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The roots and routes of cultural evolution are still a mystery. Here, we aim to lift a corner of that veil by illuminating the deep origins of encultured freedoms, which evolved through centuries-long processes of learning to pursue and transmit values and practices oriented toward autonomous individual choice. Analyzing a multitude of data sources, we unravel for 108 Old World countries a sequence of cultural evolution reaching from (a) ancient climates suitable for dairy farming to (b) lactose tolerance at the eve of the colonial era to (c) resources that empowered people in the early industrial era to (d) encultured freedoms today. Historically, lactose tolerance peaks under two contrasting conditions: cold winters and cool summers with steady rain versus hot summers and warm winters with extensive dry periods (Study 1). However, only the cold/wet variant of these two conditions links lactose tolerance at the eve of the colonial era to empowering resources in early industrial times, and to encultured freedoms today (Study 2). We interpret these findings as a form of gene-culture coevolution within a novel thermo-hydraulic theory of freedoms.

Previous research showed an emerging appreciation of literary narratives on second reading, whereas such effects fail to occur for the same narratives depleted of literary features. This might suggest that appreciation is associated with readers' acknowledgment of the purposefulness of literary devices on rereading. It may also be that the increase in appreciation is caused by a general sense of increased comprehension, a more common effect that may also occur on rereading nonliterary narratives. Three studies were conducted in which participants reread either original literary texts or manipulated versions in which literary style aspects were normalized. Using linear mixed models we examined the relationship between levels of literariness, perceived comprehension, and appreciation as well as the mediating influence of participants' reading experience. The results show that an increase in appreciation seems mainly related to an increase in perceived comprehension, independent of the level of literariness.

Two approaches to the statistical analysis of texts are suggested, both based on the study of numerals occurring in literary texts. The first approach is related to the study of the frequency distribution of various leading digits of numerals occurring in the text. This approach is convenient for testing whether a group of texts has common authorship: the latter is dubious if the frequency distributions are sufficiently different. The second approach requires the study of the frequencies of numerals themselves. The approach yields information about the author, stylistic and genre peculiarities of the texts and is suited for advanced study of authorial texts. The hypothesis that I. Ilf and E. Petrov are fake authors of novels "The Twelve Chairs" and "The Little Golden Calf", and they were ghosted by M. Bulgakov, is checked. The frequency distribution of numerals, as well as its cluster analysis, do not confirm this hypothesis.

Summary The movement of repetition is irrevocably linked to the constitution of the human body and is therefore a human condition. The process of hominisation makes this clear. In the body of Homo sapiens and in his movements a connection between nature and culture is created. The movement of repetition is of central importance. Repetition is essential for the evolution of Homo sapiens, the development of communities and individuals. Repetitions are mimetic; they lead to productive imitations in which new elements and events also emerge. Mimetic movements and the repetitive aspects they contain open up the historical and cultural world to people. Repetitions in rituals lead to the acquisition of an implicit silent practical body knowledge. The emotions arising in mimetic processes are movements through which an orientation in the world takes place. The imaginations based on the eccentricity of the human being and on movements of repetition contribute to the development of a collective and individual imaginary.

Emergent properties of global political culture were examined using data from the World History Survey involving 6,699 university students in 35 societies evaluating 40 figures from world history. Multi-dimensional scaling and factor analysis techniques found only limited forms of universality in evaluations across Western, Catholic/Orthodox, Muslim, and Asian country clusters. The highest consensus across cultures involved scientific innovators, with Einstein having the highest evaluation overall. Peaceful humanitarians like Mother Theresa and Gandhi followed. There was much less cross-cultural consistency in the evaluation of negative figures, led by Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. Latent class analysis was used to identify four global representational profiles: Secular and Religious Idealists were overwhelmingly prevalent in Christian societies, and Political Realists were common in Muslim and Asian societies. An argument is made for understanding global political culture as dialogue with a historical trajectory that resists unification. info:eu-repo/semantics/published SCOPUS: ar.j

AbstractPronouns as a diagnostic feature of language relatedness have been widely explored in historical and comparative linguistics. In this article, we focus on South American pronouns, as a potential example of items with their own history passing between the boundaries of language families, what has been dubbed in the literature as ‘historical markers’. Historical markers are not a direct diagnostic of genealogical relatedness among languages, but account for phenomena beyond the grasp of the historical comparative method. Relatedness between pronoun systems can thus serve as suggestions for closer studies of genealogical relationships. How can we use computational methods to help us with this process? We collected pronouns for 121 South American languages, grouped them into classes and aligned the phonemes within each class (assisted by automatic methods). We then used Bayesian phylogenetic tree inference to model the birth and death of individual phonemes within cognate sets, rather than the typical practice of modelling whole cognate sets. The reliability of the splits found in our analysis was low above the level of language family, and validation on alternative data suggested that the analysis cannot be used to infer general genealogical relatedness among languages. However, many results aligned with existing theories, and the analysis as a whole provided a useful starting point for future analyses of historical relationships between the languages of South America. We show that using automated methods with evolutionary principles can support progress in historical linguistics research.

Creole languages consistently show valency patterns that cannot be traced back to their lexifier languages, but derive from their substrate languages. In this paper, I start out from the observation that a convincing case for substrate influence can be made by adopting a world-wide comparative approach. If there are recurrent matches between substrate and creole structures in a given construction type, in creoles of different world regions and with different substrates, then we can exclude the possibility of an accident, and substrate influence is the only explanation. The construction types that I will look at are ditransitive constructions (Section 3), weather constructions (Section 4), experiencer constructions (Section 5), and motion constructions (Section 6). I will draw on the unique typological data source from the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures (Michaelis et al., 2013a; 2013b). My conclusion is that the data provided in AP i CS support the claim that during creolization, valency patterns have been systematically calqued into the nascent creoles.

The paper shows that a single aspect operator successfully generates the interpretations of Russian perfective and imperfective forms, if the following requirements are met. First, the default aspect operator has to be based on the notion of state change. Secondly, the output of the operator is filtered by semantic and morphological blocking constraints.

AbstractChanging weather conditions and barometer changes usually coincide. Accordingly, the propositions that my barometer falls and that the weather conditions deteriorate are quite coherent—espe...