English Medium Instruction (EMI) is a burgeoning field of interest for researchers and practitioners; however, to date its sociocultural and political implications have not been widely considered. This book addresses that concern by situating EMI within wider sociopolitical contexts of knowledge and language. It foregrounds the notion of “Critical EMI,” bringing together applied linguists to revisit EMI in higher education from critical sociocultural perspectives. The notion of criticality is conceptualized as an attempt at addressing issues of ideology, policy, identity, social justice, and the politics of English. The chapters explore Critical EMI concerns in diverse settings across five continents, and present insights for the theory, research, policy, and practice of EMI. The book also problematizes the neocolonial spread and dominance of English through EMI. Calling for an explicit and inclusive EMI praxis, it is essential reading for researchers of applied linguistics and English language education, as well as teacher practitioners.

Recent progress in deep learning and natural language processing has given rise to powerful models that are primarily trained on a cloze-like task and show some evidence of having access to substantial linguistic information, including some constructional knowledge. This groundbreaking discovery presents an exciting opportunity for a synergistic relationship between computational methods and Construction Grammar research. In this chapter, we explore three distinct approaches to the interplay between computational methods and Construction Grammar: (i) computational methods for text analysis, (ii) computational Construction Grammar, and (iii) deep learning models, with a particular focus on language models. We touch upon the first two approaches as a contextual foundation for the use of computational methods before providing an accessible, yet comprehensive overview of deep learning models, which also addresses reservations construction grammarians may have. Additionally, we delve into experiments that explore the emergence of constructionally relevant information within these models while also examining the aspects of Construction Grammar that may pose challenges for these models. This chapter aims to foster collaboration between researchers in the fields of natural language processing and Construction Grammar. By doing so, we hope to pave the way for new insights and advancements in both these fields.

Originating from irreversible statistical mechanics, the Mori–Zwanzig (M–Z) formalism provides a mathematical procedure for the development of coarse-grained models of complex systems, such as turbulence, that lack scale separation. The M–Z formalism begins with the application of a specialized class of projectors to the governing equations. By leveraging these projectors, the M–Z procedure results in a reduced system, commonly referred to as the generalized Langevin equation (GLE). The GLE encapsulates the system’s behavior on a macroscopic (resolved) scale. The influence of the microscopic (unresolved) scales on resolved scales appears as a convolution integral – often referred to as memory – and an additional noise term. In essence, fully resolved Markovian dynamics is transformed into coarse grained non-Markovian dynamics. The appearance of the memory term in the GLE demonstrates that the coarse-graining procedure leads to nonlocal memory effects, which have to be modeled. This chapter introduces the mathematics behind the projection approach and the derivation of the GLE. Beyond the theoretical developments, the practical application of the M–Z procedure in the construction of subgrid-scale models for large eddy simulations is also presented.

There is a potentially correct analogy between international tax regulation and platform content regulation because there is an homology between capital and information. On this basis, this chapter foregrounds three resemblances between tax regulation and content moderation. First, non-State actors access, manage and regulate through platforms flows of capital and similarly flows of information exploiting regulatory differentials, so that there is the need for regulatory alignment in both cases. Second, since both capital and information escape the regulatory reach of States, a common standard must be achieved in both cases. Third, such common standard can be achieved only if home States of Global Actors owning platforms assume together the obligation to moderate profit diversion as well as immoderate use of platform content through procedural accountability. The chapter explains the scope of the global tax problem, and then details the process by which policies have been developed and describes the tax implications of platforms. The chapter concludes suggesting lessons that can be learned from tax regulation for platform responsibility rules: the homology between capital and information points to regulatory structures that reduce excessive opportunism and immoderation in the use of computational capital by platforms.

Chapter 6 turns to the attack on the Whig view of the state, and especially to the rejection of the Whig contention that no arbitrary or despotic power is any longer being exercised. The chapter focuses on two major challenges to this complacency. One line of criticism pointed out that, with the creation and rapid growth of the national debt, enormous sums were now being paid directly to the crown, thereby bringing an obvious danger of despotism. The second and epoch- making challenge came from the American colonies. When the British government resolved in 1764 to tax them directly, the colonists denounced this innovation as an obvious act of despotism. They argued that, because they had no representation in the British Parliament, they had no means of expressing or withholding their consent. They were thus being subjected to a wholly arbitrary form of power, and were consequently being treated as slaves. The chapter traces the development of this patriot case in the writings of Otis, Hopkins, Dulany, Dickinson, Jefferson and other colonists, and concludes with the defence of the patriot cause by Price and Paine and the publication of the Declaration of Independence.

We present an overview of constructional approaches to signed languages, beginning with a brief history and the pioneering work of William C. Stokoe. We then discuss construction morphology as an alternative to prior analyses of sign structure that posited a set of non-compositional lexical signs and a distinct set of classifier signs. Instead, signs are seen as composed of morphological schemas containing both specific and schematic aspects of form and meaning. Grammatical construction approaches are reviewed next, including the marking of argument structure on verbs in American Sign Language (ASL). Constructional approaches have been applied to the issue of the relation between sign and gesture across a variety of expressions. This work often concludes that signs and gesture interact in complex ways. In the final section, we present an extended discussion of several grammatical and discourse phenomena using a constructional analysis based on Cognitive Grammar. The data come from Argentine Sign Language (LSA) and includes pointing constructions, agreement constructions, antecedent-anaphor relations, and constructions presenting point of view in reported narrative.

Gabel’s chapter takes a look at Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) in Kreol Seselwa (KS), a creole language spoken on the Seychelles. It argues that SVCs are part of KS grammar and that they can best be captured by a continuum approach since they show prototypical and non-prototypical semantic and syntactic properties. Furthermore, SVCs in KS have different distributions depending on spoken and written language as well as production and perception. Finally, she shows that SVCs in KS are subject to age variation thereby exhibiting a potential development in the syntax of KS.

The vivisection debates are an undervalued nexus for nineteenth-century beliefs about pain. Close readings of the Report of the 1876 Royal Commission on Vivisection reveal how conceptualisations of animal physiology, anaesthetic action, reflex responses, and pithing undermined direct correspondences between injury, pain, and expressions of suffering. The chapter then examines representations of graphic registration and recording technologies in laboratory handbooks. These devices seemed to offer a new, universal, wordless language, yet frequently conjured precisely those images of inscription, symbolism, and transliteration that many scientists were anxious to avoid. The chapter then presents animalographies and antivivisection poetry ‘spoken’ by animals. By purporting to access a more complete and individual non-human consciousness, these texts presented themselves as rivals to mechanical laboratory devices. Nevertheless, despite efforts to ‘listen’ to animals, antivivisectionists and experimental scientists encountered the same vexatious problem: Language, like pain, seemed equally troubled by the distance between signifier and signified.