Phonetically reduced forms are plentiful, theoretically interesting, and a key challenge for automatic speech recognition systems. Yet canonical forms are still central to models of production and perception. Drawing from different fields and diverse languages, this volume brings new insights to the debate on abstractions and canonical forms in linguistics: their psychological reality, descriptive adequacy, and technical implementability.

The volume deals with the mechanisms of the oral communication in the ancient Greek culture. Considering the critical debate about orality, the analysis of the communicative system in a predominantly oral-aural ancient society implies a reassessment and a deep reconsideration of the traces which orality embedded in the texts transmitted to us. In particular, the focus is on the 'cultural message', a set of information which is processed and transmitted vertically as well as horizontally by a living being, so to be differently from a genetically encoded information, a culturally defined process. The survey intertwines different approaches: the methodologies of cognitivism, biology, ethology, to analyze the embrional processes of the cultural messages, and the tools of historical and literary analysis, to highlight the development of the cultural messages in the traditional knowledge, their codification, transmission, and evolutions in the dialectics between orality and writing. The reconstructed pattern of the mechanisms of cultural messages in a prevailing oral-aural system cast a light on a shadowy aspect of a sophisticated communication system that has long influenced European culture.

A study on urban risk and resettlement programs in the Global South in the era of climate change. Environmental changes impact everyone, but the burden is especially heavy upon the lives and livelihoods of the urban poor and those living in informal settlements. In an effort to reduce urban residents' exposure to climate change and natural disasters, resettlement programs are becoming widespread across the Global South. Yet, while resettlement may reduce a region's future climate-related disaster risk, it can also often increase poverty and vulnerability. This volume collates the findings from a research project that examined urban areas across the globe, including case studies from India, Uganda, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Cambodia, and the Philippines. The book offers a unique approach to resettlement, providing an opportunity for urban planners to re-think how disaster risk management can better address the accumulation of urban risks in the era of climate change.

As human society continues to develop, we have increased the risk of large-scale disasters. From health care to infrastructure to national security, systems designed to keep us safe have also heightened the potential for catastrophe. The constant pressure of climate change, geopolitical conflict, and our tendency to ignore what is hard to grasp exacerbates potential dangers. How can we prepare for and prevent the twenty-first-century disasters on the horizon? Rethinking Readiness offers an expert introduction to human-made threats and vulnerabilities, with a focus on opportunities to reimagine how we approach disaster preparedness. Jeff Schlegelmilch identifies and explores the most critical threats facing the world today, detailing the dangers of pandemics, climate change, infrastructure collapse, cyberattacks, and nuclear conflict. Drawing on the latest research from leading experts, he provides an accessible overview of the causes and potential effects of these looming megadisasters. The book highlights the potential for building resilient, adaptable, and sustainable systems so that we can be better prepared to respond to and recover from future crises. Thoroughly grounded in scientific and policy expertise, Rethinking Readiness is an essential guide to this century’s biggest challenges in disaster management.

Effects of morphological structure on phonetic detail present us with two challenges. The empirical challenge is that some predictors have produced inconsistent effects. The theoretical challenge is that it is unclear where morpho-phonetic effects originate from. Do speakers decompose words into morphemes? Or can such effects also originate from non-decompositional structure? This book investigates the durational properties of English derived words in four large-scale corpus studies. In the decompositional perspective, durations are modeled as a function of frequency and segmentability, prosodic structure, and affix informativeness. In the non-decompositional perspective, durations are modeled with predictors derived from linear discriminative learning networks. Results show that the decompositional predictors are far less reliable than previously thought. Meanwhile, some non-decompositional predictors model durations successfully. Discriminative learning is shown to be a promising alternative for modeling speech production. However, the book also demonstrates that many investigated predictors are conceptually interrelated. It ultimately cautions against taking the metaphors we use to describe these predictors as final explanations.

This revolutionary book presents a new conception of community and the struggle against capitalism. In Undoing Work, Rethinking Community, James A. Chamberlain argues that paid work and the civic duty to perform it substantially undermines freedom and justice. Chamberlain believes that to seize back our time and transform our society, we must abandon the deep-seated view that community is constructed by work, whether paid or not. Chamberlain focuses on the regimes of flexibility and the unconditional basic income, arguing that while both offer prospects for greater freedom and justice, they also incur the risk of shoring up the work society rather than challenging it. To transform the work society, he shows that we must also reconfigure the place of paid work in our lives and rethink the meaning of community at a deeper level. Throughout, he speaks to a broad readership, and his focus on freedom and social justice will interest scholars and activists alike. Chamberlain offers a range of strategies that will allow us to uncouple our deepest human values from the notion that worth is generated only through labor.