“Interface” in present usage is a modern concept whose roots lie in physical science and engineering disciplines. For serendipitous reasons it happens to work well as a conceptual tool for structuring Sun Tzu’s approach to leadership topics, starting with the political level (the ruler) and extending in the military realm down to the level of common soldiers. That is the focus of Theme #13.

The interface between digitalized information (Data), intellectual property, privacy regulations, and competition law in the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) scenario is currently triggering the interest of politicians, businessmen, the academic community, and, even, the general public. The groups are interested for different reasons; for example, businessmen see an opportunity for the creation of wealth; researchers see the possibility of gaining, analyzing, and distributing knowledge efficiently; and everyone acknowledges that the collection and distribution of data may raise several concerns in reference to private and public power, freedom, privacy, and data protection concerns.

In this chapter, I address cross-cultural encounters of two (or more) sets of sensory scripts. These encounters are evident in the wider literature on colonialism, migration and other local–foreign interfaces. In doing so, it serves as an important reminder for one to take heed of multiple axes of sensory similarities and differences, in addition to a merely the East–West core axis of difference. I also turn the lens around by showing how local populations on the reverse, discern colonial or foreign communities through their sensory faculties as a counterpoint. The focus lies in demonstrating how sensory interfaces arising from these processes and movements of people are theorised using the notion of sensory transnationalism. I map this notion onto colonial–local sensory encounters and propose four modes of sensory engagement: reception, rejection, regulation, and reproduction. These modes collectively show how sensory encounters, stemming from contrasting power positions, lend a different understanding of empire and its everyday lived constructions, including how colonial impositions of modernity through sensory regulatory schemes are also met with resistance. Consequently, categories of colonisers and colonised are unsettled instead of being deployed as inherently asymmetrical categories.

Tone in Chinese languages is distinct in two aspects: (i) the complexity in the tonal make-up and (ii) widespread sandhi. The former is often attributed to underlying complexity in tonal inventories and the latter to triggers immediately adjacent to the sandhi site. Morphosyntax, though highly relevant, is often left unarticulated in the description of tonal inventories and processes. This chapter unravels four major aspects in which morphosyntax condition tonal processes (a) the licensing and/or generation of tonal contours, (b) the neutralization of tone, (c) the triggering and blocking of sandhi; and (d) the impact on tonal prosody. While phonological patterns in other languages are sensitive to the word- and post-lexical levels divide, it is the structural constituency that is often more relevant than syntactic category in Chinese tonal processes. Lest one overstates the power of morphosyntax, note also that morphosyntactic conditioning of tonal processes is likely mediated through alignment and interface with prosody structure. Thus morphosyntax plays not a deterministic role, but a substantially contributive one in the intricacies of tonal processes in Chinese.

Phonology/phonetics and morphology interact in such a way as to render difficult any clear-cut dividing line between these subfields. Romanists have long observed that phonetics play a crucial role in language change. From this point of view there is nothing exceptional in the fact that phonetics/phonology may provide the system with the very substance of morphological oppositions. The number and the extension of the morphological processes amenable to phonetic principles in the Romance domain are so wide that only a few typical phenomena are treated in this chapter. Furthermore, it is not always evident how one can establish the extent to which a given morphological alternation is phonologically driven, whether we are dealing with a purely phonological phenomenon or whether we should recognize some lexical conditioning in the choice of the allomorphs. The examples discussed (allomorphy in the definite article, subject clitics and affixes, possessives, and the nominal, verbal, and adjectival stems) show that the phonetic impulse for a morphological alternation may no longer be transparent ; in other cases, the trigger of a given pattern is no longer available or can only be identified following a process of diachronic reconstruction.

This chapter builds the general theory of the UG–iconicity interface, which consists of two general principles, with the Functional Iconicity Complementation Hypothesis (FICH) defining when the interaction is activated, and the Uniform Structure Mapping Principle (USM), how this interaction is carried out. In general, if a functional void of UG prevents a semantic/conceptual relation from mapping to a structural relation properly and thus halts an otherwise well-formed process of clause-generation, iconicity is called in to help finish the task. Intricate interactions between UG and iconicity may happen under the regulation of the USM so that the solution remains UG-compliant (and therefore has a proper interpretation). The scarce literature on the UG–iconicity relation is reviewed to provide the context in which the interface theory in this book is positioned and evaluated. The specific theory of the UG–iconicity interface is also compared with familiar examples in biology for further validation.

The phonetics/phonology interface refers to the relationship between the physical dimensions of phonetics and the abstract arrangement of phonemes and their manifestations within the phonological systems of languages. This chapter provides an overview of a range of approaches to the investigation of the phonetics/phonology interface, with particular attention to the relationships between phonetic factors such as positional prominence, acoustic salience and articulatory gestures, and phonological phenomena such as segment features and inventories, assimilation, and tone. I survey several clusters of theoretical orientation, each with distinct theoretical underpinnings and claims about the extent to which phonological concepts encode, reflect or direct phonetic details. I conclude with a discussion synthesising these seemingly disparate approaches, unifying them around a theme of linking the continuous physical dimensions of phonetic science with the abstract cognitive categories and rules of combination that typify phonological models. I discuss pedagogical implications and new directions in which facets of the interface can be explored.

Chapter 7 concludes this book by summarizing its content and highlighting how the so-called “creole-like” features detected for the AHLAs can be better explained in terms of interface-constrained advanced SLA processes, which were subsequently nativized and conventionalized by following generations of speakers. Likewise, this chapter stresses the importance of these Afro-Hispanic vernaculars to linguistic theory by showing how these contact varieties can offer both a window into possible L2 instantiations of UG as well as an ideal testing ground for formal hypotheses (Sessarego 2014a), which have primarily been built on standardized language data.

The final chapter explores the relationship between the work of art and its diverse spectators by developing the idea of the ‘multi-layered interface’. I argue that this work engages spectators in ways that move beyond previous theory and practice examining images of the body. I focus on performance in photography and video, exhibited in galleries or disseminated online. This art negotiates a way between a complex web of icons, from Samuel Aranda’s photograph of a fully veiled Yemeni woman holding her injured son, to the controversial naked selfies posted on social media by certain women from Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. Lalla Essaydi and Majida Khattari develop a complex interface through Arabic writing, photography and a range of French, other European, or Arabic and Persian imagery, in interaction with the performing body. New means of concealing and revealing the body evoke the revolutions in Tunisia, Libya or Syria in photographic work by Mouna Karray and videos by Naziha Arebi and Philip Horani. Online videos of street art and dance (by Ahl Al Kahf, El Seed, JR and Art Solution) at public sites in Tunisia interpolate their diverse audience in comparable ways, while extending the work in time and space.

Chapter 3 argues that while globalised liberal citizenship norms—including universalised notions of citizenship as a human right—generated a politics of inclusion thus boosting dual citizenship advocacy for Liberia, the transmission in Africa of transnational belonging—dual citizenship diffusion in the continent—has had varied outcomes for the country. It also reveals that the bundle of visceral responses to dual citizenship as a proposed development intervention in Liberia signifies an interface wherein actors negotiate the discontinuities and continuities in their lived experiences of being Liberian, with homeland actors particularly resistant. Viewed as both promise and peril for diasporic and domestic actors, respectively, dual citizenship represents an instrumental tug-of-war in which homelanders prefer to protect their privileges while transnationals wish to expand their rights.

Divided into three parts, Chapter 1 outlines the rationale for selecting respondents—homeland Liberians, permanent and circular returnees, diasporas—with an overview of their demographic profiles; the conceptual framework, actor-oriented analysis, which considers myriad responses to development interventions based on actors’ disparate life-worlds (lived experiences), social locations (socio-economic positions), and levels of agency (capacity to act); as well as deep thinking about the author’s positionality. The methodological, theoretical, and biographical reflections in this chapter are intended to contextualise how the author came to understand Liberia’s political economy of belonging and its relationship to contestations over dual citizenship.Chapter 1 demonstrates why it was essential to converse with Liberian actors inhabiting different locales in three continents. It shows, for example, that diasporas disclose through their identities, practices, and relationships that citizenship can be simultaneously passive, active, and interactive. They also both challenge and substantiate certain theoretical approaches including conceptualisations of diasporic influences on homeland foreign policy and, by the author’s extension, homeland domestic policy. Reflecting on her positionality as a Liberian researcher who has occupied multiple spaces and places, the author evaluates her own biases as someone who made a conscious choice not to naturalise abroad and how this decision influences her analysis of Liberian citizenship construction and practice.