Chapter 1 introduces the scope of the book and my theoretical and scientific perspectives. It deals with definitions of urbanism, controversies in the study of ancient cities, and introduces connections between ancient and contemporary cities.

Due to the analogy of the combinatorial power of these newly acquired devices of the grammar, the structure of the predicate in Contemporary Chinese is grammatically required to be bounded by some means; otherwise, the sentence may be ill-formed. In Contemporary Chinese, specifically, a sentence sounds incomplete unless aspect markers, time words, quantifiers, preposition phrases, or resultatives are added. From Middle Chinese to the present day, the Chinese language has acquired many grammatical constructions and markings, including mainly the resultative construction, the aspect system, verb reduplication, and verb classifiers. All of these grammatical apparatuses have something in common: they are suffixed with the matrix verb to constitute an immediate constituent. As a consequence, they all function to make the matrix verb bounded in some sense.

This chapter analyses the causal relationship between the establishment of the classifier system and the grammaticalization of the morphosyntactic particle de in the history of the Chinese language. It demonstrates that the grammaticalization of a lexical item is subject to the influence of the overall structural change of a language in a particular time period.

Sign systems help to create descriptive and depictive representations. Descriptive representations operate on symbols. They are based on conceptual analyses identifying objects or events as well as attributes and interrelations. Attributes and relations are ascribed by predications to entities according to syntactic rules resulting in so-called propositions (“idea units”). These propositions can be integrated into coherent semantic networks. Propositional representations are considered as mental structures which can be externalized in the form of spoken or written texts. Despite their informational incompleteness, descriptions have high representational power. Depictive representations are based on inherent commonalities between a representing object and the represented subject matter. The inherent commonalities can be based on similarity or analogy. These representations are complete with regard to a certain class of information. Due to their completeness and consistency and because information can be read off directly, depictive representations have high computational efficiency.

Chapter 5 examines how considerations of coherence manifest in the use of analogical reasoning by investor-state tribunals. In particular, it demonstrates through concrete examples and case studies that the persuasiveness and correctness of an arbitral award based on analogical reasoning depends on the degree of its internal coherence. It is argued that coherence in an analogical inference manifests in two ways. Firstly, in a methodological sense, coherence manifests itself in the way the adjudicator frames the legal question at issue and in the degree to which the analogy, as drawn, satisfies the elements of similarity, structural parallels, and purposiveness. Secondly, in a substantive sense, coherence manifests itself in the normative contextualisation of the legal question and in the moral appeal of the proposed interpretation derived from the analogy.

Chapter 7 explores recent splinters or CFs in the making. It investigates the profitability of five initial and eight final splinters, originally viewed as blend parts and later developed as frequent spliters used in series, to form new words by analogy.

Chapter 2 is a survey of the definitions of CFs in main morphological accounts. CFs are then described as part of transitional morphology and compared with affixes and compound constituents.

In this chapter I outline the transformation of systematics into phylogenetics by tracing the emergence of lineage thinking. One of the routes to a realist interpretation of the natural system of systematic relationships was to temporalize it. Lineage thinking emerged when the previously atemporal and symmetrical affinity relationships between contemporaneous taxa were replaced by asymmetrical ancestor-descendant relationships that tracked the arrow of time. This transition was accompanied by a rapid decrease in the diversity of shapes of affinity diagrams published in the systematic literature, and it marked a shift from predominantly reticulating or web-like systems to tree-like figures soon after the publication of Darwin’s On the origin of species in 1859. I argue that this graphic revolution largely records the influence of evolutionary expectations, as biologists redrew their diagrams to fit the theoretical dictates of Darwinian descent with modification. The current swell of enthusiasm for evolutionary networks has driven several recent authors to the peculiar argument that even Darwin disliked the tree of life as an evolutionary metaphor, an argument I will refute. Reconceiving the systematic relationships between taxa as phylogenetic pathways along which body plans evolve had an epistemic corollary. Speculation became a necessary tool for the evolutionary storyteller.

Penelope Allison’s 2001 article on using material and written sources to study Roman domestic space has framed the debate on the topic more broadly for ancient world housing. In this chapter, she revisits that contribution and responses to it, and surveys the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the chapters in the volume. By examining the nature of the data, analytical and interpretative approaches to them, and the research questions, Allison assesses the extent to which the two decades since her critique have produced more critically engaged scholarship, particularly in approaches to relationships between textual and material evidence.

This essay considers Duns Scotus’s arguments against the so-called semantic analogy—the view according to which a term can signify two or more things according to relations of priority and posteriority. It argues that this view was commonly adopted in Paris but was rejected by a group of late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century English thinkers, which included Duns Scotus. Since supporters of semantic analogy held that ‘being’ was the foremost example of a term signifying according to priority and posteriority, the implications of this debate on metaphysics are profound. This essay's conclusion is that Duns Scotus’s rejection of semantic analogy should be considered as preliminary to his famous claim that being is a univocal concept.