This article is chiefly concerned with Wallace Stegner’s ideas of aridity as the key to the understanding of the history and culture of the American West. It first examines the arguments of some major books published in the 1980s that helped strengthen Stegner’s conviction that the West was heading towards environmental disaster due to the rapidly increasing depletion of its rivers and aquifers, a ...

Games and war have always stood in a close relationship to one another. From the ancient Chinese Go, via various iterations of chess to contemporary digital simulation games, or from classical Roman gladiator battles, via martial-arts competitions to today’s first-person shooters, the skills employed and the structures limiting participants’ actions and perceptions point to a variety of equivalences ...

On the basis of syntactic and morphological evidence from West Greenlandic (WG) antipassive (AP) constructions, I argue against the view that the AP affix is nominal. The fact that the transitivizing and the antipassive affixes in a number of verbs are in complementary distribution, leads me to conclude that they both realize a light verb, transitivizing v, one on the ERG-NOM pattern, the other on ...

There is considerable variation across North Germanic when it comes to the composition of noun phrases that contain a wh-word, i.e. interrogative noun phrases such as English which N, what N and what kind of N or exclamative noun phrases such as English what a N.

The Sámis are the indigenous population of Northern Scandinavia. When the oppressive policy against the Sámi population in Norway was lightened during the 1960s, many Sámi communities established language and cultural centers for documentation and development of their language and cultural heritage as the oral tradition lost its ground in the modernization process. This paper aims to discuss how ...

Language is a complex multidimensional cognitive system that is connected to many neurocognitive capacities. The development of language is therefore strongly intertwined with the development of these capacities and their neurobiological substrates. Consequently, language problems, for example those of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), are explained by a variety of etiological ...

This article analyzes Russian aspectual prefixes from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. First, a general schema is advanced that involves a trajector, a landmark, and a relation connecting the two. Second, it is argued that there are con- ditions on the trajector involving an observer and a domain of accessibility and that the trajector of the prefix is not necessarily the same as the trajector ...

In this overview article, I seek to identify and discuss some tendencies in Slavic historical linguistics in recent years. Rather than presenting an extensive catalogue of studies on miscellaneous topics, I focus on three general issues, viz., how Slavic historical linguistics is developing in response to new theoretical ideas, methodological innovation, and "new" data. The article explores case ...