Philosophy, like other disciplines in the humanities (and social sciences), is one of the “soft disciplines” with a low paradigm consensus. With the plurality of ideas about what counts as philosophy and what methods are appropriate to it, it comes a special challenge in articulating any broadly acceptable vision for how best to implement undergraduate research in philosophy. Although philosophical research involves much collaboration, including layers of peer review feedback and multiple presentations of works in progress, it continues to culminate almost exclusively in the single-authored manuscript.Certainly, a common perception among philosophers has been that one’s own research is most efficiently and successfully undertaken by oneself without the drag of overseeing more or less novice, apprentice collaborators. Where the undergraduate mentee takes on research that is not connected to one’s own, the drag productivity is expected to be even greater.

The inquiry-based approach to learning has been successfully applied in science education. Inquiry-based learning is defined as an approach involving active, research-based learning in the classroom to acquire new knowledge and competences, either individually or collaboratively, in self-regulated learning settings. In this chapter five general inquiry phases are being discussed: Orientation, Conceptualization, Investigation, Conclusion, and Discussion. These phases and their corresponding sub-phases are interlinked in an inquiry cycle. While experiencing each phase the students will acquire research-based skills and further develop a wide range of soft skills as long as instructors provide adequate guidance and support.

While undergraduate research has been a longstanding concern, it has been approached from, and positioned within, a diverse range of interests, such that its meaning and implementation have been highly variable. These perspectives include: the teaching/research nexus, and the belief that these two roles are inextricably linked; the older notion of higher education teaching (at undergraduate, master’s and doctoral levels) as a preparation for the academic role; the contemporary difficulties faced by those seeking to innovate within higher education; the desirability of a broader introduction of undergraduate research opportunities. Some conclusions on the feasibility of doing so are drawn.

There are concerns that the South African higher education system is not producing sufficient graduates to meet national needs in respect of economic and social development. Systemic reform such as strengthening the undergraduate teaching and research relationship, which is inextricably tied to curriculum structure, is necessary to meet the goals of equity and development and enhancing graduate quality. This can potentially widen the pipeline into postgraduate studies and produce the next generation of academics. The main argument of this chapter is the need to profoundly change the manner in which teaching is structured in South Africa, in order to shift the prevailing culture of undergraduate students as receivers to one in which they are inquirers. This requires pedagogies that enable inquiry-led learning to be developed, to actively engage students in the research process and for them to make the linkage to their discipline-specific practice. An increased focus on building an undergraduate research culture through pedagogical reforms is still needed.

In this chapter the editors introduce the book and its aim of showing how the study of comparative and historical data from the Romance languages can illuminate general linguistics. After a brief presentation of the volume and its structure, the editors reflect on how their personal experiences of working with data from the Romance languages have led them to reflect on wider issues in general ling uistics. Recurrent themes in their work have been, respectively, morphosyntactic change (Ledgeway) and sound change and its morphological consequences (Maiden). Among the topics whose theoretical implications are explored are: parametric variation, universals, typological variation, pro-drop, word order, linguistic theory and philology, complementizer systems, the interaction of phonological and morphological factors in morphologization, the problem of defining a language family, and the perils of ‘standard language bias’ in the practice of historical linguistics. While these may appear a quite heterogeneous set of issues, they are treated in a way that prompts some major shared fundamental conclusions, in particular that Romance linguistics can make its most powerful contributions to general linguistics when Romance linguists exploit to the maximum the extraordinary wealth of historical and comparative data which the Romance languages and dialects offer them.

This chapter uses data from a range of Romance languages to illustrate the different definitions of the notion of suppletion in the linguistic literature, and to offer a typology of suppletion (notable the difference between ‘incursive’ and phonologically induced suppletion). Suppletion may be most usefully viewed simply as an extreme contrast between unity of meaning, on the one hand, and disunity of the forms expressing that meaning, on the other. The typology and distribution of Romance suppletions is described, for example, from the numeral system, from the system of marking comparatives in adjectives, from the inflexional morphology of personal pronouns, from the inflexional morphology or verbs, nouns, and adjectives. While the Romance languages provide cross-linguistically typical illustrations of suppletion in its different manifestations, the Romance data are particularly thought-provoking with regard to, among other things, (i) the particular role of synonymy between lexemes in determining the emergence of incursive suppletion in diachrony; (ii) the role of existing abstract patterns of alternation in providing ‘templates’ for the paradigmatic distribution of suppletive alternants; and (iii) the role of phonological resemblance as a determinant of incursive suppletion.

Student undergraduate research experience is a priority for higher education in Russia. The national long-term social and economic development document states that project-based learning is central to preparing students for the realities of the professional world. New government educational standards were developed to provide universities with the flexibility to introduce key undergraduate research activities to their curricula. This chapter gives a brief overview of the national higher education system in Russia, describes the administrative and cultural framework for undergraduate research, presents best practice examples, and provides an outlook on possibilities for future development.

This chapter presents Romance evaluative suffixation not as a cabinet of curiosities but as a set of linguistic data with potentially important consequences for linguistic theorizing. The impact on linguistic theorizing that one is prepared to grant to these data depends on whether Romance evaluative suffixation is considered plain or expressive morphology. In the first part of the chapter, we conclude that it has greater affinities with the latter and counterexamples against supposed linguistic universals drawn from Romance evaluative morphology therefore should not be overrated. In the second part, an account of the semantic and pragmatic meaning of evaluative suffixation in the framework of Potts’s two-tiered semantics is shown to predict some of the seemingly abnormal behaviour of evaluative suffixes, such as their iterability when used in pragmatic function. In the third part, we present data from child-directed speech and dialects from Romania to Brazil that show evaluative suffixation outside verbal inflexion. This order of affixes is problematic for some theories that postulate a strict order of components in grammar, but we argue that it complies with deep principles underlying affix order in natural languages if one takes into account the peculiar affective-pragmatic use of diminutives as ‘sentence diminutives’ in some Romance varieties.

This chapter deals with the analyses of the grammatical phenomena that have been related to information structure in the Romance languages, and that have played a central role in the general research on the encoding of information-structure notions in the grammar and at the interfaces. An overview is presented of this work, which has offered a great contribution to our current understanding of both empirical and theoretical issues. Highly debated questions are addressed, such as the relationship between focus and newness and between topic and givenness, the grammatical and interpretive correlates of different types of focus and topics, and the ‘aboutness’ nature of topics in contrast with subjects.

Exercise science is a multifaceted discipline with roots in many different natural science backgrounds.Most concepts associated with it can be made accessible and understandable to the most novice researcher. Students are exposed to knowledge relating to the discipline in the news, at school, during recreational sports, and in general dinner table conversation. This tends to make exercise science research less intimidating and more appealing to students of all backgrounds and majors than traditional sciences such as chemistry and biology. Even though this type of research can include complicated instrumentation that requires extensive training to operate, there are always aspects that benefit from undergraduate participation. In turn, exercise science investigations offer undergraduate researchers a level of accomplishment and responsibility that will directly impact future career aspirations.