Conjoined Fraternal Twins: Marking Something Other than Time in Matthew 13.44-46

While some read Mt. 13.44-46 as making the same point about the kingdom of heaven twice over, this article instead uses verbal markedness theory to suggest use of the perfect tense-form within Treasure in the Field (TIF) and Pearl of Great Price (PGP) indicates otherwise. Whereas TIF foregrounds the kingdom’s ‘hiddenness’ with κεκρυμμένῳ, PGP instead uses πέπρακεν to emphasize the toll its purchase exacts on investors. Hence, one might accurately describe the parables on the basis of verbal markedness theory, and their redactional similarities, as a set of fraternal twins the First Gospel conjoins within the parables discourse. While their individual points remain distinct, Matthew binds the implications of TIF and PGP together to suggest their mutual entailment. For those fortunate enough to uncover the hidden kingdom’s location, its entrance will cost them everything and so alter their lives forever. All experience difficulty obtaining the kingdom, and its discovery remains tentative even for those in the right line of work.

Ethnic/Racial Terminology as a Form of Representation: A Critical Review of the Lexicon of Collective and Specific Terms in Use in Britain

All ethnic/racial terminology may be seen as a form of representation, whereby meanings are generated by a range of social categorizers in settings of popular culture, political discourse, and statistical governmentality. This paper investigates these representations through a critical review of the lexicon of collective and specific ethnic/racial terms in use in Britain. Relevant studies and documents were identified through structured searches on databases of peer-reviewed literature and the websites of government census agencies. The full-text corpus of the UK Parliament was used to delineate the genealogies or etymologies of this terminology. The derivation of specific ethnic/racial terms through census processes tends to conform with the theoretical model of mutual entailment of social categories and group identities. This relationship breaks down in the case of the broad and somewhat abstract categories of race/ethnicity originating in the modern bureaucratic processes of government and advocacy by anti-racist organizations, opening up a space for representations that are characterized by their exteriority. Commonly used acronyms are little understood in the wider society, are confusing, and of limited acceptability to those they describe, while other collective terms are offensive and ethnocentric. Accurate description is recommended to delineate ethnic minority populations in terms of their constituent groups.

Ineffable narratives in Spanish: Another case of overgeneration by e-GIVENness

In this paper, I present a new case of overgeneration for the semantic view on identity in ellipsis. Concretely, I show that a radical version of the semantic approach to the identity condition on ellipsis, in particular, one with the notion of mutual entailment at its heart, wrongly predicts as grammatical cases of TP-ellipsis in Spanish where a (formal) present tense feature on T in the antecedent entails a (formal) past tense feature in the elliptical constituent and vice versa. However, this is not attested: present tense cannot serve as a suitable antecedent for formal past tense in TP-ellipsis contexts, regardless of pragmatic entailment. On the basis of this and other new observations in the realm of tense and ellipsis, several consequences for the theory of identity in ellipsis, on the one hand, and the proper representation of tense in natural languages, on the other, are also discussed.

Two WorldsandTwo Aspects: on Kant’s Distinction between Things in Themselves and Appearances

In the interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism, a textual stalemate between two camps has evolved: two-world interpretations regard things in themselves and appearances as two numerically distinct entities, whereas two-aspect interpretations take this distinction as one between two aspects of the same thing. I try to develop an account which can overcome this dispute. On the one hand, things in themselves are numerically distinct from appearances, but on the other hand, things in themselves can be regarded as they exist in themselves and as they appear. This reveals a mutual entailment of both accounts. Finally, I suggest that this approach most naturally leads to a kind of ‘phenomenalism’, but of a sort not normally attributed to Kant.