Although the interest in the concept of partitivity has continuously increased in the last decades and has given rise to considerable advances in research, the fine-grained morpho-syntactic and semantic variation displayed by partitive elements across European languages is far from being well-described, let alone well-understood. There are two main obstacles to this: on the one hand, theoretical linguistics and typological linguistics are fragmented in different methodological approaches that hinder the full sharing of cross-theoretic advances; on the other hand, partitive elements have been analyzed in restricted linguistic environments, which would benefit from a broader perspective. The aim of the PARTE project, from which this volume stems, is precisely to bring together linguists of different theoretical approaches using different methodologies to address this notion in its many facets. This volume focuses on Partitive Determiners, Partitive Pronouns and Partitive Case in European languages, their emergence and spread in diachrony, their acquisition by L2 speakers, and their syntax and interpretation. The volume is the first to provide such an encompassing insight into the notion of partitivity.

This book includes papers presented at the 14th International Conference “Economies of the Balkan and Eastern European Countries� (EBEEC), held in Florence, Italy, in May 2022. It sheds new light on the micro- and macroeconomic developments in the Eastern European and Balkan countries, taking into account also the broader regional and global factors influencing these developments. In particular, it includes the latest theoretical and empirical research and policy insights from Central and Southeastern Europe and presents new ideas on how to resolve economic problems, also generated by the pandemic, in the Balkan and Eastern European economies in a pan-European context. By examining how the decisions and the performance of economic, social, and political actors in the area are intertwined with wider events, also at a global level, the papers highlight the dynamic development in Eastern Europe and the Balkans region. Further, the book demonstrates how the area is evolving within the framework of European economic integration and the global effervescent economy.

Scale is a word which underlies much of architectural and urban design practice, its history and theory, and its technology. Its connotations have traditionally been linked with the humanities, in the sense of relating to human societies and to human form. To build in scale is an aspiration that is usually taken for granted by most of those involved in architectural production, as well as by members of the public; yet in a world where value systems of all kinds are being questioned, the term has come under renewed scrutiny. The older, more particular, meanings in the humanities, pertaining to classical Western culture, are where the sense of scale often resides in cultural production.

Scale may be traced back, ultimately, to the discovery of musical harmonies, and in the arithmetic proportional relationship of the building to its parts. One might question the continued relevance of this understanding of scale in the global world of today. What, in other words, is culturally specific about scale? And what does scale mean in a world where an intuitive, visual understanding is often undermined or superseded by other senses, or by hyper-reality? Structured thematically in three parts, this book addresses various issues of scale. The book includes an introduction which sets the scene in terms of current architectural discourse and also contains a visual essay in each section. It is of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, academics and practitioners in architecture and architectural theory as well as to students in a range of other disciplines including art history and theory, geography, anthropology and landscape architecture.

The problem of finding minimal surfaces, i. e. of finding the surface of least area among those bounded by a given curve, was one of the first considered after the foundation of the calculus of variations, and is one which received a satis factory solution only in recent years. Called the problem of Plateau, after the blind physicist who did beautiful experiments with soap films and bubbles, it has resisted the efforts of many mathematicians for more than a century. It was only in the thirties that a solution was given to the problem of Plateau in 3-dimensional Euclidean space, with the papers of Douglas [DJ] and Rado [R T1, 2]. The methods of Douglas and Rado were developed and extended in 3-dimensions by several authors, but none of the results was shown to hold even for minimal hypersurfaces in higher dimension, let alone surfaces of higher dimension and codimension. It was not until thirty years later that the problem of Plateau was successfully attacked in its full generality, by several authors using measure-theoretic methods; in particular see De Giorgi [DG1, 2, 4, 5], Reifenberg [RE], Federer and Fleming [FF] and Almgren [AF1, 2]. Federer and Fleming defined a k-dimensional surface in IR" as a k-current, i. e. a continuous linear functional on k-forms. Their method is treated in full detail in the splendid book of Federer [FH 1].

This book examines political, social, and economic interactions in highly interconnected areas, stretching from Europe to Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia, labelled as Trans-Europe. The first part of the book focuses on the interests of several leading actors in Trans-Europe. The second part deals with the actions of national actors trying to compete with the EU influence in their shared neighbourhood. The third part studies cross-border issues, such as economic dynamics, migration flows and energy markets in the Trans-European space.

This book intends to make NI more accessible and viable, especially as a critical device for better understanding contemporary politics. The purpose is to refresh the debate on NI and to explore this fascinating concept, appreciating its multifaceted and malleable nature. Throughout time, NI has been presented as an ambiguous but obstinate concept in politics, political discourse, and theoretical elaboration. NI has constantly resurfaced, and many designate themselves as its protectors. Its increasing relevance, pertinence and recurrence make it clear that it can no longer be ignored in political analysis.

Founded upon more than a century of civil bloodshed, the first imperial regime of ancient Rome, the Principate of Caesar Augustus, looked at Rome's distant and glorious past in order to justify and promote its existence under the disguise of a restoration of the old Republic. In doing so, it used and revisited the history and myth of Rome's major success against external enemies: the wars against Carthage. This book explores the ideological use of Carthage in the most authoritative of the Augustan literary texts, the Aeneid of Virgil. It analyses the ideological portrait of Carthaginians from the middle Republic and the truth-twisting involved in writing about the Punic Wars under the Principate. It also investigates the mirroring between Carthage and Rome in a poem whose primary concern was rather the traumatic memory of Civil War and the subsequent subversion of Rome's Republican institutions through the establishment of Augustus' Principate.

This edited collection addresses the dynamics of the post-Communist transition in Central Eastern Europe. Its contributors present a detailed analysis of the events unfolding during the last three decades in the region, focusing in particular on identity-building processes and reforms in Belarus, Bulgaria, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine. The contributors outline reasons why some of these states accomplished a decisive break with the Communist past and became members of European and transatlantic structures, while some opted for pseudo-transition and fostered hybrid political regimes, jeopardizing their genuine integration with the West. A group of states which decided to preserve their Communist legacy is also explained. The collection describes and scrutinizes the formation of geopolitical affiliations and the evolution of discourses of belonging. It also traces the fluctuating dynamics of national decision-making and institution-building, as many of the post-Communist states reconsider and re-elaborate their initial ideas and visions of Europe today. Finally, the collection brings to light the rapidly changing perceptions of the region by the major global actors-the European Union, People's Republic of China, Russian Federation, and others.

Sugar was the single most valuable bulk commodity traded internationally before oil became the world's prime resource. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, cane sugar production was pre-eminent in the Atlantic Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Subsequently, cane sugar industries in the Americas were transformed by a fusion of new and old forces of production, as the international sugar economy incorporated production areas in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Sugar's global economic importance and its intimate relationship with colonialism offer an important context for probing the nature of colonial societies. This book questions some major assumptions about the nexus between sugar production and colonial societies in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, especially in the second (post-1800) colonial era.

The book addresses the challenges faced by women on the two shores of the Mediterranean from a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspective. While in the European Union's (EU) Mediterranean countries inequality is mostly linked to the social sphere and, in particular refers to labour market dynamics, in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) area, the situation is more complicated as the social and private spheres are blended and cultural and religious factors have a great impact on women autonomy and opportunities beyond the family perimeter. The different challenges women are facing on the two sides of the Mediterranean have sometimes originated incomprehension and misperceptions. Western-supported policies devoted to fill the gap between men and women in the MENA area have overlooked countries' peculiarities simply exporting models tailored for EU's member states. The EU's attempts to strengthen relations with the Mediterranean countries on a multilevel basis have not rescued women from marginalisation. Nevertheless, during the 2011 awakening, women played an important role in activating civil society. They are still considered as a key part of the fight against terrorism and radicalisation, although in some countries their condition has worsened after secular regimes have been downturned. The number of migrant women has increased and, not differently from men, they are looking for opportunities and better conditions of life while Western media tend to present them in a stereotyped way either as traumatized victim and/or as caring mother. There are other misleading common places, which need to be better conceptualised and understood, such as the alleged incompatibility between Islam and women rights. Unfortunately, women's rights are still under attack even in European countries where they are considered consolidated. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the Journal of the Balkans and Near Eastern Studies.