The English gerund revisited

This paper re-examines the semantics of Present-day English gerunds by analyzing their collocational preferences. While traditional approaches suggest that a semantic opposition between ‘actions’ and ‘facts’ determines the meaning as well as the distributional preferences of nominal (the signing of the contract) and verbal (signing the contract) gerunds, these claims have not been supported by quantitative evidence. At the same time, more recent studies which quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the meaning of gerunds from a referential perspective lack a distributional dimension. This study presents a semantic typology of the nouns and verbs that are attracted to nominal and verbal gerunds in noun and verb complementation structures by means of a distinctive collexeme analysis which has been applied to contextual collexemes. The analysis shows that, while nominal and verbal gerunds occur in clearly distinctive contexts, this distinction does not appear to be based on an action-fact dichotomy, but is rather determined by the more abstract features of conceptual (in)dependence and temporal flexibility. Finally, it is shown how these abstract semantic profiles can be filled in more concretely by specific contextual slots, thus arriving at a more fine-grained and dynamic perspective on the semantics of English gerunds.

Sensitising Green Criminology to Procedural Environmental Justice: A Case Study of First Nation Consultation in the Canadian Oil Sands

Procedural environmental justice refers to fairness in processes of decision-making. It recognises that environmental victimisation, while an injustice in and of itself, is usually underpinned by unjust deliberation procedures. Although green criminology tends to focus on the former—distributional dimension of environmental justice—this article draws attention to its procedural counterpart. In doing so, it demonstrates how the notions of justice-as-recognition and justice-as-participation are jointly manifested within its conceptual boundaries. This is done by using the consultation process that occurs with indigenous peoples on proposed oil sands projects in Northern Alberta, Canada, as a case study. Drawing from ‘elite’ interviews, the article illustrates how indigenous voices have been marginalised and their Treaty rights misrecognised within this consultation process. As such, in seeking to understand the procedural determinants of distributional injustice, the article aims to encourage broader green criminological scholarship to do the same.

The Politics of Controlling Immigration

Migration is linked to various dimensions of politics: the procedural or distributional dimension (who gets what, when, and how), the legal or statist dimension (which involves issues of sovereignty and legitimacy), and the ethical or normative dimension (which deals with questions of citizenship, civil society, justice, and participation). The key concept surrounding migration and politics is one of interest. According to Gary Freeman, the demand for immigration policy is heavily dependent on the play of organized interests. An alternative to Freeman’s explanation is the historical-institutional approach, also known as the “liberal state” thesis, which contends that, irrespective of economic cycles, the play of interests, and shifts in public opinion, immigrants and foreigners have acquired rights. Therefore, the capacity of liberal states to control immigration is constrained by laws and institutions. The extension of rights to non-nationals has been an extremely important part of the story of international migration in the post-World War II period. In an age of increasing globalization, the pace of migration accelerated and created the so-called liberal paradox, perfectly illustrated by the difficulty of using guest workers for managing labor markets in Western Europe. International migration is likely to intensify in coming decades. There are several challenges that immigration scholars need to address, such as devising a framework that will allow us to understand the relationship between the politics of immigration control and the politics of integration.