A fundamental contrast in the theory of Natural Phonology is that between “process” and “rule.” Processes are the physiologically/acoustically motivated alterations between intended targets and actual execution of utterances. A subset of these corresponds to what are traditionally called allophonic processes, but casual speech deviations from intention are also processes. Rules are alternations between distinct phonemes that result when historical changes leave phonemically differing variants of morphemes. More recent research shows that the division between processes and rules is not clear-cut. Although vowel harmony appears to be a rule, there are instances of automaticity in some languages’ vowel harmony rules and there children acquire them like processes. Furthermore, the very fine phonetic detail involved in allophonic processes appears to be controllable at will in language play and in code-switching and dialect imitation. Furthermore, such prototypical processes as Final Devoicing appear to have language-specific variations.

David Stampe’s theory of natural phonology (NP) is a psychological approach to phonological theory that is not primarily grounded in intuitions of well-formedness, as are generative approaches, but in performative communicative function. The primary antecedent of this approach was a psychological phonemic theory proposed by Baudouin de Courtenay (late 19th c.). Stampe’s dichotomy between processes and rules corresponds to Baudouin’s dichotomy between physiophonetics (phonology) and psychophonetics (morphonology). Physiophonetic alternations belonged to the same phoneme, but psychophonetic alternations represented different ones. The chapter explores the relationship between Baudouin’s theory of alternations, subsequent schools of Russian phonemic theory based on it, and Stampe’s interpretation of the dichotomy. Trubetzkoy criticized Baudouin’s “psychological equivalent of a speech sound” as viciously circular on the grounds that all speech sounds are psychological in nature. To get around this objection, the NP phoneme can be defined as a mnemonic speech sound. NP is more useful than generative phonology for explaining the nature of phonemic awareness in native speakers.

This chapter gives an overview of time series analysis.

Educators acknowledge the importance of utilising, implementing, and applying curriculum; a day-to-day engagement in a wide range of educational settings. So often, focus centres upon the curriculum itself; however, this chapter provides strategies for navigating curriculum and provides proven helpful cross-curriculum tools and processes for applying curriculum in effective and efficient time-friendly ways. A wide range of examples are provided to cover many aspects of the Australian Curriculum, importantly inclusive of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Knowledge.

Chapter 5 investigates the dynamics of meaning generation pertaining to social structures, processes, and relations; to grammatical and semantic roles, particularly problems created by choice of grammatical voice in identifying agents and experiencers of violative actions and the ideological positioning of those individuals relative to human rights evaluations of those actions. It compares the appeals with philanthropic fundraising letters: both are problem/solutions texts attempting to persuade their addresses to act to solve their respective problems. It examines the appeal topics and the language of the rhetorical moves and steps that enact them and compares these with Amnesty’s letter writing guidelines. It identifies patterns of grammatical mood, polarity, and evidentiality that represent rights and the legal instruments from which they derive; and patterns of linguistic choices expressing concern and exigency, norms of evaluation, violation and redress, concession and rebuttal, engagement and gratitude, and that construct the cohesion exhibited by the documents and their relationships.

This chapter deals with processes both from a macroscopic, thermodynamic point of view and from a dynamical perspective. For the latter, a class of processes is introduced that can be described through a Hamiltonian description with a time-dependent external control parameter. It is shown how the expressions of work and heat from classical thermodynamics can be obtained as an appropriate average over an initial distribution. The second law inequality relating work and free energy can then be proven as a consequence of a master inequality. With well-specified additional assumptions, second law inequalities for heat exchange and entropy production are derived.

Chapter Five examines the role of international law in State Department policymaking. It describes the formal and informal decision-making processes within the State Department, focusing on the influential role of the Legal Adviser and the Legal Adviser’s Office. The chapter then examines closely the weight given by policymakers to legal advice and the nature of the interaction between policymakers and lawyers. Policymakers, at least at higher levels, generally have final decision-making authority, but the views of the Legal Adviser’s Office can be determinative in the relatively rare instances when the lawyers deem a course of action conclusively illegal. Otherwise, the lawyers’ advice is influential, but its weight may vary depending on the circumstances, including the nature of the national interest involved. Many former officials indicated that the development of policy was often a collaborative and constructive process. The lawyers were usually willing to work with policymakers, and they were often willing to find alternative courses of action within the law, though they would not usually budge on an interpretation of the law. Some former officials indicated that their relationship involved greater contestation, resembling a negotiation. When international law conflicted with significant policy interests, policymakers could sometimes seek to overcome those obstacles.

As scholars and activists seek to define and promote greater corporate political responsibility (CPR), they will benefit from understanding practitioner perspectives and how executives are responding to rising scrutiny of their political influences, reputational risk and pressure from employees, customers and investors to get involved in civic, political, and societal issues. This chapter draws on firsthand conversations with practitioners, including executives in government affairs; sustainability; senior leadership; and diversity, equity and inclusion, during the launch of a university-based CPR initiative. I summarize practitioner motivations, interests, barriers and challenges related to engaging in conversations about CPR, as well as committing or acting to improve CPR. Following the summary, I present implications for further research and several possible paths forward, including leveraging practitioners’ value on accountability, sustaining external calls for transparency, strengthening awareness of systems, and reframing CPR as part of a larger dialogue around society’s “social contract.”

This book explores some implications of studying international relations from a systemic perspective. This chapter takes on the preliminary tasks of defining systems, identifying distinctive characteristics of systemic explanations, and situating systems approaches in a broader context of relational framings. A system is a bounded set of components of particular types, arranged in definite ways, operating in a specific fashion to produce characteristic outcomes, some of which are emergent. The arrangement and operation of the components produce “emergent” “systems effects;” properties and outcomes that cannot be fully understood through knowledge of the parts considered separately. I emphasize the relational character of systemic explanations and their reliance on mechanisms and processes, in order to foster developing a relational processual systemic perspective within a pluralistic IR.

Multilevel multicomponent complex adaptive systems are not reducible to the sum of the causal effects of independent variables. Causal inference, which has a privileged place in contemporary IR (and many other social sciences) cannot address systems effects, which arise from interdependent elements and operations (not the impact of independent variables on dependent variables). Systems effects explanations explain why by showing how. They identify mechanisms and processes of causation. They thus are able to establish causal efficacy; that is, show how processes produce – actually cause – outcomes (rather than merely identify some elements that are part of an unspecified causal process). Such an understanding leads us away from a “laws and theories” conception of science, which remains popular in Physics and Chemistry, towards a “models and mechanisms” understanding, which predominates in the life sciences (which, on their face, seem a much better model for the social sciences).

The remaining chapters of this book begin to sketch a new systemic/relational perspective and illustrate some of its implications and attractions. Like systems approaches, relational approaches in contemporary IR, which employ frames such as networks, fields, practices, and assemblages, stress the arrangement of parts of wholes. A systems perspective, however, highlights a tendency among relationalists to overemphasize relations and underemphasize processes. (The frame “relationalism” draw attention away from processes and usually leaves obscure how relations and processes are related.) I argue for a systemic/relational perspective that understands social systems as configuring configurations that configure. And I argue that these hierarchically layered assemblages can best be understood through relational processual explanations.

The speed of sound in gases is derived in a manner similar to what was done for the speed of waves on a string. The mass of the gas molecules provides the inertial contribution. The gas laws, along with approximation techniques, are used to estimate the return force. The appropriate process is adiabatic, and so the speed of sound depends on the adiabatic constant. The adiabatic constant, in turn, depends largely on the shape of the molecules. Excellent agreement is found between the rather simple theory and measured results. The speed of sound in a gas is found to depend on the (average) mass of the molecules, temperature, and the adiabatic constant (the shape of the molecules); however, there is very little pressure dependence when the pressure is near 1 atmosphere.

The success of legal time is to be found in its exterior and standardized character. In this chapter, it argued on the basis of Heidegger and Bergson that such a perspective misses the peculiar characteristics of human time and does not relate well to processes. The first characteristic of human time is that it cannot be stopped. This does not only imply that time is finite, it also means that human time inevitably moves forward from birth to one’s inescapable death. Furthermore, human time cannot be traversed: in a human life, one cannot actually go back to the past or move forward to the future. A third characteristic of human time lies in its irreducible relationship with eternity. If one wants to eternally exclude someone, it is unclear how long this will actually last. Bergson furthermore reminds us that the reference to processes is always inadequate, it is qualitatively different from what it refers. We see this in the discussion of formal and material criteria used to refer to the process of migrants living within a certain territory. Two dominant approaches – jus domicilii and jus nexi – both ultimately fail to grasp such process.

Chapter 8 explores the ways in which the press talk about people having mental illness using a mixed-methods approach. In the chapter, the frequency and semantic and pragmatic content of the verbs ‘suffer’ and ‘ experience’ in the context of prescribed forms for talking about having mental illness are investigated. I show that ‘suffer’ and ‘experience’ occur in different semantic contexts in the MI 1984–2014 Corpus as well as general language corpora, which may contribute to ‘suffer’ being a more problematic term for describing mental health than ‘experience’. Moreover, I show that ‘suffer’ is proportionally less likely to be used in first-person narratives because ‘suffering’ is attributed to people with mental illness by others, for example, medical professionals, in reported speech. I bring together my findings in a set of lexicogrammatical heuristics based on the semantic content of ‘suffer’ and ‘experience’ in context (e.g. whether the word encodes animacy or is temporally bounded).

Chpater 4 argues that an account of causation in terms of quasi-inertial processes and interferences handles problematic cases of pre-emption and overdetermination better than rival accounts. It also explains why and how the causal relations fail to be transitive.