As in music, stress and accent in natural language are phenomenal prominences. A phenomenal prominence is always the most salient aspect of an acoustic contrast. A stress or accent might consist of a higher pitch, a greater amplitude, or a longer duration. It might also arise from differences in aspiration, vowel quality, or voicing. The primary purpose of stress and accent is to indicate a form’s temporal structure. It does this by indicating the positions of metrical prominences on the metrical grid. When phenomenal prominences correspond to metrical prominences, as they do in both music and language, they indicate the locations of metrical prominences and overall temporal organization. The key difference between metrical patterns in music and metrical patterns in language is that the former are typically more cyclic – or repetitive – than the latter with a more even distribution of prominences. Metrical organization is always rich and constructed automatically. Even when presented with a series of identical isochronous pulses, a hearer will automatically construct an analysis with multiple metrical levels. Stress and accent indicate which metrical analysis a listener should construct. This typically requires minimal information. A single accent per form can distinguish between the four perfect grid patterns, the simplest binary metrical patterns.

Chapter 9 summarizes the main points addressed in previous chapters. The main issues addressed in Chapter 1 are phenomenal prominence, metrical prominence, and the relationship between them. Chapter 2 addresses the Prosodic Hierarchy and structural prominence. Chapter 3 examines the typology of word stress. Chapter 4 examines two correspondence relationships: the relationship between prosodic categories and grid entries and the relationship between syntactic categories and prosodic categories. Directionality effects are addressed in Chapter 5, and grid well-formedness are addressed in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 examines boundary effects, and Chapter 8 focuses on feet.

Chapter 5 focuses on the different temporalities that are interwoven in the station, feeding into everyday experiences and informing patterns of action. In Accra’s station, just as in most bus stations in Ghana, departures do not follow designated scripts dictated by clock time; instead, they are collectively timed by the inflow of passengers. These inflows follow different rhythmic temporalities co-composed in Accra and in the destinations served by the station. By detailing the daily work activities of an inexperienced and an experienced station worker, it teases out different levels of perceptual attunement to movement and rhythm taking shape hundreds of kilometres away. It argues that the tacit dimension of temporal and kinaesthetic enskilment highlights important qualities needed to make hustle successful, which essentially requires the ability to ‘read’ the different rhythms of eruptive situations and to align and time one’s actions accordingly.

As children learn more about language, they use it more effectively to achieve their conversational goals. They choose appropriate speech acts, establish joint attention, contribute new information, take up information from others, and take turns. They learn how to enter an exchange among others from as young as age two. Their intrusions in ongoing exchanges typically contain new information. Planning an utterance takes time, and children learn to plan what to say so as to take turns on time. This can be tracked in their answers to yes/no and wh- questions, where they get faster with age. They plan pretend play, assigning roles, assigning actions, and also utterances for each character enacted. They track common ground and design referring expressions for their addressees, and they repeat new words to mark uptake. They distinguish requests from offers, and, on occasion, persist in making repeated requests themselves. They clarify what they mean when asked and offer spontaneous repairs as well. In all this, they track what the others in the exchange say and choose when to enter the exchange themselves.

The best public speakers use a series of tricks to enchant an audience. They are revealed in this chapter and include: incorporating interactions to make a crowd feel part of the performance, signposting to continually refresh interest, the showbusiness of magic moments for truly memorable talks, the use of commanding body language, how to deal with nerves and preparing for the question and answer session.

This chapter introduces the forty-six policy episodes that we study in detail. We present their timing, their politicization, and their substantive focus. The association between politicization and pressure, both problem and political pressures, proves to be rather variable across member states and looser than expected. We account for this finding by taking into account the endogenous political dynamics during the crisis. Policy responses at the national level were not only required by the failure of the CEAS and by the inability of the leaders to adopt joint solutions at the EU level, they were also the result of a series of endogenous factors at the national level, which operated independently of problem pressure and, in part at least, created the political pressure in the first place. The strategies of political entrepreneurs – Orbán, Salvini, Seehofer, and Erdogan – most clearly fit this bill, but anticipation of crisis situations to come, legislative cycles, conspicuous events like terrorist attacks, and sequels of policy decisions made earlier in the crisis all contributed to these endogenous dynamics.

This chapter contains four parts. To some, questions of time and politics may appear extraneous – they may be valid issues to study but not a central concern for contemporary IR, much less a necessary one. For them, it is just another area of study and deciding whether to pursue it is a matter of personal choice. The first section shows how international politics and time are already intertwined and argues that time impacts the main issues of concern for IR. The second shows how IR is “stuck in the past” – even as it furiously gestures toward the future – because it theorizes temporality and time as universal and linear, privileging the past, all while resisting thinking about the present. The third section briefly introduces what I call presentism, an alternative temporal imaginary for IR that explicitly values the present, thinks in time, and resists naturalizing the contemporary political dominance of universal, linear time. The final section outlines the rest of the book, identifying theoretical and conceptual implications, concretizing both by showing how it enables a different perspective on war, American foreign policy during the Trump administration, and IR’s primary theoretical architectures.

Physical time refers to five context-independent elements of time: tempo, duration, timing, sequencing, and stages. It makes two contributions. It refines the analysis of historical time by focusing on the rhytms in which it unfolds. It thus supplements the analysis of what changes in content by paying attention to how it changes in rhythm. It also refines causal analysis by treating the elements of physical time that produce distinct causal effects; these are frequently overlooked by linear notions of causality. CHA employs both physical time and historical time, and this distinguishes it from other methodologies. It configures these elements of time in distinct ways, which define the three strands of CHA: eventful, longue durée, and macro-causal analysis.

Why is birth so dangerous, even today, with modern medicine? Through historical anecdote and a contemporary case history we explore this question, discussing the process of birth and what can go wrong. By thinking about who is in control of labour – is it the mother or her fetus? – we think about how a couple might prepare for birth. The challenge posed by birth makes us look to human evolution for answers, and we describe the insight it gives into birth in some low-resource settings around the world. We tackle the question of the rising numbers of caesarean sections around the world and the possible consequences. Although it may be widely believed that a smaller baby would mean a less difficult birth, we go on to explore the risks of being small for the survival of the baby alongside new research revealing how the mother’s body limits the growth of her baby inside the womb. We discuss whether the growth of the fetus is set by the genes which the mother or the father have passed on, mother’s size, or her environment. This leads to how the fetus develops and what controls this, the focus of the next chapter.

Payne offers an account of the unsettling effects of confessions of violence by armed left guerillas or revolutionary fighters in Argentina in two moments in Argentine history. The chapter considers how the timing of these confessions shaped responses to them. In the years shortly after the transition from authoritarian rule, contentious debate moved toward a full accounting on the left for its role in past violence. In recent years, this proved less possible. As the right reconsolidated its political power, the confessional narratives from the Argentine armed left fueled fears of a backlash against the left, reinforcing a view of the left’s shared responsibility with the authoritarian regime for human rights violations, and a call for its prosecution. This silencing of open debate over the left’s past actions prevented the process of condemning violations regardless of who committed them. The prescriptive dimension to this observation highlights the need for urgency in thinking self-critically, to reflect broadly on the motives and consequences of violence, and to use moments of political advantage to condemn those parts of the (temporarily) dominant power’s past that deserve condemnation.