Since the beginning of this century, there has been evidence of a rise in educational funding among the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). However, there has been a decline in recent years despite South Asia being a highly populated and poverty-ridden region. Thus, the present study comes to assess how well the countries are doing in relation to the effect of educational funding on national development indicators, namely economic growth, human capital development, and the unemployment rate among the SAARC countries in the 21st century using Panel Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (PNARDL) model formulated in Salisu and Isah (2017). The findings revealed that the impact of educational funding on economic growth and the unemployment rate is an asymmetry in the long run and symmetry in the short run but on the human development index, it is an asymmetry in both terms. However, educational funding is influencing economic growth in the long run, but in the short run is not. Furthermore, educational funding influences human capital development in both terms, but in the long run is negligible. Moreover, educational funding is negligibly discouraging the unemployment rate in both terms.

This study investigates the mechanisms of event integration in Mandarin motion events, with a specific focus on the widely used “V + Dào” construction, a representative verb complex in the language. Event integration, defined as the reconceptualization of events through conceptual conflation or integration, has traditionally been examined within the scope of either the main verb or the satellite. This research broadens the theoretical scope by introducing two complementary dimensions of event integration: internal event integration, where individual lexical items conflate multiple subevents, and external event integration, where subevents are integrated between the main verb and the satellite. Using a dataset of 611 “V + Dào” sentences extracted from a spoken Chinese corpus, the study identifies 12 distinct patterns of event integration. These patterns include combinations such as “(motion + manner) + (motion + path)” and “(motion + cause) + (motion + path),” illustrating the intricate interplay between semantic components. The analysis reveals that internal integration operates through the conflation of conceptual elements within “V” or “Dào,” while external integration is achieved through conceptual mapping and the semantic overlap between these components. The findings of this study advance our understanding of Mandarin’s typological flexibility and enrich existing theories on motion event encoding. By proposing a refined framework for analyzing event integration, this work offers new insights into cross-linguistic variation and highlights the significance of Mandarin as a language that challenges traditional dichotomies in motion event typology. These contributions underscore the importance of reconsidering established linguistic models to account for the complexity of event integration mechanisms in diverse languages.

Music is an activity that needs to be acted out and “doing” music is a very embodied experience. That’s why the metaphor of motion is pervasive in Western classical music—the formal musical style predominant in Europe and the Western world between 1600 and 1900. The reference to musical movement is inescapable without which the description would be no more than merely the sound. We have to perceive and experience music in terms of motion metaphor. However, traditional music criticisms are mainly based on groundless introspections, disregarding the pervasiveness of motion metaphors as they widely exist in music; In collaboration with the Metaphor Lab Amsterdam, Nina Julich-Warpakowski’s monograph—Motion Metaphors in Music Criticism: An empirical investigation of their conceptual motivation and their metaphoricity makes a corporal and empirical exploration into the conceptual-embodied motivation as well as the more genre-specific communicative aspects of music that shape metaphor use in the specific discourse contexts of western classical music.

Marital conflict talk has attracted considerable attention in family studies, social psychology, and communication research, but remains underexplored from the perspective of impoliteness reciprocity. Guided by Culpeper and Tantucci’ s Principle of (Im)politeness Reciprocity (PIR) and informed by Locher and Watts’ s relational work framework, this study examines impoliteness reciprocity in marital conflict talk. The data consist of 12 conflict episodes involving six couples from the Chinese reality show See You Again. Combining quantitative sequential analysis with pragmatically informed interpretation, the study investigates the sequential distribution of reciprocity types, their association with interactional functions, and the extent to which turn-level variables, namely interactional functions, sarcasm, and resonance, are associated with reciprocity. The findings show that non-reciprocity predominates, whereas reciprocity, once established, tends to display greater local continuity and stability. Non-reciprocity is more likely to co-occur with attacking and defensive functions, whereas reciprocity is more often associated with transactional and repair-oriented functions. Defensive functions significantly reduce the likelihood of reciprocity, while sarcasm and resonance do not show stable associations with reciprocity. The study extends the applicability of the PIR to marital conflict and offers a pragmatic account of the sequential organisation and functional distribution of marital conflict talk.

As one of the branches of applied linguistics, peace education has become popular for decades, especially in Colombia which has suffered from wars and violence. It proposes that teachers, as change...