Culmination

Abstract: Abstract The culmination of more than two decades of work on the spatiality of economic forms, worlds, and lives, Variegated Economies tackles the question of how to approach, conceptualize, and analyze economies as geographically differentiated and unevenly developed phenomena. Staged from the loosely bounded field known as economic geography, the book seeks to build bridges to complementary work in critical political economy and heterodox economic studies by way of a substantive theoretical and methodological program. Variegated Economies advances a series of arguments concerning the inherent—and highly consequential—spatiality of economic forms, worlds, and lives, engaging a range of issues from the diversity of capitalism(s) to the dynamics of late-stage neoliberalization, and from the problematic uneven geographical development to the challenges-cum-opportunities of conjunctural modes of analysis.

Abstract: Abstract This chapter presents the culmination of our investigation of the rise in women’s (part-time) employment in modern societies. It summarizes the major findings of the country reports from a cross-national comparative perspective, and it tries to illuminate the time-related interplay of the most important mechanisms that have been working in different countries and have generated the great variety of part-time work in modern societies. It also attempts to disentangle the common thread of the place of part-time work within women’s life-course. I first recapitulate the main hypotheses which have guided our long-term cross-national comparative case-study approach and then synthesize the findings and draw some major conclu¬sions.

Abstract: There is quite a high rate of acceptance of telic-perfective predicates as descriptions of non-culminating events in children learning Germanic and Romance languages. What causes children, much more so than adults, to accept non-culminating interpretations of telic-perfective sentences? In this review, I discuss learners’ difficulties in each of three grammatical dimensions that contribute to event culmination: the notion of ‘result’ as encoded in the lexical semantics of verbs, telicity of verb phrases, and perfectivity of tense-aspect morphology. I conclude that telicity and perfectivity do not cause the non-culmination acceptance patterns. Instead, the learnability challenge for event culmination lies in the acquisition of verb meanings. I sketch several new angles for further research, including the role of agentivity of the subject.