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Using an optimality theoretic analysis, this study offers a conception of the problem of plural realization in Eastern Andalusian Spanish (EAS) where plural suffix /s/ was deleted diachronically that differs from other accounts that assign the EAS plural an underlying suffixal /s/ synchronically. Using alignment constraints, we argue that plural /s/ does not appear in the underlying form synchronically in EAS, but that instead the plural morpheme is represented by a floating [–ATR]PL feature that aligns to the right edge of the word and spreads left. The [–ATR] feature, represented phonetically as a laxing or opening of vowels, applies to all mid vowels, low vowels in word final position, and combines with vowel epenthesis to explain Eastern Andalusian pluralization tendencies in words with final consonants. We discuss the behavior of high vowels, which can be transparent to harmony, and focus in particular on the plural of words that end in a final stressed vowel that have been rarely discussed in the EAS literature. We develop an optimality-theoretic analysis on the Granada variety and extend that analysis to other varieties with somewhat different patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the case of O Movimento Brasil Livre (The Free Brazil Movement), or MBL, this article interrogates key assumptions about the nature of networked digital activism. The MBL, formed in the early 2010s by a Koch‐funded network of libertarian student groups, utilized a combination of activist training and strategic media engagement to organize a series of mass mobilizations in 2015 against supposed corruption within the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) administration under President Dilma Rousseff. Organized through MBL Facebook pages and promoted via YouTube and television appearances by movement leaders, these protests brought millions of Brazilian citizens to the streets in a wave of protests that eventually sparked Dilma's impeachment in May 2016. Deploying the conceptual framework of right‐wing Leninism, this article argues that conservative groups like the MBL are able to construct digital protest movements with revolutionary political ramifications due to their embrace of strategies originally formulated by Lenin, including the training of groups of ideologically coherent and committed cadres and the pursuit of dual power formation where the current political order is ruptured from the inside. Understanding how right‐wing activists mobilize digital media is of paramount importance for both countering their influence and developing strategies for the Left. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the controversial charge of Netflix imperialism made in 2019 by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation president Catherine Tait, this piece attempts to develop a theoretical and technical framework for understanding whether the American content provider/streaming service is engaging in 'media imperialism' by rapidly and expansively importing its service into other nations--often to the chagrin of governments and other media companies. Reading a variety of textual sources ranging from trade publications to industry press outlets to popular autobiographies, we will argue that the company is engaged in a hybrid form of media imperialism and platform imperialism through a variety of industrial practices: vertical integration built around a proprietary platform, transnational scaling up of production at a rapid pace, and engaging in corporate practices that systematically disregard accountability and legal regulation. The article ends with examining how national governments and inter-imperialist rivalries might complicate Netflix's ambitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article delineates key links between right-wing populism and epidemiological denialism. Building on a comparative analysis of central tropes from Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro's 2018 campaign and his public-facing response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we argue that his engagement during both periods employs two key elements of right-wing populism: Antielitism, or the view that the political establishment is irredeemably disconnected from the citizenry, and anti-pluralism, or the blaming of political and social problems on scapegoat populations. During the COVID-19 outbreak, this denigration of public trust fuels denialism or the systemic attempt to downplay severity to minimize public response. Developing a thematic analysis around Bolsonaro's speeches, interviews, and personal social media, we address how anti-elitist and anti-pluralist strategies from the 2018 campaign inform the pandemic response. These include the discrediting of governmental bodies, the villainization of progressive activists, and the assignation of blame on foreign actors. Our goal is to provide an in-depth case study of how communication bolstering epidemiological denialism is propagated--an increasingly vital conversation as right-wing populism and health misinformation proliferate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shows that the high-ranking syllable contact constraint is the driving force behind the well-known nasalization and lateralization phenomena in Korean. Develops an optimality-theoretic analysis of Korean nasalization and lateralization in which SyllCon is an undominated constraint. (Author/VWL)

Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of roughly 700 articles published on the Breitbart News 'Cartel Chronicles' site between 2015 and 2021, this article analyzes the ways conservative citizen journalism projects strategically mobilize key tropes from international human rights to justify calls for militarization on the US/Mexico Border. Specifically, it details how widely accepted human rights frameworks like freedom of the press and protection of the rights of children are used both as evidence of humanitarian breakdown within Mexico and as a condemnation of the Mexican government. I argue that through its selective and motivated employment of human rights, Breitbart is promoting a form of 'bullshit human rights', defined as the purposefully misleading mobilization of rights claims deracinated from their context and repurposed without consideration for the truth they hold for the individuals who experience them. The suffering documented by 'Cartel Chronicles' serves only as fuel for Breitbart's larger political project of militarizing the US/Mexico Border without consideration of human costs. Paradoxically, bullshit human rights call for an increase in violence in order to protect against human suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues against the view that the unusual reflex of ṣād as [st] in Faifi Arabic stems from a metathesized version of the Proto-Semitic glottalized affricate *cʾ ([tsʾ]), as in Alfaifi and Behnstedt (2010: 53-4), where [st] is assumed to pattern as monosegmental. Instead we propose that the [st] reflex of ṣād in Faifi Arabic reflects a South Arabian ejective or glottalized fricative *sʾ as a substrate feature. We first argue that Faifi Arabic [st] patterns as bisegmental based on linguistic argumentation internal to the dialect. We then discuss *s' as a feature of South Arabian varieties that can be considered as part of the Faifi substrate. We then detail how it is phonetically plausible for ejective sʾ to 'break' into a sequence of a fricative followed by a stop, such as [st], accounting for its bisegmental patterning and its realization as pharyngealized [ṣ] where [st] is phonotactically impossible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most common language games in Tagalog impose consonant articulations on vowels. This theory provides a simple account of diphthongal behavior, explains the high number of inserted labial consonants, and supports the concept of the demisyllable.

This article draws on the case of La Gordiloca, a Facebook-based journalist from Laredo, TX, to interrogate the increasing role of social media within news-making processes. Applauded by The New York Times as a paragon of twenty-first century journalism and under scrutiny from local businesses and law enforcement for defamation and misuse of official information, she occupies a space between digital journalist and social media celebrity. Combining a content analysis with focus groups of Laredo residents, we argue that her work reflects a constitutive paradox unique to social media journalism: Whereas new technologies expand opportunities for citizens to participate in the process of news production, they also enable the corrosion of norms/practices that oriented previous forms of news production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pharyngealization, also known as emphasis, is phonologically a very productive process in most Arabic varieties. This study first overviews the typology of pharyngealization in Arabic dialects and then focuses on the analysis of pharyngealization (i.e., emphasis spread) in a subvariety of rural Jordanian Arabic, which differs considerably from other dialects. The preferred structure in this subvariety of Jordanian Arabic is the emphatic syllable (the domain of emphasis) which is the driving force behind the spread of emphasis from underlying emphatics to other segments. This study also offers an Optimality-Theoretic analysis of ES in this Jordanian subvariety, where EMPHATIC-s is an undominated constraint whose hierarchical interaction with other high ranked and lower ranked constraints always favors candidates with an emphatic syllable over other candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kuki-Chin group of the Tibeto-Burman language family consists of upwards of 50 languages spoken mainly in western Myanmar, predominantly in Chin State and in neighboring areas of India and Bangladesh (Simons & Fennig (eds.). 2019. Ethnologue: Languages of the world, 21st edn. Dallas Texas: SIL International. Online version. http://www.ethnologue.com/). In the many daughter languages of Proto–Kuki-Chin, syllable structure simplification has yielded a synchronic situation in which individual languages are spread along a cline ranging from more conservative languages, some with complex onsets and vowel length distinctions, to more innovative languages, some with no coda consonants at all. The distribution and phonetic realization of these features vary across the Kuki-Chin group, raising a number of relevant questions about the underlying phonological representations of the Kuki-Chin syllable. This paper surveys representative structures from a variety of Kuki-Chin languages in order to highlight issues in syllable structure across these little-studied languages. In doing so, we aim to both unify observations on Kuki-Chin phonology related to the syllable, and to propose research that will further elucidate its structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses incipient /aI/-raising in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Acoustic analysis of word list data from 27 participants targets both typical items (e.g., write, writing) and monomorphemic trochaic words often overlooked in previous research (e.g., Nike, bison, cyber, tiger). It reports four major /aI/ production patterns in the Fort Wayne data, which range on a continuum from no /aI/-raising to phonological raising of /aI/ (i.e., raising before t-flaps, a pattern of Canadian raising referred to as Dialect A). In the middle of the continuum is found the elusive Dialect B, a pattern of Canadian raising first documented by Martin Joos in 1942 in which raising occurs in write but not before t-flaps. The authors find that speakers of this type of raising tend not to raise in any trochaic words. In fact, raising in monomorphemic trochaic words, such as Nike or bison, is exceedingly rare in the Fort Wayne data. In tandem with the variation observed within Fort Wayne, the fact that raising has not yet extended into monomorphemic trochaic words further suggests that raising is incipient in this variety. The authors propose that Dialect B is not a separate dialect at all but an incipient variety of Dialect A. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The archetype of the orphan has a long history in the western cultural imaginary. In need of culturally and politically legitimized familial structures to ensure the child's moral and physical needs are met, substitute parental figures loom large in narratives of orphanhood where the (anti-)hero comes good. This article will consider the presentation of female orphans in two films: Carla Simón's Catalan film Estiu 1993/Summer 1993 (Simón, 2017) presents the story of Frida, who has just lost her parents to AIDS and is relocated to her aunt and uncle's rural family home, while Saura's celebrated Cría cuervos/Raise Ravens (Saura, 1976) focuses on Ana, one of three sisters recently orphaned and now under the care of their aunt in late-Francoist Madrid. The article will examine the similarities between the two films' thematic and formal approaches to the subject matter, attending to their respective socio-historical contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]