Anyone who studies design today is confronted with a professional field that places a variety of demands on future designers. Designers are expected to solve problems of all kinds in innovative ways: They should be able to implement briefings reliably and keep the production method and its costs in mind; they should be able to predict trends reliably; they should know their target groups and deliver products tailored to them. Of course, designers should also be able to communicate, visualize, and present their ideas convincingly. Rarely are these skills combined in one person, which is why designers also need to be able to work in a team. Students should therefore not only be sensitized to design, but also to intercultural differences, and be familiar with and able to classify different social milieus in order to design accordingly for specific target groups (families with small children, for example, hardly ever buy tables with sharp edges). Students should also become aware of their own esthetic preferences and staging strategies. This chapter presents an example of undergraduate research in design and discusses theoretical and conceptual problems of research in design.

This chapter highlights how phenomena found in modern Romance varieties as well as processes of language change pose challenges to the idea that inflexion, derivation, and compounding may reside in distinct modules or components of the grammar. It discusses the basic and uncontroversial characteristics of inflexion, derivation, and compounding with data from Romance languages and presents specific topics and case studies that challenge the traditional view from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. The first case study considers the ways in which various morphophonological alternations, such as diphthongization and palatalization, pattern alike or differently with respect to inflexion, derivation, and compounding. The question whether inflexion and derivation can be distinguished on semantic grounds is the focus of two further case studies dealing with (i) the formal marking and the semantic interpretation of number in Italian ambigeneric nouns, and (ii) with the different outcomes of the Latin augment /-sc-/ in modern Romance languages, which evolved in some languages into an inflexional marker, while retaining a derivational function in others. A final topic covered is so-called ‘conversion’, defined here as a transpositional (i.e., category-changing) process that is not marked by any formative, and thus applies to fully inflected words.

This chapter provides a synopsis of our Cambridge Handbook of Undergraduate Research. We argue that undergraduate research is made possible by, and responds to, changes in the ways we think about knowledge. Readers will be familiar with the contemporary social context, which often sees knowledge as a kind of free-for-all in which opinion is presented as fact, where knowledge gained through research competes in the political realm with supposition, and public discourse is steeped in deliberate misinformation. In the context of our handbook, such developments not only open up opportunities for students to engage in research, they also emphasize the importance of all students developing the skills to engage meaningfully and rigorously in evidence-based practice and to challenge unfounded assumptions. Knowledge has become democratized, and it is this that provides both the impetus and opportunity for widespread and equitable undergraduate research engagement.

In Germany, learning through research has experienced a great upswing in the last decade, especially through project funding and research within the framework of the national “Quality Pact for Teaching” (QPL, Qualitätspakt Lehre). Forschendes Lernen – as the concept is called in German – was developed in Germany about fifty years ago. In the last twenty years, this teaching and learning concept has been adapted to current conditions and challenges through the commitment and creative ideas of various university players. Forschendes Lernen became the foundation for undergraduate research in Germany.

The Romance counting system is numerical – with residues of earlier systems whereby each commodity had its own unit of quantification – and decimal. Numeral formations beyond ‘10’ are compounds, combining two or more numerals that are in an arithmetical relation, typically that of addition and multiplication. Formal variation across the (standard) Romance languages and dialects and across historical stages involves the relative sequence of the composing elements, absence or presence of connectors, their synthetic vs. analytic nature, and the degree of grammatical marking. A number of ‘deviant’ numeral formations raise the question of borrowing vs independent development, such as vigesimals (featuring a base ‘20’ instead ‘10’) in certain Romance varieties and the teen and decad formations in Romanian. The other types of numeral in Romance, which derive from the unmarked and consistent cardinals, feature a significantly higher degree of formal complexity and variation involving Latin formants and tend toward analyticity. While Latin features prominently in the Romance counting system as a source of numeral formations and suffixes, it is only in Romance that the inherited decimal system reached its full potential, illustrating its increasing prominence, reflected not only in numerals, but also in language acquisition, sign language, and post-Revolution measuring systems.

New Zealand has an integrated but differentiated system of tertiary education, and within this, it is the universities that have a long tradition of research and research-informed teaching. The Tertiary Education Strategy emphasizes the role of faculty as researchers, and the need for internships and research of value to employers; in practice it supports a conventional model of students as research apprentices. Universities do not have offices dedicated to undergraduate research, service learning or community engagement to encourage student engagement in research projects shaped by undergraduates rather than their teachers. Nonetheless, good examples of student-driven practices are identified in a range of disciplines, including the humanities, engineering, ecology and geography. Examples are given at assignment, class and curriculum levels. An important component of these in New Zealand is an awareness of and some competency with respect to Māori culture, given the requirement in the national Education Act that institutions acknowledge the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, which is the country’s foundational constitutional document.

This is the general introduction to the Cambridge Handbook of Undergraduate Research. It deals with the history of the university as an institution (which has been a research institution only since the nineteenth century); with the concept of undergraduate research and its dimesions (e.g., student- or staff-initiated research); with possible alternative concepts (e.g., critical thinking or lifelong learning); with research on undergraduate research (e.g., increased retention rate but necessary mentoring); and with implementation challenges (for universities and faculty). We see a new role for students: that in ever more differentiated modern societies, collaborative, cross-segmental knowledge production becomes a new necessity, the educational means to which might be undergraduate research.

After reviewing the different meanings attributed to the concept ‘complex predicate’, a set of syntactic diagnostics for the identification of a complex predicated is established. This set of diagnostics is then discussed in relation to modern and old Romance structures such as: (i) auxiliary constructions (with habere, esse, and other verbs), most of which emerged in the passage from Latin to Romance, and their Tense-Mood-Aspect make-up; (ii) the periphrastic passive compared to the reflexive passive (with special reference to past participle agreement, the inventory of passive auxiliaries, the double passive, and the ordering of elements in the passive cluster); (iii) aspectual auxiliaries; (iv) modal complex predicates; (v) causative complex predicates; and (vi) complex predicates headed by perception verbs. Putting aside the various meanings associated with the concept ‘complex predicate’ and the enormous variety of the syntactic structures which to varying degress satisfy the complex predicate diagnostics, this chapter seeks an answer to the deeper question of how the Romance languages are theoretically and empirically relevant for a better understanding of complex predicates.

The primary interest of sandhi in Romance is as a morphological phenomenon. Adaptation of word forms to a variety of sandhi contexts gives rise to allomorphy (paradigmatic variation). Such adaptation reflects natural phonological processes which tend to reduce the markedness of sequences of phonological elements. We illustrate from Catalan and French strategies to avoid hiatus, and from Catalan and Occitan strategies to simplify consonant clusters. Romance also attests subphonemic alternations in sandhi environments, and we draw attention to cases such as intersonorant lenition of initial voiced stops in much of south-western Romance. A striking feature of Romance sandhi alternations is the readiness with which they may become morphologized or lexicalized. This outcome may arise from subsequent sound changes that make the original motivated alternation opaque, or from levelling of allomorphic alternation that makes the distribution of allomorphs opaque. We review an example of such a change in progress: the aspiration/loss of coda /s/ in Andalusian Spanish. Occasionally, a morphologized/lexicalized alternation may be (partly) remotivated, as is famously the case with rafforzamento fonosintattico ‘phonosyntactic strengthening’ in standard Italian. However, the phenomena of elision and liaison in modern French exemplify morphophonemic arbitrariness with very extensive incidence.

Research opportunities for undergraduate engineers vary widely in topics, tasks, and organization, yet they all convey knowledge and practices that are fundamental to engineering work and culture. This chapter outlines that engineering worldview and how it shapes undergraduate research opportunities, and then recommends best practices for undergraduate research in engineering.

The work describes the research situation in undergraduate studies in Argentina. To do this, it develops a historical perspective from the beginning of the twentieth century, which allows us to understand how research was constituted at this level. The type of institutions, the democratic discontinuities and the place in the international production of knowledge configured a special development of research in Argentina. The work proposes some successful experiences, the structural conditioning and the challenges that are faced to develop research in undergraduate studies. The disciplinary fields, the academic cultures, the participation of the state and industry, and the political role that is given to the production of knowledge are fundamental to understand the efficiency of curricular improvements in Argentina.

This chapter elaborates on two case studies in structural variation to illustrate how the comparison of closely related grammatical systems fuels research questions on general theoretical issues. Our first case study regards subject clitics in central Romance dialects. Subject clitics have been studied extensively over recent decades, but they still raise several questions concerning the nature of null subject languages. Analogously, there is a huge literature on the selection of perfective auxiliaries – the second case study in our chapter – and, as in the case of subject clitics, lesser-known non-standard dialects display a kaleidoscope of auxiliation options whose rationalization poses fascinating analytical challenges and yields insights into basic issues of linguistic theory. The core question raised by our case studies concerns the modelling of linguistic diversity: do the above phenomena result from a finite set of discrete parameters or emerge from random language-specific options? We argue that the otherwise ‘hyperastronomical’ number of possible grammars is aptly constrained by syntactic factors, although inflexional morphology – which syntax cannot control entirely – may have a role in the realization of specific auxiliary or subject clitic forms in each dialect and for each person.

Experience in teaching and supervising undergraduate research projects for over two decades has shown that undergraduate research (UR) in Nigeria could hardly be said to be taken seriously. However, in recent times, several private initiatives have begun to establish a promising trend in UR in the country. For instance, there are curricular spaces for UR in Nigeria. Under the strict guidelines of the National University Commission (NUC), many Nigerian institutions include a course on research methods within the undergraduate curriculum. The NUC policy is to allow undergraduate students ample experience of conducting meaningful research. This chapter presents best practices in UR at Covenant University as well as the Educational Research Network for West and Central Africa (ERNWACA) small grant projects.

In addition to time and place, which are inseparable from sociolinguistic variation, language may vary according to age, social class, sex or (social) gender, ethnicity, medium, style, and register. Contact between speakers often leads to change, and different patterns result according to whether this contact involves first-language (L1) or second language (L2) acquisition. Thus, ‘family tree’ aspects of language change are largely accounted for by transmission (involving L1 acquisition), whilst ‘wave model’ changes can be explained in terms of diffusion (involving L2 acquisition). Languages with a high degree of L2 contact will tend to simplify, whilst stable bilingualism or isolation will often lead to complexification. Contact may be interlinguistic or intralinguistic, sometimes resulting in complex linguistic repertoires, with up to four different levels existing simultaneously (national standard, regional standard, interdialectal koiné, local dialect). Contact may also result in code-switching, the emergence of contact vernaculars, and ‘language death’. The receptiveness of a variety to contact influence depends on the extent to which its social networks are open or closed and on the social attitudes of its speakers. Standard languages emerge through a variety of conscious and unconscious processes, and attempts may be made to give non-standard speech varieties a distinct linguistic identity through codification and the creation of literature.

Undergraduate research programs in Australia’s 43 universities emerged in the mid-2000s. The last decade saw undergraduate research (UR) evolve to become a major force in Australian higher education thanks to a range of national and regional projects and initiatives, which aim to integrate undergraduate researchers at all levels and in various functions of the university. The achievements of Australian undergraduate students and the benefits of inquiry-based learning are now well documented and widely reported beyond Australia. The pinnacle of this development is the establishment of the Australasian Council of Undergraduate Research, whose mission is to promote and advance the spread of UR in Australasia. This chapter presents the multiple facets and milestones of this journey.

Changes of social order in societies in remote times up to the present time have had a major impact on the use of address systems and their change, as has language contact due to population movements whether forced or unforced. There are several important factors influencing these changes involving processes of (de)grammaticalization and pragmaticalization. Indeed, there is a series of extra-linguistic variables associated with pronominal address including social position, relative authority, group membership, generation, age, sex, kinship, genealogic distance, mood, social context, and language variety. It is precisely these features which turn second person pronouns into social markers. This chapter has a threefold objective: first, to shed some light on the complex architecture of address systems which Romance languages have developed over time out of their shared Latin heritage; second, to familiarize readers with some of the different kinds of address systems conventionalized in Romance; and, finally, to foreground the processes of language change which led to the great variety of systems present in the post-Latin varieties today.

This chapter presents the organization of the Portuguese higher education system, defines the institutional context of undergraduate research (UR) in the country and present five cases of best practice that illustrate individual, departmental, and institutional efforts for promoting UR. The authors conclude by proposing four recommendations for further evolution of UR in Portugal.