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Physics VIII starts with the succession argument: before any motion there must underline have been a previous motion or change. Averroes was intensively occupied by this argument, and its possible deterministic implications. He kept coming back to it, and during the years radically changed his interpretation of it. His agenda was to establish indeterminism as a scientific doctrine based on a firm Aristotelian foundation. He attempts a new interpretation of the succession argument that can support an indeterministic philosophy.

Aristotle addresses the concept of motion in books III, V, and VI of the underline Physics from different perspectives, and offers three different definitions or construals of this concept. This chapter shows how Averroes reworks all three definitions and in fact tears down completely Aristotle's concept of motion as a continuous entity. The discussion focuses mainly on the divisibility argument of underline Physics VI.4: “everything that changes must be divisible” and on the definition of motion as perfection (underline entelecheia) in Physics III.1. In both contexts Averroes offers an alternative interpretation of motion as a contiguous chain of intermediate motion segments. He introduces a new distinction between final and intermediate termini that leads the way to the conception of motion as forma fluens.

This chapter examines extended family, or wider-kin, connections in Plymouth Colony. Though Plymouth households were basically nuclear in structure, the sources from the period show a considerable degree of interconnection among kin. These include the matter of physical contiguity, particularly the possibility that neighbors in the Old Colony Towns were often related as parents and children, or as siblings or cousins.

This chapter establishes the empirical and theoretical goals of the book. It introduces the theoretical backdrop of Anti-contiguity Theory, situating the proposal within a framework inspired by Richards’s (2010, 2016) Contiguity Theory. The chapter previews the book’s main findings and conclusions, while providing details about the book’s chapter-by-chapter organization. It alludes to a number of other issues and questions raised by the proposal and delineates which ones will be dealt with in the book and which will not. The chapter also introduces the book’s running theme—sometimes “syntax” is syntax, and sometimes “syntax” is phonology.

This chapter examines temporal binding, the ability of the brain to group together separate events occurring at different time points into one coherent and meaningful event sequence. It evaluates the hypothesis that temporal binding is a two-way street that serves to resolve mutual ambiguities. It discusses the bi-directional relation between temporal contiguity and causality in temporal binding and suggests that subjective experience of time simultaneously shapes people's experience of the world.

In the late twentieth-century context of multiculturalism, the emptiness of the modern everyday can appear as a form of potential openness and equality. Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker explores the possibilities of mere proximity, of things and persons that exist side-by-side without knowing or affecting each other. The form of the list is the most significant example. An everyday form without boundaries or internal coherence, the list lies at the heart of this novel. Though it begins as a banal, everyday thing, it provides a crucial lyricism as well as a key to the novel’s subtle critique of nation-based thinking. Lee’s novel articulates the Asian immigrant’s longing not only for economic success, but also for political modernity––action in the public sphere. When the latter is made impossible by racial constraints, the novel imagines a different model of political community. Reflecting the everyday and figured through the list, this imagined community consists in a pattern of emergence. Lee’s novel uncovers the political value of open-ended, on-going everydayness.

This chapter focuses on the syntax and prosody of wh- in-situ in Krachi. In Krachi, wh- in-situ is available in both root and embedded contexts. Prosodically, embedded complement clauses in the language are parsed as independent Intonational Phrases. The distribution of wh- in-situ in the language is considered against the backdrop of Richards’s (2010, 2016) Contiguity Theory. Given the prosodic facts previously mentioned, Contiguity Theory is shown to be incapable of accounting for long-distance wh- in-situ in the language, motivating an “anti-contiguity” theory of the prosody of wh- and C at the syntax-phonology interface.

The final chapter in this first part of the book proposes a more satisfactory way of understanding historical change and the ambiguities of modern British politics. It draws on the metaphor for historical change favoured by the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott, the ‘dry wall’. The advantage is that it allows us better to render unto politics those things which are political and unto history those things which are historical. It puts the practical emphasis on calculations and wagers, making the stuff of politics much more interesting and open-ended. The chapter argues that we cannot rely either on the narratives of Providence or Zeitgeist but are faced with the burden of judgement and choice. It calls on the skill of subtle analysis because things don’t evolve nor are they inevitable.

This chapter provides an integrated summary of the properties of serial verbs discussed throughout the book, and their parameters of variation. The definition of serial verbs with their characteristic properties is followed by the principles of argument sharing within serial verbs. In terms of their composition, serial verbs divide into symmetrical and asymmetrical types. There can be nesting within serial verb constructions. The two broad kinds of constructions are contrasted in terms of their semantics, order of components, and propensities towards grammaticalization or lexicalization. Contiguity and wordhood are further typological parameters of variation within serial verbs. Grammatical categories such as person of the subject, aspect, tense, modality, evidentiality, or mood, can be marked concordantly on each component, or just once per construction. Serialization can be productive or limited. It is essential to distinguish serial verbs from multi-verb sequences of other kinds. Origins and development of serial verbs are briefly summarized.

One new constraint family argued for in this book are constraints ensuring a ‘morph-contiguous’ projection of prosodic nodes. It is argued that the phonological representation of a morpheme strives to be contiguous across different tiers, i.e. phonological elements affiliated with one morpheme avoid being dominated by a phonological element that is affiliated with another morpheme. It is shown how different patterns of phonologically predictable allomorphy involving MLM follow from such a preference. This constraint type also allows the solution of a general opacity problem that OT-accounts assuming floating prosodic nodes face. The relevant constraint demanding morph-contiguous mora licensing ensures that an epenthetic mora is inserted in contexts where a vowel would otherwise only be dominated by a mora with a different morphological affiliation. This constraint predicts an interesting typology of languages where all or only some vowels undergo morphological lengthening. As is shown with several examples, this typology is indeed borne out.

From an early age, children learn that writing stands for something outside itself. However, it takes some time for children to learn that writing is glottographic: that it symbolizes language. Children may instead think that writing is a first-order symbol that represents people and objects directly. Children realize early on that writing is not generally iconic: it does not look like what it stands for. More common is the idea that writing is an index: that it connects to its object through spatial or temporal contiguity. Evidence from studies using the moving word task supports this point. As children learn that the link between a piece of writing and its referent involves conventions that are shared by groups of people, and as they learn that a piece of writing is read the same way each time, they begin to grasp that writing is a second-order symbol. It gains its meaning because it represents language, which itself has meaning.

This chapter develops the Anti-contiguity proposal based on the distribution of wh- in-situ in Krachi, Bono, Wasa, and Asante Twi. Embedded wh- in-situ is only allowed in Krachi and Bono. The chapter argues that a prohibition on wh- items phrasing with overt C at the level of Intonational Phrase (iP) underpins this distributional asymmetry. In these languages, the acceptability of embedded wh- in-situ correlates with the prosodic status of the immediately containing clause—embedded clauses are independent iPs in Krachi and Bono, but not in Wasa and Asante Twi. Thus, iP boundaries divide C from embedded interrogatives in Krachi and Bono, preventing the items from forming iP constituents. No such boundaries intervene between embedded C and wh- in Wasa and Asante Twi, yielding prosodic mappings in which the items phrase together. Consequently, embedded wh- in-situ is prosodically licit in Krachi and Bono, but not in Wasa or Asante Twi.

This chapter furnishes additional support for the Anti-contiguity theory of wh- prosody by demonstrating that it derives two surprising and mysterious asymmetries of Nupe wh- syntax. The first asymmetry concerns the fact that in embedded clauses the structurally lowest wh- item in a multiple wh- question may not appear in-situ. The second asymmetry concerns the availability of embedded non-interrogative focus and the impossibility of embedded interrogative focus. Both of these asymmetries are argued to be explainable in terms of the Anti-contiguity ban on contiguous wh- phrasing with overt C at the Intonational Phrase level, given that overt embedded C does not introduce an Intonational Phrase boundary in Nupe, as in Wasa and Asante Twi. As a consequence, no Intonational Phrase boundary insulates focused embedded wh- items from overt embedding complementizers, therefore running afoul of the Anti-contiguity prohibition.

This chapter concludes the book by considering Anti-contiguity in a cross-linguistic context. It is shown that the proposal can be successfully applied to derive asymmetries in wh- in-situ distribution beyond the West African languages considered in Chapters 2–4. The chapter focuses on thirteen languages from diverse language families (Romance, Bantu, and Indo-Aryan, among others) and considers the implications of data from these languages for the final formulation of the Anti-contiguity condition. On the basis of these considerations, the Anti-contiguity constraint is parameterized. Among the languages considered against the backdrop of the Anti-contiguity proposal in this chapter are French; Spanish; Catalan; Zulu; Bàsàá; Duala; Shona; Lubukusu; Kiitharaka; Hindi-Urdu; Bangla; Iraqi Arabic; and Malayalam.

This chapter identifies the theoretical foundation of the book by means of the major international relations paradigms, namely realism, liberalism, and constructivism. Given that supporting rebels who target other states is an act of animosity frequently committed by states, a rigorous theory is offered building on interstate interactions as primary explanation for state support of rebels. Two main sets of motives are identified when describing the causes of interstate conflict and cooperation, which are also relevant for the state-rebel selection theory: material and ideational. Material motives include factors such as external and internal threats and the ability of a state to mobilize domestic resources to deal with them. Ideational motives consist of common ideas and identity. The theory captures the entire domain of ideational contiguity between states. Hypotheses are proposed to explain the underpinnings of two models of state-rebel groups interactions: States’ Selection Model (SSM) and Rebels’ Selection Model (RSM).

This epilogue offers a meta-analysis across the book’s twenty chapters on Classics and Irish politics through three unifying and recurrent themes: contiguity, affinity, and chance. Contiguity is witnessed in physical spaces, objects, and monuments, but it also functions beyond the material in finding homologous realms between ancient and modern while at the same time respecting differences and acknowledging the challenges inherent in appropriating or translating from one culture into another. Affinity reveals the personal choices and experiences underlying examples of classical reception in Irish culture. Chance inheres in the serendipitous encounters that often lie at the heart of cultural transmission.

This chapter sets out the contradictions that result from modern, in particular (post-)structuralist revisions of classical tropology. By revisiting fundamental assumptions implicit in the theorizing of ancient rhetoricians, the entire field of poetic language is mapped out afresh and different models for the possible relationships between its constituent parts (i.e. between the various tropes and figures) are put forward. Against this backdrop, a tentative, provisional theory of metonymy is outlined: ancient theorizing is shown to presuppose the now widely accepted (yet unsatisfactorily elusive) concept of ‘contiguity’ as central to metonymy. By adducing the theory of semantic fields, a more precise notion of ‘lexical contiguity’ is offered as the operative principle of metonymy. Recent theories of metaphor are used to develop a set of guiding questions with which to probe the relationship between the two tropes, focusing in particular on the applicability of the ‘tenor’-‘vehicle’ model (as developed for metaphor) on metonymy.

The conclusion offers a succinct summary of the new theory of metonymy, highlighting its advantages and explanatory powers against the backdrop of the shortcomings of earlier attempts at theorization, in particular its ability to explain metonymy in both its unity and its diversity, its relationship to metaphor, and the differences in their respective poetic effect. It offers an explanation for the lack of attention hitherto given to metonymy, surveys the consequences for critical practice that can be drawn from its tropological rediscovery offered here, and delineates several avenues of future research, such as: text-/author-/genre-/period-specific analyses of stylistic tendencies, comparative studies of metaphor and metonymy in literary translations with different translation ideals, or inter-medial structuralist studies that would investigate the media-specific form that metonymic defamiliarization takes in different media.