ways that are as incisive and critical as they are optimistic and constructive. Daniel C. Timmer’s The Theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah situates these books in their social and political contexts and examines the unique theology of each as it engages with imposing problems in Judah and beyond. In dialogue with recent scholarship, this study focuses on these books’ analysis and evaluation of the world as it is, focusing on both human beings and their actions and God’s commitment to purify, restore, and perfect the world. Timmer also surveys these books’ later theological use and cultural reception. Timmer also brings their theology into dialogue with concerns as varied as ecology, nationalism, and widespread injustice, highlighting the enduring significance of divine justice and grace for solid hope and effective service in our world.

50 words: This volume examines the powerful and poignant theology of the books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah. Daniel C. Timmer situates these books’ theology in their ancient Near Eastern contexts and traces its multifaceted contribution to Jewish and Christian theology and to broader cultural spheres, without neglecting its contemporary significance.

20 words: This volume draws out the theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, attending to their ancient contexts, past use and reception, and contemporary significance.

In this chapter, we start by defining and illustrating the notions of discourse relations and connectives. We will see that even though the role of discourse connectives is to make discourse relations explicit in discourse, their use is not necessary for a discourse relation to be communicated. Conversely, connectives are not always associated with a specific discourse relation: many of them can convey various relations depending on the context. Another goal of this chapter is to situate discourse relations and connectives within the more general concepts of discourse cohesion and coherence. We will see that connectives represent one type of cohesive tie and that discourse relations are crucial elements ensuring local coherence within a discourse. In the last part of the chapter, we present some important underlying methodological and theoretical choices that were made when selecting the topics covered in the book and the data presented in each chapter. We also emphasize that the study of discourse connectives and relations has many interfaces with other domains of linguistic analysis such as semantics, pragmatics and syntax.

Many of the justifications for the electoral college focus on maintaining the harmony and cohesion of the Republic. Upon closer scrutiny, however, we find that the electoral college does not contain the results of fraud and accidental circumstances within states. Instead, it magnifies their consequences for the outcome nationally. Direct election, by contrast, would create disincentives for fraud and recounts. Similarly, the electoral college does not produce concurrent majorities around the country and force winning candidates to moderate their stances to appeal successfully to all segments of society and all geographic locations. Equally problematic is the view that victory in the electoral college ensures presidents effective coalitions for governing. Moreover, the electoral college does not produce compromise within states, and it is fundamentally different from constitutional provisions that require supermajorities to take positive action. The electoral college produces neither majority-vote victories for presidents nor mandates for their governing. It is also not a bastion of federalism. Direct election of the president would not diminish the role of state and local parties and officials or the nominating conventions, and national standards for elections are already in place and not to be feared.

As the Army found itself caught up in debates about a ‘kinder, gentler military’, Army leaders reacted by emphasising cultural change. Part of this cultural shift came from the bottom up, as commanders in elite combat units showed a new interest in the psychology of killing and brought in consultants to lecture their instructors on how to more effectively inculcate a willingness to kill. Much of it came from the top, though. General Eric Shinseki controversially mandated that all soldiers would wear black berets as their working headdress to symbolise a new Army culture, and he commissioned a study on the ‘warrior ethos’ and begin to enshrine that ethos into Army doctrine and training. This warrior ethos – the idea that all soldiers are de facto heroic and potential Rangers – had the goal of democratizing notions of soldiering within the Army. However, not only did the warrior ethos require all soldiers to psychologically orientate themselves towards combat, but one of the unintended consequences of the decision may have been to help to put the American soldier a little higher on the pedestal of public opinion and inadvertently widen the gap between soldier and citizen.

The Introduction sketches out the key themes of the book, offers a justification for focusing on the identity of the American soldier as a key issue in the Army’s post–Cold War transformation and introduces the reader to literature on ‘warrior culture’. Just as Army leaders and ordinary soldiers often meant very different things when they spoke about warriors, so contemporary historians, anthropologists and classicists have used the term in various ways. Thus, the latter part of the Introduction spends some time examining how the term has evolved and been deployed in different contexts.

Frontline crisis teams are typically very cohesive, characterized by strong bonds between members. Cohesion ensures that team members look out for each other in dangerous work environments, operate resiliently in crisis contexts, and can rapidly coordinate in stressful situations. This explains why many crisis organizations are total institutions. Yet, cohesion may also produce dysfunctional group dynamics, as open debate about the crisis and the required response is avoided. Contestation in crisis teams is often deplored and might escalate into conflict, but it does ensure a thorough analysis of the situation from diverse viewpoints and thus facilitates the adoption of a well-considered, mindful response. The simultaneous need for cohesion and contestation creates a dilemma. To deal with this dilemma, it is important to note that team tensions are varied. Crisis organizations, particularly those with complex tasks, can pursue task-related contestation, while upholding relationship-related cohesion. This requires an investment in mutual trust and respect, so that team develops a safe space for open interactions without risking hostility or disintegration.

This chapter provides a detailed account of the atypical use of a certain type of indefinite referring expression. Contrary to the established view that indefinite expressions cannot be used for uniquely identifiable reference, we show that this is not always the case. Using written texts from opinion writing in newspaper discourse, we detail how writers can create an adequately definite shared space with their readers to allow an indefinite expression to be understood as referring to an established entity. The cotextual and contextual scaffolding put in place by the writer is sufficient for the indefinite expression to be understood as identifiable. The chapter also discusses the reasons why a writer would want to override normal accessibility considerations. Writers use these atypical expressions to ensure the association to an old, identifiable referent remains explicit by exploiting contextually and co-textually established information which is tied to the context or ongoing discourse.

Abstract: As a product of constructed imaginations, national identity is fragile, especially in pluralistic democracies where cohesion depends on the faithful execution of an aspirational ideal, such as “the American Creed,” a statement about fairness and merit. Cohesion is difficult to build and easily fractured. When fractured, the humanities may provide the material needed to stitch together a new identity, one that emerges out of the old. Repairing fractures and maintaining a cohesive democratic identity is the work of citizens serving as custodians of democracy. But failure is always a possibility.

This chapter discusses the roles of and relations between political parties, political groups and members of the European Parliament (MEPs). Domestic political parties play an important role because they are responsible for selecting the candidates for the European Parliament elections. Once elected, most of these political parties and their MEPs work together in political groups. In these political groups MEPs from like-minded parties organize their work and tend to vote as cohesive blocks. Political groups thus help to make the EP work in a much more effective manner than would be possible if the more than 200 parties that are represented there did not build coalitions. These political groups are organized along two main cleavages: a classic left–right cleavage as well as a more recent cleavage between groups that are more supportive and groups that are more critical of European integration. Finally, in addition to domestic parties, there are also European political parties. They have more limited tasks and mostly provide a platform for like-minded parties from the different member states.

In this chapter, we consider the ways in which these normative framings structure both policy interventions but also ways of thinking about the multicultural nature of contemporary Britain. The work of the Blair Government’s Commission on Integration and Cohesion is considered where one of the authors served as a commissioner between 2006 and 2008. The notions of integration and cohesion are considered for the ways in which they, at times, fail to provide a particularly helpful frame for understanding the dynamics of social change, the diachronic rather than synchronic evolution of racialised politics in the United Kingdom, the highly localised restructuring of economy and society that structure the crucibles out of which new diversities emerge.

Chapter 6 of Discourse Syntax (Connectives) deals with connectives as one aspect of grammatical cohesion and the grammar of discourse. It introduces the various syntactic elements that function as discourse connectives (coordinators, connective adjuncts), contrasts the overt and the covert expression of additive conjunction, and then turns to other semantic and pragmatic types of discourse relations (causative, adversative, temporal). The discussion of the occurrence of sentence-initial “and” as it is used to connect sentences in texts focuses on spoken discourse and narration. Turning to the other semantic classes of conjunction, the chapter describes characteristic uses of connectives within the academic register. The chapter also explains how to deal with frequencies of occurrence gathered from large-size corpora, elaborating on the need for normalized rates of occurrence rather than absolute frequencies and on how to adjust individual frequencies for their density.

Chapter 7 of Discourse Syntax (Pronouns and Ellipsis) deals with pronouns and ellipsis as another area of grammatical cohesion and of the grammar of discourse. It introduces reference and coreference and the different classes of pronouns. The discussion is based on the distinction between endophoric and exophoric reference, co-referential ties and chains of reference as well as the interpretation of pronouns as expressing extended reference. The chapter also discusses principles of pronoun interpretation and the concept of givenness from a psycholinguistic viewpoint. Givenness is explained with reference to the concepts of accessibility and recoverability, which are also shown to be relevant as conditions of elliptical reference and, in particular, the use of subject ellipsis in discourse. The chapter presents corpus data about the use of pronouns and ellipsis in texts and corresponding patterns of text-linguistic variation, such as interactive and oral language use as well as usage in types of written language (literary and electronic discourse, informal writing).

In many networks, fibers interact though surface interactions such as cohesion and capillarity, which cause fiber bundling. In adequate conditions, the same process leads to the formation of percolated networks of fiber bundles. These have a specific structure and their mechanical properties are quite different from those of regular networks of fibers and molecular filaments. Separate sections are dedicated to crosslinked and non-crosslinked networks with surface interactions. Surface interactions perturb weakly the structure of crosslinked networks, but have a significant effect on their mechanics. If the network is not crosslinked, surface interactions reorganize the network and define the resulting structure. The properties of networks of fiber bundles embedded in solvents (colloidal suspensions) and in the dry state (buckypaper) are discussed in separate sections.

Chapter 14: Building Awareness of Discourse Structure. Skilled readers are tuned into how information is organized, how central themes emerge, and how signaling mechanisms provide cues to this organization. Skilled readers are able to identify the main or topic sentences as they appear in a text and are sensitive to text structures that help identify where to find main idea sentences. The chapter sorts written discourse analysis into two distinct approaches. The first examined specific aspects of the texts themselves, describing the roles of cohesion, information structuring, lexical signaling, anaphoric signaling, topic continuity signaling, text coherence, text genres, and patterns of discourse organization that underlie all prose texts. The second approach involves a focus on intentional inferencing skills and “deep comprehension.” The chapter then reviews research on discourse structure and reading comprehension in both L1 and L2 contexts. It also focuses specifically on the importance of using discourse sensitive graphic organizers. The chapter then describes research on teaching discourse structure awareness, and concludes with implications for instruction.

In Chapter 6, we find evidence that opposition successor parties from more closed opportunity structures experience centrifugal strains caused by the amalgamation of ideological orientations and perspectives that they represent. These strains lead to elite polarization that cause movement fracture and collapse. Conversely, opposition successor parties from more open opportunity structures are ideologically more coherent and thus do not suffer the same centrifugal tensions. Second, we see that nearly all opposition successor parties experience a dramatic decline in popularity after founding elections, due the ephemerality of symbolic resources in general (oppositional credibility, in this context). The positive reputations that helped opposition groups persuade citizens to vote for them in founding elections break down under economic strain and political disfunction that so frequently plague new democracies. Finally, we see that in contexts in which authoritarian state institutions persist beyond the transition, the resurgence of state repression against opposition successor parties becomes more likely, while authoritarian successor parties, in contrast, can integrate former regime members into the new democratic political system.