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AbstractThe ‘widow’ is a gendered, socially contingent category. Women who experienced spousal bereavement in the early middle ages faced various socio‐economic and legal ramifications; the ‘widow’ was further a rhetorical figure with a defined emotional register. The widower is, by contrast, an anachronistic category. In the absence of developed models of male ‘widowhood’, this article considers the case study of Einhard, whose letter of bereavement appears to offer a rare glimpse into early medieval interiority. Einhard did not experience the same socio‐economic and legal consequences of female widowhood. But was he, in his own rhetorical self‐expression, a male widow?

In the cultural heritage field, non-invasive analyses are becoming more important as they avoid any sampling, allowing in situ measurements to be performed. XRF is one of the most common among those techniques, as it allows elemental speciation of the sample with a range that goes from F to U. However, the main limitation of this technique on cultural heritage objects is due to their intrinsic inhomogeneity, both lateral and in-depth. If MA-XRF has overcome the lateral inhomogeneity through the collection of multiple XRF spectra in different positions, it is more difficult to find an optimal way to perform in-depth analyses. Now, only confocal micro XRF allows for precise 3D analyses, as other techniques are limited to certain kinds of samples. In recent years, however, angle-resolved XRF has given promising results in the analysis of layered samples. In this study, we will review the information about this new analytical technique and its advantages and disadvantages in studying cultural heritage objects following our recent studies.

This paper investigates the syntactic–pragmatic behavior of two expletive-like elements, namely a and chiru, in Fornese and Cilentano, two Romance varieties spoken in Northern and Southern Italy, respectively. We argue that a and chiru are not bona fide expletive subjects but discourse-pragmatic expletives, which mark zero aboutness or the absence of an aboutness referent in an utterance. The investigation of Fornese and Cilentano points towards the existence of a sub-class of null-subject languages where aboutness as a discourse feature must be structurally satisfied by merging an overt or null topic in the syntactic spine of the clause. In the absence of such an element—for example, in thetic clauses—a discourse-pragmatic expletive is externally merged as a last-resort strategy to satisfy [uAboutness]. We argue that, in these null-subject languages, the satisfaction of the discourse feature [uAboutness] is an LF requirement, which is subject to a parametric choice. We show that, in Fornese, “default” [aboutness] is satisfied in SubjP, which is the canonical syntactic position for overt subjects within a cartographic approach. In Cilentano, on the other hand, [aboutness] is satisfied in a higher position within the C-domain, namely ShiftP, the canonical syntactic position that hosts overt aboutness/shift topics.

Global grids of geophysical data or properties of the Earth are increasingly being used, perhaps because they are easy to access and make calculations on. Where original data are proprietary, researchers can sometimes obtain a form of those data within these grids, albeit at commonly lower resolution. Examples include gravity fields (Balmino et al., 2011; Sandwell et al., 2014), thicknesses of sediment overlying basement (Whittaker et al., 2013; Straume et al., 2019), Earth's topography (Smith and Sandwell, 1997; Becker et al., 2009; Ryan et al., 2009; Weatherall et al., 2015), crustal thickness (Laske et al., 2013), seafloor spreading history (Müller et al., 1997) and magnetic fields (Maus et al., 2009). However, depending on the type of study, when working with such data, we need to know the distribution of the original measurements that were used to compile those grids, hence which grid nodes contain interpolated values and which nodes are close to measurement sites. Ideally, we should be aware of the noise characteristics and resolution of such data also. The term "grid resolution" is commonly used in the literature but is misleading, as it refers to the spacing of nodes in the grid, not the resolution of the contributing data. Resolution can also be affected by processing steps used to create the grid. The article of Saada et al. (2021) describes important calculations and useful observations, though some parts of the study illustrate issues that can be encountered in analysing global grids. Given the increasing use of global grids, we provide this comment to help engender discussion.

Since the perceptions of communities at risk play a central role in managing future emergencies, contingency plans must consider the appropriate involvement of the perspectives of exposed populations. This article addresses the case of Ensenada (Puerto Varas, Chile), a settlement located in the area of direct influence of the Calbuco and Osorno volcanoes. They respectively rank 2nd and 8th in the list of highest-threat Chilean volcanoes. Here we depict the multiple risk perceptions of the inhabitants of Ensenada and the integration of human perceptions into volcanic emergency management through qualitative research, based on semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis. Our results illustrate that Ensenada represents a settlement critically exposed to multiple hazards from both volcanoes, intertwined with a series of social conditions that influence individuals’ self-perception as vulnerable to future eruptions and, simultaneously, as capable of acquiring conditions to strengthen disaster preparedness. Moreover, the locals are eager to participate in future emergency management planning and adopt preventive attitudes at community, household, and individual levels. Based on these results, we highlight the advantages of a better understanding of the causes of perceived risk and its integration into emergency management strategies for future eruptions, in order to visualise how people make sense of daily life and disaster preparedness in the midst of active volcanoes.

It has been argued in forensic science that the empirical validation of a forensic inference system or methodology should be performed by replicating the conditions of the case under investigation and using data relevant to the case. This study demonstrates that the above requirement for validation is also critical in forensic text comparison (FTC); otherwise, the trier-of-fact may be misled for their final decision. Two sets of simulated experiments are performed: one fulfilling the above validation requirement and the other overlooking it, using mismatch in topics as a case study. Likelihood ratios (LRs) are calculated via a Dirichlet-multinomial model, followed by logistic-regression calibration. The derived LRs are assessed by means of the log-likelihood-ratio cost, and they are visualized using Tippett plots. Following the experimental results, this paper also attempts to describe some of the essential research required in FTC by highlighting some central issues and challenges unique to textual evidence. Any deliberations on these issues and challenges will contribute to making a scientifically defensible and demonstrably reliable FTC available.

Abstract Recently, there has been a growing discussion concerning the way historians should approach the study of Indian revolutionaries both within and outside the subcontinent. Described as ‘the revolutionary turn’, this area of research has not only explored the porosity and ambiguity in defining individuals as revolutionaries but has also questioned the way such revolutionaries sought to write themselves into history as a political act. Continuing this line of interrogation, this article examines the retrospective political claims of heroic revolutionary belonging by analysing the autobiographical notes left by Pandurang Khankhoje, a peripatetic Indian who left his country pursuing dreams of revolution. While in the last decade Khankhoje has become an iconic character in writing histories about global solidarities and anti-colonial resistance, this article asks to what extent can historians believe self-described revolutionary narratives. As this article shows, these narratives privilege what Pierre Bourdieu has called ‘biographical illusion’, the organisation of life as a history that unfolds coherently and chronologically from beginning to end. Political or ideological differences and inconsistencies are flattened in the name of global ideologies or solidarities. As an attempt to disrupt these narratives, this article will focus on the silences, absences and ‘unreliability’ of the experiences and sources used to understand the work and lives of Indian revolutionaries abroad, such as Khankhoje, Lala Har Dayal and M. N. Roy. This article argues that the story of revolutionaries reveals important details about how they understood the racial, political and gender structures of different societies in the early twentieth century.

Presentational constructions, i.e., structures which introduce an event into the universe of discourse, raise the question of what it means for a predication to be entirely new in information structural terms. While there is growing consensus that these constructions are not topicless, there is no agreement on how to analyse their topic. The Romance languages of Northern Italy have figured prominently in this debate because the presentational constructions of many such languages exhibit VS order and an etymologically locative clitic in subject clitic position. This clitic has been claimed to be a subject of predication in a syntactic subject position. Adducing primary comparative evidence from Milanese and Turinese, we discuss patterns of microvariation which suggest that the etymologically locative clitic need not be a syntactic subject and can mark an aboutness topic provided by the discourse situation alone. We propose a parallel-architecture, Role and Reference Grammar account whereby the microvariation under scrutiny is captured in terms of the interfaces that are involved in the parsing of utterances. This account considers discourse to be an independent module of grammar, which, alongside the semantic and syntactic modules, is directly involved in linguistic variation and change.