scholarly journals Redrawing the boundary of “speech community”: how and why the historicity and materiality of language and the space/place distinction matter to its reconceptualization

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (267-268) ◽  
pp. 131-135
Author(s):  
Miyako Inoue

Abstract This essay contemplates how we adapt existing sociolinguistic theoretical concepts, methodologies, and analytical units to the world we live in today. Regardless of one’s location on the globe, our lives are profoundly affected by increasingly intense global interconnections and, at the same time, equally intense differentiation of space attending late global capitalism and the evolving nation-state system. While sociolinguistics has attended the heterogeneity within the speech community, in the world today as such, the idea of speech community as bounded is no longer tenable. In envisioning the future direction of IJSL and its leadership in the field, this essay suggests that speech community as an analytical concept would be significantly advanced through the theoretical integration of the space/place distinction and the historicity and materiality of language into its architectonics. By drawing on some of the recent works for guiding models, the essay argues that the reconceptualization of speech community would also demand radical openness to interdisciplinary approaches.

Author(s):  
M. V. Kharkevich

The article is devoted to the analysis of the so called impossibility theorem, according to which democracy, state sovereignty and globalization are mutually exclusive and cannot function to the full extent when present simultaneously. This theorem, elaborated in 2011 by Dani Rodrik, a famous economist from Harvard University, poses a fundamental problem about the prospects of the global scalability of political institutions of the nation-state. Is it in principle possible to globalize executive, legislative and judicial branches of power, civil society, and democracy, or is it necessary to limit globalization in order to preserve democracy and nation-state? Rodrik’s conclusions, in essence, make one give up hopes to create global democratic order against the background of global capitalism. On the basis of the Stanford School of Sociological Institutionalism and the reconstruction of the historical materialism by Jürgen Habermas, the author refutes Rodrik’s theorem. The author’s analysis shows that not only is it possible to build democratic order at the global level, but also that it already exists in the form of the world culture that includes such norms as electoral democracy, nation-state, civil society and other institutions of Modernity. The world culture reproduces fundamental social values, playing the role of social integration for the humanity, while global capitalism provides for its material reproduction, playing the role of system integration. However, since globalization is a more dynamic process than the development of the world culture, between material and ideational universalism arises a gap, which in its turn is fraught with various kinds of political and economic crises.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Tansen Sen ◽  
Brian Tsui

The essays in this volume describe the manifold ways in which China, India, and their respective societies were connected from the 1840s to the 1960s. This period witnessed the inexorable rise and terminal decline of Pax Britannica in Asia, the blooming of anti-colonial movements of various ideological hues, and the spread and entrenchment of the nation-state system across the world. This layered legacy looms large in the relations between Chinese and Indian societies in the twenty-first century. Euro-American imperialism figured as much more than the backdrop against which China and India interacted. Practitioners of global history (...


1978 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gernot Köhler

The concept of apartheid has significance far beyond the situation in South Africa which coined the term. Indeed, the concept can be generalized to apply to the present world situation. It provides both a better understanding of the present human condition and more effective guidelines for action to change it. The processes of interdependence, interpenetration and intercommunication in the present era have made the entire humanity into one global society. The present nation-state system, which obscures the appearance of this society, fails miserably in responding to the concerns and needs of the global community. The concept of global apartheid provides a more realistic and comprehensive view of the world and suggests appropriate ways of so acting as to make a beginning toward realizing a just, participatory, peaceful and humane global society.


2000 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dani Rodrik

This article speculates about the future of the world economy 100 years from now. It argues that the spread of markets is restricted by the reach of jurisdictional boundaries, and that national sovereignty imposes serious constraints on international economic integration. The political trilemma of the world economy is that international economic integration, the nation-state, and mass politics cannot co-exist. We have to pick two out of three. The article predicts that it will be the nation-state system that disappears, with global federalism taking its place.


1967 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. William Zartman

Interpretations of patterns and trends in postwar international relations have frequently noted the outmoded position of the nation-state, the shrinking nature of the world, the extension of a single international relations system to global limits, and the rising importance of superpowers and regional organizations. It was then often concluded that the coming unit of international politics was likely to be not the territorial state, as in the past, but new regional groupings of states, where the component members would collectively acquire greater power by individually giving up some of their sovereignty to a bloc or group.


The nineteenth century saw a new wave of dictionaries, many of which remain household names. Those dictionaries didn’t just store words; they represented imperial ambitions, nationalist passions, religious fervour, and utopian imaginings. The Whole World in a Book explores a period in which globalization, industrialization, and social mobility were changing language in unimaginable ways. Dictionaries in the nineteenth century became more than dictionaries: they were battlefields between prestige languages and lower-status dialects; national icons celebrating the language and literature of the nation-state; and sites of innovative authorship where middle and lower classes, volunteers, women, colonial subjects, the deaf, and missionaries joined the ranks of educated white men in defining how people communicated and understood the world around them. This volume investigates dictionaries in the nineteenth century covering languages as diverse as Canadian French, English, German, Frisian, Japanese, Libras (Brazilian sign language), Manchu, Persian, Quebecois, Russian, Scots, and Yiddish.


Author(s):  
Alec Stone Sweet ◽  
Clare Ryan

The book provides an introduction to Kantian constitutional theory and the European system of rights protection. Part I sets out Kant’s blueprint for achieving Perpetual Peace and constitutional justice within and beyond the nation state. Part II applies these ideas to explain the gradual constitutionalization of a Cosmopolitan Legal Order: a transnational legal system in which justiciable rights are held by individuals; where public officials bear the obligation to fulfil the fundamental rights of all who come within the scope of their jurisdiction; and where domestic and transnational judges supervise how officials act. The authors then describe and assess the European Court’s progressivie approach to both the absolute and qualified rights. Today, the Court is the most active and important rights-protecting court in the world, its jurisprudence a catalyst for the construction of a cosmopolitan constitution in Europe and beyond.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 6861
Author(s):  
Xiya Liang ◽  
Pengfei Li ◽  
Juanle Wang ◽  
Faith Ka Shun Chan ◽  
Chuluun Togtokh ◽  
...  

Mongolia is a globally crucial region that has been suffering from land desertification. However, current understanding on Mongolia’s desertification is limited, constraining the desertification control and sustainable development in Mongolia and even other parts of the world. This paper studied spatiotemporal patterns, driving factors, mitigation strategies, and research methods of desertification in Mongolia through an extensive review of literature. Results showed that: (i) remote sensing monitoring of desertification in Mongolia has been subject to a relatively low spatial resolution and considerable time delay, and thus high-resolution and timely data are needed to perform a more precise and timely study; (ii) the contribution of desertification impacting factors has not been quantitatively assessed, and a decoupling analysis is desirable to quantify the contribution of factors in different regions of Mongolia; (iii) existing desertification prevention measures should be strengthened in the future. In particular, the relationship between grassland changes and husbandry development needs to be considered during the development of desertification prevention measures; (iv) the multi-method study (particularly interdisciplinary approaches) and desertification model development should be enhanced to facilitate an in-depth desertification research in Mongolia. This study provides a useful reference for desertification research and control in Mongolia and other regions of the world.


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