Medical HistoryPub Date : 2025-08-06DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2025.10018
Dmitry Ezrokhi
{"title":"The lower cavity: the origins and history of an anatomical idea.","authors":"Dmitry Ezrokhi","doi":"10.1017/mdh.2025.10018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2025.10018","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper examines the history of the 'lower cavity' of the gastrointestinal tract, a distinctive anatomical feature in Greco-Roman medicine that described a second stomach-like organ in the large intestine. It traces how a bipartite model of the digestive system emerged in fourth-century bce Greek medical and philosophical thought and persisted in the works of influential figures such as Galen, Vesalius, and Glisson, despite shifts in terminology, anatomical observations, and physiological theories. The study demonstrates that this understanding arose primarily from three complementary factors: a specific terminology that paired the stomach with a lower cavity, systematic animal dissections that revealed pronounced caeca in certain species, and emerging physiological theories that required separate bodily receptacles for digested food and residues. Through this case study, the paper illuminates how premodern anatomical knowledge was articulated by a constant negotiation between animal bodies, human bodies, and past textual authorities, facilitating the surprising longevity of ideas like the 'lower cavity' in the gastrointestinal tract.</p>","PeriodicalId":18275,"journal":{"name":"Medical History","volume":" ","pages":"1-19"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144789526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The celebrification of Qian Xuesen.","authors":"Alexander C T Geppert, Lu Liu","doi":"10.1017/S0007087425101155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087425101155","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1-24"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144790353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rocket stars, space personas and the global Space Age.","authors":"Alexander C T Geppert","doi":"10.1017/S0007087425101143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087425101143","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The founding figures, advocates and engineers of the early Space Age are frequently hailed as 'fathers', 'forebears', 'prophets', 'pioneers', 'visionaries' and 'heroes', employing hagiographic, gendered and indiscriminate tropes that lack analytical value. Inspired by persona and celebrity studies, this introduction proposes an alternative approach to comprehend the historical significance and historiographical prominence attributed to global 'rocket stars' Qian Xuesen (1911-2009) in China, Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) in Sri Lanka, Vikram Sarabhai (1919-71) in India, Sigmund Jähn (1937-2019) in East Germany, Ulf Merbold (1941-) in West Germany and Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez (1942-) in Cuba covered in this special issue. Replacing 'great-men' hagiography with a theoretically grounded focus on celebrification processes and the making of national patriarchs from without - from person to persona - enhances nuance and reduces cliché in understanding the role technocelebrities played in the production of outer space as a key phantasmagoria of the twentieth century. As these six space personas operated and starred in geographical contexts distinct and distant from the spaceflight superpowers, the special issue advances the notion of a global Space Age as an alternative to the conventional bipolar Cold War variant and offers a foundation for its budding historicization.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1-19"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144790352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A meaning-based academic vocabulary list","authors":"Tongxi Gong , Lei Liu , Jianjun Shi , Yi Guo","doi":"10.1016/j.jeap.2025.101557","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jeap.2025.101557","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Students must have a strong vocabulary to comprehend academic texts effectively. To assist with this, several academic word lists have been developed. However, there is an ongoing debate in the literature about whether to include common words, such as “paper” and “state”, in these lists. This conflict arises because previous studies did not differentiate between the various meanings of these words. In this article, we used a large language model, BERT, to semantically annotate English corpora, treating each sense of a word separately. As a result, we developed a meaning-based academic vocabulary list, comprising 1550 words (or lexemes) that focus solely on their academic meanings. The words on this list are found to be common across different disciplines, more frequently used in academic texts, and representative in various academic corpora. By categorizing “paper” (meaning “a sheet”) as a general word while “paper” (meaning “an essay”) as an academic word, this article effectively solved the debate over whether certain common words should be included in an academic vocabulary list.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of English for Academic Purposes","volume":"77 ","pages":"Article 101557"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144780907","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How gender affects compliments in Italian","authors":"Giovanna Alfonzetti, Giulio Scivoletto","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.07.009","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.07.009","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper presents findings from a long-term study on compliments in Italian, employing different theoretical and methodological approaches. This study adopts variational pragmatics to investigate the impact of gender on compliments. We examine whether Italian compliments exhibit gender-specific patterns that transcend cultural variations, as suggested in prior research. After revisiting in a variational perspective the wide collection of spontaneous speech analyzed in an earlier phase of the research, new data are drawn from a questionnaire submitted to a sample of 576 young speakers in the University of Catania (Italy). This questionnaire explores various facets of complimenting, including frequency, object, modulation, and function. This analysis reveals a distinct gender pattern, highlighting a pragmatic role of compliments that is salient in women's interaction. Among them, compliments are much more common and intensified, they concern mostly appearance, and they are a positive politeness strategy as they serve an important interpersonal function: linked to the concept of phatic communion, compliments are acts aimed at creating, maintaining, and strengthening mutual solidarity.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"247 ","pages":"Pages 4-15"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144781828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Top-down and bottom-up bilingual speech production: The effects of language context on inhibitory control","authors":"Yun-Wei Lee, Patrick Rebuschat, Aina Casaponsa","doi":"10.1017/s1366728925100357","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1366728925100357","url":null,"abstract":"Language-switching sometimes causes delayed responses, especially when switching from the later-acquired languages (here, L2) to the dominant native language (L1). It is well-established that language proficiency plays a role in production, but what about language context (i.e., the ratio of L1 and L2)? We investigated language context within two language production processes: “top-down” (naming pictures) and “bottom-up” (reading words aloud). We suggest that switch cost asymmetry was not only affected by language context, but also by production modality. In picture naming, the degree of inhibition relies largely on the activation level of the predominant language in the language context, whereby affects the asymmetry. However, the asymmetry disappears when language processing only requires reading aloud words with orthographically unique and constrained to one language. We provide evidence with dynamics of inhibition in different language contexts, suggesting that future study should continue to explore the flexibility of production processes in bilingual speakers.","PeriodicalId":8758,"journal":{"name":"Bilingualism: Language and Cognition","volume":"34 1","pages":"1-13"},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2025-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144787715","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Regional pragmatic variation in the use of conventional expressions at three Spanish-speaking sites","authors":"Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig , Llorenç Comajoan-Colomé , Sabrina Mossman , Enrique Rodríguez Sánchez","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.104021","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.104021","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper reports on an empirical investigation of regional pragmatic variation in the use of conventional expressions in Spanish at three sites: two in Spain (in the Barcelona and Extremadura areas) and one on the US-Mexico border (El Paso/Ciudad Juárez). Conventional expressions are multi-morphemic expressions and one type of pragmalinguistic resource. They are inherently social in nature and characterize language use within speech communities. Conventional expressions are associated with specific pragmatic situations and are the preferred expression of L1 speakers in those contexts. Data were elicited via computer-delivered oral production tasks from 107 L1 speakers of Spanish in the Barcelona (N = 38), Extremadura (N = 33), and El Paso/Ciudad Juárez (N = 36) areas. The tasks were regionally adapted so that speakers would feel that they were speaking to interlocutors from their respective speech communities. Conventional expressions were identified as occurring in at least 50% of the responses in any one community. Speakers in some sites used more conventional expressions than others. Some situations elicited the same expressions at all three sites, some show agreement at two sites, and some yield a different expression from each site. The sites show substantial overlap in expressions, although not in contexts of use (exhibiting <em>variety-preferential variation</em> rather than <em>variety-specific variation</em>).</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"326 ","pages":"Article 104021"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144779920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nigel Rothfels. Savages and beasts: the birth of the modern zoo (Revised Edition). 2025. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.","authors":"Heather Browning, Walter Veit","doi":"10.1007/s40656-025-00690-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-025-00690-6","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"47 3","pages":"40"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144790807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A comparative study of text characteristics of CET-6, IELTS, and TOEFL reading passages based on computational tools","authors":"Lin Chen, Qingyun Luo","doi":"10.1016/j.jeap.2025.101556","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jeap.2025.101556","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study conducts a multidimensional analysis of reading texts from three major English proficiency tests--CET-6, IELTS, and TOEFL--using computational tools such as Coh-Metrix, VocabProfile, and WordSmith. Based on a corpus of 60 reading passages from each test, the study evaluates text characteristics across five dimensions: vocabulary, syntax, textbase, situation model, and readability. The results reveal significant variations across multiple indices: (a) CET-6 texts demonstrate lower lexical and syntactic complexity but weaker cohesion at the textbase and situation model levels, while TOEFL passages exhibit the highest levels of lexical and syntactic sophistication; (b) IELTS texts occupy an intermediate position, with greater variability in text length; (c) no significant differences were observed across the three tests in terms of L2 Readability, suggesting that these exams may be more comparable in this aspect than previously assumed.</div><div>The findings highlight the interplay between text characteristics and cognitive demands, offering empirical insights for both test development and language education. This study underscores the necessity of adopting a multidimensional approach to assess text complexity, ultimately assisting learners in optimizing test preparation and language acquisition.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of English for Academic Purposes","volume":"77 ","pages":"Article 101556"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144771285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}