Canonical Questions Research Articles

Defining ‘Russianness’, defining ‘Austrianness’ – defining ‘Europe’: Austrian Tchaikovsky imageries during the Allied occupation, 1945–55

ABSTRACT This essay will examine critical discourses regarding Peter Tchaikovsky as a symbolic figurehead of high-brow Russian music in the two most widely circulated Austrian newspapers of the Allied occupation period: the Wiener Kurier (WK) and the Salzburger Nachrichten (SN), both affiliated with the US administration. In the context of Austria’s (problematic) denazification, post-war reconstruction, nation-building and reorientation towards the West, the reception of Tchaikovsky serves as a litmus test of negotiations concerning questions of cultural capital, habitus, musical canon, and nationalism (Otherness), Austria’s position as Europe’s Musikland, and a composer’s branding. Influential critics evaded a clear positioning within the Cold War ‘East–West’ context by appropriating Tchaikovsky for constructing an Austrian, European identity from a position of cultural power. This led to the coexistence of several musical ‘Russias’ in the Austrian public space: Soviet cultural diplomacy, US promotion of musical modernity (Stravinsky) and Austrians’ own, and self-interested, reconstruction of a Russian ‘national’ canon. Wiener Kurier and Salzburger Nachrichten columnists display a significant degree of middle-term continuity, while developing remarkable independence from and agency vis-à-vis the hard power presence of both the United States and the USSR, by subverting the superpowers’ cultural offensives, engaging in Austrian prestige politics, and affirming their interpretative sovereignty and knowledge-power within the re-emerging Austrian musical field. The music critics’ robust judgment, combined with the relative popularity that Tchaikovsky enjoyed, affirmed the considerable autonomy of the cultural field, and the discursive pre-eminence of musical conservatives and their knowledge-power.

Conjectural questions in Sm’algyax

Abstract This paper discusses evidentials and their behaviour in interrogative sentences, based on novel data from Sm’algyax (Tsimshianic, British Columbia/Alaska). Typically, evidentials in declarative sentences receive a Speaker-anchored orientation (“According to my evidence, p”), and in interrogative sentences they receive an Addressee-anchored orientation (“According to your evidence, Q?”). This shift from Speaker to Addressee in questions is referred to as Interrogative Flip, which has been argued to be an obligatory process in canonical questions (Korotkova, Natasha. 2016. Heterogeneity and universality in the evidential domain. UCLA Doctoral dissertation). I discuss a particular evidential sn “Conjectural”, which exhibits variable interrogative flip in questions. The anchor of sn may shift to the Addressee, or it may result in a “Conjectural Question” reading, which I suggest involves a particular orientation of sn to neither the Speaker nor the Addressee. Adopting a simple modal analysis for evidentials, and a pragmatic approach to interrogative flip (Garrett, Edward John. 2001. Evidentiality and assertion in Tibetan. UCLA Doctoral dissertation; Korotkova, Natasha. 2016. Heterogeneity and universality in the evidential domain. UCLA Doctoral dissertation), I suggest that the variable interrogative flip behaviour falls out from the pragmatics of (non-)canonical questions (Farkas, Donka F. 2022. Non-intrusive questions as a special type of non-canonical questions. Journal of Semantics 39(2). 295–337).

The Celebration of Daily Mass with No Faithful Present after Vatican II

abstract: In many large gatherings of priests, seminaries, and formation houses, daily concelebration among priests has become the default option in recent decades. A canonical question arises. Can a priest who has daily access to a concelebrated Mass legitimately choose to celebrate alone due to his devotion to the Eucharist? Contrary to the prevalent misconception that Vatican II aimed at eliminating private Mass through the promotion of concelebration, canon 904 encourages priests to offer daily Masses even when the faithful cannot be present. Canon 906 allows priests to celebrate Mass alone for a just and reasonable cause. Canon 902 stipulates that a priest has the complete freedom to offer Mass individually. This article shows that it is licit for a priest to celebrate alone even if there is a concelebration available, as long as the concelebration does not take place simultaneously in the same church or oratory. A Mass celebrated even without the participation of the faithful remains the center of the entire Church and the heart of priestly existence. The canonical right of a priest to celebrate alone, based on Vatican II's teachings on daily Mass in the life of a priest, must be safeguarded.

In search of Paulus Vladimiri: Canon, reception, and the (in)conceivability of an Eastern European ‘founding father’ of international law

AbstractWhile many international lawyers are familiar with Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546), very few have even heard of Paulus Vladimiri (1370–1435) – a Polish priest and jurist who made striking similar arguments to Vitoria on legal universality and the rights of non-Christians a full century before Vitoria. This divergence of consciousness, I argue, provides a unique opportunity to explore questions of canon, reception, and the role of ‘founding fathers’ within international legal thought. Centring Vladimiri as an ‘Eastern European’ figure, I argue that his non-reception is largely the result of how Eastern Europe implicitly functions as a distinctly liminal space within international legal thought that makes any possible ‘founding father’ from this region immensely difficult to imagine. I examine this dynamic through the differing postwar efforts of the Polish jurists Kazimierz Grzybowski and C. H. Alexandrowicz to include Vladimiri within the international legal canon. In examining the background structures of twentieth-century international law, I conclude that, in a manner directly connected to the liminality of Eastern Europe, neither Soviet nor Third World nor Western imaginations could easily receive Vladimiri within their fundamentally political narratives of normative order that shaped their international legal approaches. However, despite this historic non-reception, I argue that Vladimiri, and the question of Eastern Europe more generally, holds great promise in our current global moment. Particularly, engaging Eastern Europe’s liminal character offers a more sociologically grounded alternative to the reductionist Schmittian view of international law as a product of inescapable conflict in a world of exclusionary ‘greater spaces’.

Cultural Capital: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

<i>Cultural Capital</i>: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

The prosody of surprise questions in Estonian

This paper examines the role of prosody in a little-studied type of non-canonical questions: syntactically and lexically canonical interrogative sentences that have been uttered by the speaker in order to express surprise. The study compares Estonian surprise questions with string-identical information-seeking questions elicited by means of context descriptions. The materials comprise 1,008 utterances by 21 speakers.It is concluded that the prosody of the examined utterances has three roles that are relevant to the expression of surprise by ordinary interrogative sentences. First, the enhanced prosodic realisation of the utterances as manifested in a longer duration, a wider pitch range, and a more frequent occurrence of upstepped pitch accents conveys emotional expressivity. Second, lower pitch along with the creaky voice quality signals that the utterances are not canonical questions, while the main prosodic correlate of information-seeking questions is high pitch. Phonological pitch accents and boundary tones, however, are not used to distinguish between surprise questions and information-seeking questions. Third, the nuclear accent placement signals an information structure that is associated with the expression of incongruity or counterexpectation: the focal accent can evoke an alternative (set) that arises from the speaker’s expectations.

The New Stakeholder Theory on Organizational Purpose

The new stakeholder theory (NST) grapples with two canonical questions: Which stakeholders are enfranchised in organizations? How is the value created through stakeholder collaboration distributed and experienced by stakeholders? This paper first describes how the NST builds on original stakeholder theory to ask these two specific questions. The defining features of the NST are (i) a broad range of dependent variables, (ii) descriptiveness, (iii) formalized analysis, (iv) boundaries on stakeholder enfranchisement, and (v) analytic links to other established theories. The paper then assesses the assumptions and implications of this theory for understanding organizational purpose. A primary idea is that the NST conceptualizes purpose as originating in the goals, needs, and interests of stakeholders as complex, nuanced actors. Under the NST, the organization is conceived of as a tool—a functionalized construction—through which enfranchised stakeholders pursue a shared purpose that leads to experiences of stakeholder value in terms that are defined by the relevant stakeholders themselves. The survival and profitability of an organization depends on its effectiveness and efficiency as a tool for accomplishing mutual stakeholder aims, which are what define organizational purpose.History: This paper has been accepted for the Strategy Science Special Issue on Corporate Purpose.Funding: Funded by Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada.

Intonation correlates of canonical and non-canonical wh-in-situ questions in Spanish

This project investigates the intonation of canonical (information-seeking) and non-canonical wh-in-situ echo questions conveying repetition and surprise in Northern Peninsular Spanish. Data from 14 female participants were collected via a contextualised elicitation task. The following correlates were examined: (i) the melodic curve of the wh-in-situ question, (ii) the nuclear peak (in Hz), (iii) the wh-tonal range (i.e. the difference between the lowest nuclear Low and the highest boundary High), and (iv) the nuclear contour. Results show that all wh-in-situ questions investigated display similar melodic curves and nuclear contours, but canonical questions have significantly lower nuclear peaks and wh-tonal ranges than non-canonical questions. Echo-repetition and echo-surprise questions also differ in nuclear peak and wh-tonal range. We propose a tentative analysis, whereby canonical in-situ questions have a final H% boundary tone, in contrast to non-canonical questions, which have an extra-High (upstepped) final boundary tone (¡H%).

A Treasure to Be Shared: Understanding Anglicanorum Coetibus ed. by Walter Oxley and Ulrich Rhode, S.J.

Reviewed by: A Treasure to Be Shared: Understanding Anglicanorum Coetibus ed. by Walter Oxley and Ulrich Rhode, S.J. Mark Woodruff Walter Oxley and Ulrich Rhode, S.J., ed. A Treasure to Be Shared: Understanding Anglicanorum Coetibus Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022 182 pages. Paperback. $34.95. Three years before he died in 1988, Michael Ramsey, the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury, was visited by a long-time collaborator with the news that he would shortly announce his resignation and be received into the Catholic Church. Ramsey responded, "If you had told me twenty-five years ago that this man whom I ordained a priest in the Church of God would one day leave his ministry to become a Roman Catholic, I would not have been believed it possible. Nowadays, I cannot say that I am surprised." Not long before, Ramsey had given a serious of lectures to Anglican seminarians in the United States (The Anglican Spirit, 2004) in which he described Anglicanism not as a church that was an end in itself, but providential and necessary for the authentic re-composition of the universal Church as a whole. They are a fine reflection on what it is about the shared history, perspective, and tradition—social, theological, ecclesiological, spiritual, pastoral, and liturgical—that it matters to Anglicanism to offer to the whole Church in the spiritual exchange of gifts of which John Paul II wrote, just as Anglicanism has itself learned so much from other churches. So, what is this patrimony as identified by the Catholic Church? A Treasure to be Shared provides the considered reflections of key Catholic figures who witnessed the rising tide of groups longing to transfer to the Catholic Church, yet not lose who they were and what had formed them. These accounts of the historical background, the canonical conundrum, the ecumenical controversies, and the Catholic Church's shaping of the Anglican patrimony that it wished to receive, as a kind of so far missing expression of its faith, crucially come not from the immediate beneficiaries or third-party commentators, or apologists for one cause or another, but from those involved in the development of Anglicanorum Coetibus at close hand. Did it come twenty years too late? Cardinal Basil Hume of West-minster told Anglican clergy hoping to be received and ordained [End Page 125] priests in the Catholic Church in 1993: "Bring your Anglican tradition with you. Do not leave it behind. We need it." In his essay on canonical questions, Gianfranco Ghirlanda, S.J., Rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University at the time of Anglicanorum Coetibus' release and now a Cardinal, convincingly explains that earlier proposals for corporate reunion could only prove inconclusive. The late Msgr. Mark Langham, from his role at the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity as Anglicanorum Coetibus was crystallizing, reflects in his essay that official Anglican bodies had so far failed to "think things through" (158–159) on the implications of their dialogue with the Catholic Church, or to be consistent in their account of faith and order, or moral teaching. Yet Ghirlanda's engrossing account of discussions back and forth between the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, and ultimately Pope Benedict XVI, reveals the conviction in Rome that a defining moment had at last arrived, and that it was important to keep faith with those who had taken the Catholic Church at its word—if only the right formula could be found. Resolving upon the structure of the personal ordinariate recalls the proposal at the Malines Conversations from Dom Lambert Beauduin that the way to unite the identity and tradition of Anglicans with the Catholic Church was through a distinctive entity: "the Anglican Church, united not absorbed." But to some Anglican observers the establishment of the ordinary's office as vicarious, as if it signified a merely delegated power rather than a position distinct from that of the local bishop and protected for this purpose by immediacy to the Apostolic See, fell short of a fitting recognition of what Anglican tradition constitutes in a reintegrated Church. Ghirlanda is frank...

Questions of Canon in Gilbert Hernandez's "Palomar" Comics

"While questions of misrepresentation are starting to be addressed in academia — acknowledging racial, cultural, gender, and artistic diversity — there is still much work to be done to close the gap between the literary canon and what contemporary literature actually looks like. These efforts have been a step in the right direction, but representation of unconventional literatures is often spotty, boiling down entire literary scenes into one book. This is especially true for those that offer formal or structural challenges – including multilingual and graphic narratives that don’t easily fit into a canonical “box.” Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar comics, serialized in Love and Rockets and later collected into graphic novels, demonstrate literature that is difficult to categorize and is thus excluded from academic attention. The three graphic novels that make up the bulk of Palomar tell funny yet tragic stories of individual passions and community responsibility in a small Latin American village. As the series progresses, Hernandez transforms from an author dominated by his influences — Hispanic literature and 1960s comics — to an artist at the forefront of both “scenes,” subverting the expectations of each to great effect. Palomar’s last novel, Poison River, is a masterpiece of graphic fiction that should be considered among the best of all twentieth-century literature – Chicano, graphic, or otherwise. Though the canon has traditionally excluded unique voices like Hernandez, his work deserves to be reevaluated academically and have its complexity considered a strength, not a reason for exclusion."

Variation at the Syntax–Pragmatics Interface: Discourse Particles in Questions

This paper focuses on the microvariation concerning the distribution and functions of certain interrogative discourse particles found in several central and southern Italian dialects. These particles show many similarities in terms of both their morphological shapes (being homophonous to the wh-phrase corresponding to English ‘what’) and their syntactic distribution within the sentence, in that they all occur at the beginning of polar questions. However, a careful analysis of their distribution across a pragmatically defined typology of canonical and non-canonical polar questions shows that these particles are not possible in all question types. In particular, two patterns emerge: in Pattern B, the particle is associated with a conventional implicature that both the speaker and the addressee are competent with respect to the issue addressed by the polar question, while in Pattern A, this implicature is restricted to the addressee competence. This point of microvariation is then analysed by assuming that both the pragmatic assumptions of competence and the discourse participants are encoded in the syntactic representation; the cartographic framework is adopted to characterize the compositional structure.

The hammer, the mallet, and the nail

The hammer, the mallet, and the nail

Anthological Canonizations of the Recent Bosnian-Herzegovinian Poetry

This work considers the question of canon as a „place of power“ and the position of literature in relation to the ideological dictates of the so-called „social reality“. In this sense, it discusses the general social, cultural, and poetic patterns on which the canon is based, that is, the canons in the most representative anthologies of recent Bosnian-Herzegovinian poetry in the last thirty years. Understanding canonization as a model of ideological impact in the production of „literary facts“, the paper explores the attitude of anthologists towards the composite integrity of Bosnian-Herzegovinian literature and at least three poietic formulas involved in the struggle for „cultural meaning“ („poetry of re-ethnicization“, „poetry of false universalism“, „poetry of differences“). The literary canon, monolithic in socialist society and reduced by political censorship, was first nationalized and later, especially in the post-war period, decentralized and turned into alternative canons. Anthologies of Bosnian- Herzegovinian poetry distinctly follow the mentioned evolution, and in that way contribute to the stratification of the canon and the breaking of its „hegemony“.

&lt;em&gt;Meh&lt;/em&gt; contributes VERUM: A study of biased questions in colloquial Singapore English

This paper analyzes the contribution of the meh particle in biased questions in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). Canonical CSE questions can be formed with inversion, or with declaratives with rising intonation (maintaining neutrality), while non-canonical questions typically require discourse particles. Meh occurs clause-finally (It’s raining meh?) and has been described to mark questions and express skepticism, encoding the opposite of what the speaker thinks to be true. Drawing from Romero and Han (2004), I propose that meh contributes the meta-conversational operator verum, which triggers the existence of an epistemic implicature.

Self-addressed questions and honorifications: The case of Japanese daroo-ka/desyoo-ka

Abstract Japanese self-addressed questions (SAQs) are either marked with SAQ question particles (i.e. kana, yara) or marked with modals daroo or desyoo. The present paper argues that the pragmatic profile of Japanese SAQs should not be limited to solitary contexts. The paper presents an experiment examining whether daroo-ka/desyoo-ka can be perceived as SAQs in the accompanied contexts. The results of the experiment indicate that Japanese SAQs can be felicitously uttered in the presence of a second (socially higher) person. Apart from the experimental study, this paper also presents a pilot study of comparing daroo-ka questions and plain information-seeking questions (i.e. those without daroo-ka) in urgent situation contexts. The preliminary results shed light on the fact that Japanese native speakers interpret daroo-ka questions as canonical questions in the performance of indirect speech acts.

Ignorance and competence implicatures in central Sicilian polar questions

In this paper we examine the distribution and functions of two optional particles found in polar questions in central Sicilian: chi and cusà. The import of these particles can best be understood if their distribution in various types of ‘non-canonical’ questions is analysed, based on the typology outlined in Farkas (2020). In Farkas’s account, canonical questions are characterized by the default assumptions of speaker ignorance and addressee competence about the question’s propositional content, while non-canonical questions lack at least one of these assumptions. This characterization of (non)-canonical questions in terms of speaker ignorance and addressee competence allows us to capture the distribution of the two particles, which strengthen these assumptions to conventional implicatures. In particular, we show that chi is conventionally associated with addressee competence, while cusà is conventionally associated with speaker ignorance. We frame this analysis in a version of the inquisitive semantics model, according to which sentence types are characterized by two parameters: the informativeness of the propositional content relative to the participants’ information state, and its inquisitiveness, that is, its potential to raise an issue. This perspective allows is to develop a formal explicit analysis of the particles’ meaning, which can in turn be successfully extended to capture their use beyond polar questions.

Brevity – format – programme: A conceptual triangle

This article outlines the theoretical tenets of considering the short film as a format. Taken as a format rather than simply a film of short duration, the conceptual triangle of brevity – format – programme is used as a foundation to reflect on the particular epistemological position of short films in film studies and to address larger questions of canon, circulation and context. Rather than working towards a codification of an essence or specificity of the short film, this article proposes that the technical term ‘format’ is a suitable concept to concretely identify and discuss the factors at play in the production and exhibition of short films.

L’organe du toucher et la neurologie du racisme : l’origine tactile de la couleur de la peau chez Claude-Nicolas Le Cat

The Organ of Touch and the Neurology of Racism: Claude-Nicolas Le Cat and the Tactile Origin of Skin Color This article aims to explore the way in which the sense of touch is analysed by the physician Claude-Nicolas Le Cat (1700-1768) in his Treatise on the color of human skin (1765), a work which testifies to the fruitful synergy between medicine and philosophy in eighteenth-century France. By the convergence of two canonical questions of early-modern biological thought - the epistemological value of touch and the question of skin colour - Le Cat’s work succeeds in drawing original conclusions both from a strictly physiological perspective and from a wider anthropological and philosophical perspective. Concerning the first aspect, Le Cat introduces a « neurological » explanation of the colour of the skin (which allows him to solve even the enigma of albinism) which opposes the most established pathological paradigm. Concerning the second aspect, the « normalisation » of the explanation of blackness, makes possible by Le Cat’s theory of touch, fits into a complex phenomenon, typical of the eighteenth century, namely the questioning of European society through the moral designation of the Other.

The Last of an Age: The Making and Unmaking of a Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Poet

The Last of an Age: The Making and Unmaking of a Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Poet

Attosecond state-resolved carrier motion in quantum materials probed by soft x-ray XANES

Recent developments in attosecond technology led to table-top x-ray spectroscopy in the soft x-ray range, thus uniting the element- and state-specificity of core-level x-ray absorption spectroscopy with the time resolution to follow electronic dynamics in real-time. We describe recent work in attosecond technology and investigations into materials such as Si, SiO2, GaN, Al2O3, Ti, and TiO2, enabled by the convergence of these two capabilities. We showcase the state-of-the-art on isolated attosecond soft x-ray pulses for x-ray absorption near-edge spectroscopy to observe the 3d-state dynamics of the semi-metal TiS2 with attosecond resolution at the Ti L-edge (460 eV). We describe how the element- and state-specificity at the transition metal L-edge of the quantum material allows us to unambiguously identify how and where the optical field influences charge carriers. This precision elucidates that the Ti:3d conduction band states are efficiently photo-doped to a density of 1.9 × 1021 cm−3. The light-field induces coherent motion of intra-band carriers across 38% of the first Brillouin zone. Lastly, we describe the prospects with such unambiguous real-time observation of carrier dynamics in specific bonding or anti-bonding states and speculate that such capability will bring unprecedented opportunities toward an engineered approach for designer materials with pre-defined properties and efficiency. Examples are composites of semiconductors and insulators like Si, Ge, SiO2, GaN, BN, and quantum materials like graphene, transition metal dichalcogens, or high-Tc superconductors like NbN or LaBaCuO. Exiting are prospects to scrutinize canonical questions in multi-body physics, such as whether the electrons or lattice trigger phase transitions.