Qualified to be deviant: stigma-management strategies among Chinese leftover women

This paper highlights the intersection of gender, sexuality and class in shaping the ways in which ‘leftover’ women navigate legal and social discrimination. ‘Leftover women’ is a stigmatising term in China that refers to women who do not get married by the time they reach their late twenties. Based on my fieldwork in China with queer and heterosexual ‘leftover’ women, I introduce two strategies of stigma management: ‘buying a licence to be deviant’ and ‘identity-hopping’. The former is a strategy adopted by heterosexual women with financial resources and a desire frequently expressed by queer women. ‘Buying a licence to be deviant’ refers to the strategy of accumulating sufficient financial resources to justify one's choice to be deviant and deal with the legal consequences of the evasion of the population policies. ‘Identity-hopping’ is popular among those with a lower social and financial status, who use the law's labelling function to hop from one stigmatised identity to another as a way to deal with stigma. From an intersectional lens, this paper advances law and society's study of stigma and discrimination by emphasising the hierarchy of stigmatised identities and the strategy of using the law's power of labelling identities to hop from one identity to another. It also demonstrates how the intersection of gender, sexuality and class complicates the ways in which leftover women understand and engage with the law.

Twitterverse: The birth of new words

New words are continuously being coined on Twitter, which is regarded as a means of creating and distributing new words, concepts and ideas. Our research focuses on the way Twitter’s apt naming has become one of the richest sources of brand-related word-formation. The current study has identified various productive patterns of new Twitter word-formation, such as affixation, compounding, blending, abbreviation and the powerful mechanism of lexical analogy. We have also identified the most common models used in coining new units of each type. The creation of new Twitter words has various functions and effects: establishing a closer social connection; jocular/mocking function; novelty and originality; desire to follow fashion; and denominative/labelling function. We conclude that in the era of an ever-growing amount of data, the popularity of Twitter has become a breeding ground for new brand-related words that have enriched the modern English vocabulary.

Noun Phrases as expressions of evidentiality: an analysis of four English abstract nouns and their Spanish equivalents

This paper presents an analysis of the expression of evidentiality with the English nouns evidence, indication, proof and sign and their Spanish equivalents evidencia, indicación, prueba and señal. The nouns are described as shell nouns having the properties of encapsulating, signalling and labelling. The delimitation of their evidential and non-evidential uses is determined by three factors: existence of a qualified proposition (Belief), non-occurrence within an irrealis context and constant value of the evidential qualification when the Belief refers to a plurality of events. The difficulties posed by the delimitation illustrate the problems involved in determining the scope of evidentiality when expressed by lexical devices belonging to the content of a proposition. A quantitative analysis was carried out on 400 occurrences of the nouns, extracted from two comparable corpora. The results reveal that all the nouns except two expressed evidentiality in most cases, that the linguistic context in which they appear shows great variation in terms of syntax and information structure, and that the labelling function is prominent. The results also uncover idiosyncratic evidential expressions with some of the nouns.

Kripke modelling of multiple robots with decentralized cooperation specified with temporal logic

Kripke models are used to formalize decentralized cooperation of a group of robots, to propose temporal logic specification of the cooperation, and to verify the correctness of the specification by checking the models. The focus is on implementing this mathematical formalism under minimalist communication and under constrained motion of the robots. Kripke models consist of, firstly, a of possible worlds (system configurations), secondly, an accessibility relation in the (transitions between the worlds), and, thirdly, a labelling function (which logical statements are true in each world). This approach represents continuous dynamics and discrete decision making of the robots in a unified way. Desirable properties of cooperation can be precisely expressed using temporal logic statements defining safety, liveness, etc. Whether a group of robots, whose behaviour is formalized with Kripke models, possesses such properties is then verified using automated model checking tools. The scenarios considered include path planning of a group of three robots moving in an obstacle-free environment, without and with communication among group members. The results show that for each scenario the mathematical formalism of Kripke models expresses the group behaviour in a transparent and tractable way. Finally, desirable properties of the decentralized cooperation, specified with temporal logic, can be verified on the Kripke models by automatic model checking software. Hence, guaranteed performance of cooperating autonomous robots can be assured in a formal, precise, and clear way.