Tmesis and movement in Avestan

Conclusions A comparison of the facts described above for Younger Avestan with those uncovered in the discussion of Gathic Avestan reveals that tmesis in Avestan was the result of either (1) a fronting of the preverb or (2) the application of rules governing the placement of the clitics (especiallyc andv). The fronting rule allowed movement of the preverb to a limited set of positions, normally initial position in the sentence, second position if initial position was taken up by an element in COMP, and, in metrical texts, to a major metrical boundary. Thus the relationship between a preverb and its verb was easily recoverable by the native speaker.This close relationship between tmesis and fronting is likely to be very old. The majority of hte Vedic and Greek examples can be analyzed as preverb-fronting,¹⁵ compare also Watkins (1963) for Celtic. It seems likely that the fronting of preverbs at least originally implied some emphasis on the semantics of the preverb, such emphasis being the normal function of fronting in the Proto-Indo-European clause. Tmesis without demonstrable preverb fronting is not found in the Avestan corpus, nor in Vedic prose, but it is not sufficiently rare in the Rigveda (given our current understanding of Rigvedic clause structure) to allow us to say that tmesis and preverb fronting were one and the same process for that language. The Avestan evidence surveyed here will thus prove crucial to the development of a comprehensive account of the diachronic development of tmesis in Indo-Iranian, and, therefore, in the Indo-European language family as a whole.I would like to thank S. Insler, S. Jamison, J. Schindler, C. Watkins and the participants in the Harvard Indo-European Colloquium for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Needless to say, they bear no responsibility for its current shortcomings. I have, in translating the Gathas, frequently imitated to a greater or lesser extent the available scholarly translations, especially those of Humbach (1959) and Insler (1975).     

The double reflex of *ai in Avestan*

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Oriental Society's 203rd Meeting (Chapel Hill, April 1993), and I am grateful for comments from the participants there, especially William Malandra. Mark Hale, Stanley Insler, Stephanie Jamison, P. Oktor Skjærvø, and Calvert Watkins all deserve special thanks for contributing much time and advice. The research for this paper was made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation.     

European private law and the challenge of plural legal subjectivities

This paper argues that the approach to questions of authority, legitimacy, and personal identity characteristic of contemporary European law presents a paradox. The power of the legal project that emerged after the French Revolution lay in its deployment of the notion of abstract legal subjectivity to challenge claimed authority. Much is made of the public law dimensions of this revolutionary moment—the creation of political constitutions establishing national citizenship and human rights standards. But the transposition of abstract legal subjectivity into the private law through national social constitutions like Civil Codes has been far less successful. Abstract legal subjectivity in public law regimes necessarily privileges some personal identities over others in its construction of citizenship. These privileged identities of public law citizenship limit how legal subjects can express their identities in the private law. The paper proposes an alternative, pluralist, theorization of the diverse, iterative character of everyday human interaction that gives content to the idea of legal subjectivity in the private law. It seeks to reconcile a public law of abstract, unitary citizenship with a private law of plural legal subjectivities in a manner that advances the project of democratic constitutionalism.     

Mapping coexistence in Italy: Reshaping the cartographic feelings of the plural nation

Rarely considered from the perspective of ordinary citizens as opposed to institutional actors, national maps have been primarily deconstructed as abstract tools of power that express nationalist agendas. This paper offers an alternative examination of the map as a performative tool of national pluralism. In tune with the most recent conceptualizations of everyday forms of nationhood, I explore multiple creative auto-cartographies of Italy as experiential images for investigating the coexistence of several senses of nationhood and cultural diversity. To this end, I combine an inductive visual content analysis of nearly three hundred remappings of Italy, uploaded online by readers of a popular national newspaper, La Repubblica, with a visual semiotic reading of six samples. Here, the playful idea of remapping the nation becomes a catalyst to produce or resist a sense of belonging to the nation, while eliciting a wider spectrum of feelings with regard to internal and external perceived meaningful others. This paper concludes that the different ways in which ordinary people map the nation have to be taken seriously, as they show evidence that these readers absorb and decode, but also resist or challenge, different mainstream discourses regarding the idea of nationality, coexistence, and cultural diversity.     

Ethics Ex Machina: popular culture and the plural futures of politics

ABSTRACT

The articulation of ethical responsibility can be conceived as a condition of ethical practice that brings into being a human subject to whom we owe consideration, and the reverse must also hold: we are brought into being – subjectified – through these relational connections. But can these connections exist between human and non-human subjects? In this short paper, we analyse the representation of artificially intelligent machines in the popular television series Westworld and the movie Ex Machina and elaborate on the boundary between human and non-human as a complex and contested ethical space. We argue that taking popular cultural representations of machine learning seriously can offer significant insight into how futures of human subjectivity and ethicopolitical responsibility might unfold. (117 words)     

中西封建君主制中的"法治"与"人治"

中西封建政治史上都存在着限制君权的传统。西欧盛行的是由日尔曼法、神法与封建法融合而成的“王在法下“的“法治“传统,在中国则表现为儒学的君主受制于“天“、“礼“的政治传统,但这类传统多流于理论或理想的层面。在中西君主制中,“谏议“虽有规范君权的效应,但最终并不能束缚君权,而君主以加冕誓词或“罪己诏“所作的政治承诺也是如此。从君权的实际运作来看,中西封建君主制都带有基本的“人治“特征。     

考古学与民族学视野中的酋邦

“酋邦”这个术语是用来研究非国家社会的社会复杂化。尽管进化类型学受到尖锐的批判,但酋邦概念和相关阐述为理解集中决策等级制和社会不平等发展的演化比较研究提供了一个框架。在过去十年间,我们对酋邦的理解因大量历史学和考古学研究而发生了根本的改变。研究方式已经不再是将社会分类为酋邦与否,而是转而考量可见变化的原因。     

The Pfahlbauproblem and the History of Lake-Dwelling Research in the Alps

The lakes of the circum-Alpine region preserve unique remains of Neolithic and Bronze Age architecture, which since their discovery in the mid-nineteenth century have invited reconstruction. Each generation since then has offered a different image of these structures. Now it seem that they may all contain an element of truth.     

城市少数民族的发展与现代化--广州满族坟场调查

广州世居满族是清代驻粤八旗兵的后裔,广州满族坟场自满族八旗兵驻防广州之时即开始兴建,已经有246年历史,它是广州市区内唯一一座公共墓园。满族坟场的兴衰沉浮记录了广州满族的发展历程,反映出城市散杂居民族于异质世界中,在共同语言、共同生活地域、共同经济生活均已消亡的情况下,如何调整族群认同以适应环境变化,在现代社化语境中维护本族群的独立与发展。