Speech-act and participation theory presuppose a hearer who can take up what is said. The lullaby is addressed, by convention, to an infant who cannot, and this article asks what its insistent second person is doing and whether an illocutionary act can take an addressee who is not yet competent to receive it. The question is pursued through Arabic, where one widely attested Levantine formula promises the infant a slaughtered dove and then, turning to the dove, cancels the promise in the same utterance. A primary corpus of thirty-nine sleep-directed Arabic lullabies from the Levant, Egypt, Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula, Sudan, and the Maghreb was assembled from published, citable sources, read against the classical dandling (tarqīṣ) tradition and cross-cultural comparators, and coded independently by two raters for displaced address, sincerity suspension, and proleptic address, with high inter-rater agreement. Three findings result. The genre distributes illocutionary force between the infant and displaced addressees (God, animals, absent kin, the singer herself). It operates under a generic suspension of sincerity conditions that explicit diagnostics distinguish from lying, fiction, irony, and play. Its second person has a proleptic dimension, oriented to the hearer the child will become. The lullaby is therefore a well-formed communicative genre rather than a defective one, and the resulting three-way distinction, sincere, insincere, and sincerity-suspended, extends speech-act and participation-framework theory to hearers who cannot yet take up what they are told and offers intercultural researchers an apparatus for reading the cradle’s coded discourse across traditions.
The study aimed to identify specific features of speech etiquette in Kyrgyz and English linguo-cultures through a comparative analysis of means of expressing communicative distance. The methodological framework combined corpus analysis, contextual-interpretative analysis of literary texts, and a functional-grammatical description of normative models. It was established that the repertoire of basic etiquette acts in both linguo-cultures included greeting, farewell, gratitude, apology, request, and congratulation; however, their distribution and structural organisation differed. Kyrgyz communication is characterised by greater formulaic elaboration and the inclusion of well-wishing components, whereas English tends toward compactness and the universalisation of clichés. Kyrgyz systematically encodes social distance through the pronominal opposition sen/siz and extensive use of kinship nominations, whereas English conveys distance primarily through titulature and forms of address, in the absence of pronominal differentiation. English politeness strategies rely predominantly on modal and conditional constructions, whereas Kyrgyz relies on morphological forms of respect and mitigating particles. The study found that the formal written register in both linguo-cultures is characterised by a high degree of standardisation, whereas the neutral register allows for reduced structural components and greater variability in formulae. The study's practical significance lies in the possibility of using its results to develop teaching materials for Kyrgyz and English, to practise translating etiquette formulae, and to teach the norms of oral and written intercultural communication.
Bangladeshi international students in Canada are a marginalized and under-researched cohort. Despite their academic and economic contributions, they remain inadequately integrated into Canadian society, highlighting critical gaps in scholarship and support mechanisms. This mismatch leads to social, economic, and psychological challenges that international students must endure while studying abroad. Students use various coping strategies to address these challenges. This study aimed to explore the coping strategies of Bangladeshi international students studying and living in universities and colleges in Ontario, Canada. This qualitative study employed Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to explore the lived experiences of Bangladeshi international students in Canada and the subjective meaning-making of their coping strategies. Findings suggest that participants used a three-tiered support system comprising social, structural, and self-support. Prominent coping strategies included support from family and friends; diverse socialization with peers and local people; institutional, medical, and provincial support; and self-assurance and personal care. Furthermore, most participants considered support from family and friends back home their primary strategy. The students’ inclination to use these strategies may also be attributed to Bangladesh's close-knit family and social structure. Within this sample, participants’ accounts more frequently reflected emotion-focused than problem-focused coping, particularly in situations involving perceived lack of control, discrimination, isolation, and/or social stigma. In this sample, female participants reported institutional support more frequently than male participants. The participants’ perceived social stigma for mental health struggles also hindered their access to different support systems. A holistic approach involving provincial, institutional, and peer-to-peer engagement is crucial to support these students' coping process.
This article argues that Hanan al-Shaykh's Women of Sand and Myrrh, Sahar Khalifeh's Wild Thorns, and Leila Aboulela's Minaret theorize gendered resistance as situated, everyday practices rather than singular acts of overt defiance. Reading the three novels through Chandra Talpade Mohanty's decolonized feminism, James C. Scott's concept of everyday resistance, Homi Bhabha's third space, and Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, and framing these literary practices within the wider political-gender-theory tradition associated with Joan W. Scott and Anne Phillips, the paper shows that resistance in this fiction is enacted through narrative voice, calculated silence, memory, bodily discipline, and spatial negotiation. The study's original contribution is threefold: it offers a sustained comparative close reading of these three authors as a single corpus spanning Gulf, Palestinian, and Sudanese-diasporic contexts; it demonstrates that the novels' formal choices - fragmented temporality, multiple first-person narration, free indirect discourse - are themselves modes of political theorizing rather than incidental style; and it extends postcolonial feminist literary criticism by showing where political gender theory's account of power as constitutive of, and constituted through, gender difference clarifies what "resistance" means for subjects who cannot safely act in public. The paper's principal limitation is its exclusive focus on published, internationally circulated fiction, which leaves open the question of whether the same modalities of resistance appear in oral, vernacular, or unpublished Middle Eastern women's writing; it recommends comparative extension to additional authors and to non-literary "hidden transcripts" as a direction for future research.
Originating in Japanese manga traditions depicting romantic relationships between men, Boys’ Love (BL) has developed into a transnational media phenomenon. Scholarship has expanded accordingly but remains fragmented across disciplines, national contexts, media forms, and methods. This systematic review examines 134 English-language, peer-reviewed, Scopus-indexed journal articles published between January 2000 and June 2026. Combining bibliometric mapping with a PRISMA-guided thematic synthesis, it maps geographic, temporal, thematic, and methodological patterns in the internationally indexed literature. Publication growth accelerates after 2020, accompanied by increased attention to Thai and Chinese screen media alongside continued work on Japanese manga. Four bibliometric clusters are interpreted through eight analytical themes: fandom and audiences; state, censorship, and regulation; representation and narrative; gender, sexuality, and feminist critique; industry, political economy, and soft power; transnational circulation and localization; genre history and aesthetics; and affect, emotion, and intimacy. Qualitative approaches dominate the corpus, whereas quantitative and mixed-method designs remain comparatively uncommon. Country-related patterns are treated as descriptive author-affiliation tendencies rather than statistical country-theme relationships. The review identifies four priorities: deeper production and political-economy analysis, stronger examination of multidirectional transnational circulation, broader geographic and linguistic coverage, and greater methodological diversity. It further argues that intercultural BL scholarship would benefit from moving beyond nation-bounded localization models toward transcultural and counter-flow perspectives.
