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This Cambridge Element examines the role and nature of focus on form in second language acquisition. An overall assessment of the role of instruction and the nature of language is provided. Instruction might have a facilitative role in the rate of acquisition. The Element briefly reviews empirical research examining the relative effects of different types of focus on form and presents some of the key implications for second language learning and teaching. An effective focus on form type is one that is input and meaning oriented. Manipulating input to facilitate language processing and form-meaning connections might enhance second language acquisition.
Insect-scale flapping wing flight vehicles can conduct environmental monitoring, disaster assessment, mapping, positioning and security in complex and challenging surroundings. To develop bio-inspired flight vehicles, systematic probing based on the particular category of flight vehicles is needed. This Element addresses the aerodynamics, aeroelasticity, geometry, stability and dynamics of flexible flapping wings in the insect flight regime. The authors highlight distinct features and issues, contrast aerodynamic stability between rigid and flexible wings, present the implications of the wing-aspect ratio, and use canonical models and dragonflies to elucidate scientific insight as well as technical capabilities of bio-inspired design.
This Element aims to connect the literature of street-level bureaucrats with that of policy entrepreneurship in order to analyze why and how bureaucrats operating at the street level can promote policy change in public administration at the individual level. I demonstrate how street-level bureaucrats act as policy entrepreneurs in different contexts around the globe to promote policy change and analyze what they think of policy entrepreneurship and what they do about it in practice. For this purpose, I use multiple research methods: a survey, in-depth interviews, focus groups and textual analyses. I also offer recommendations to decision-makers to promote street-level policy entrepreneurship, highlighting the benefits of doing so. Lastly, I critically discuss the normative aspects of street-level policy entrepreneurship: ultimately, is it desirable?
What are the meanings of number expressions, and what can they tell us about questions of central importance to the philosophy of mathematics, specifically 'Do numbers exist?' This Element attempts to shed light on this question by outlining a recent debate between substantivalists and adjectivalists regarding the semantic function of number words in numerical statements. After highlighting their motivations and challenges, I develop a comprehensive polymorphic semantics for number expressions. I argue that accounting for the numerous meanings and how they are related leads to a strengthened argument for realism, one which renders familiar forms of nominalism highly implausible.
Recent advances in statistical approaches called phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs) have provided paleontologists with a powerful set of analytical tools for investigating evolutionary tempo and mode in fossil lineages. However, attempts to integrate PCMs with fossil data often present workers with practical challenges or unfamiliar literature. This Element presents guides to the theory behind and the application of PCMs with fossil taxa. Based on an empirical dataset of Paleozoic crinoids, example analyses are presented to illustrate common applications of PCMs to fossil data, including investigating patterns of correlated trait evolution and macroevolutionary models of morphological change. The authors emphasize the importance of accounting for sources of uncertainty and discuss how to evaluate model fit and adequacy. Finally, the authors discuss several promising methods for modeling heterogeneous evolutionary dynamics with fossil phylogenies. Integrating phylogeny-based approaches with the fossil record provides a rigorous, quantitative perspective on understanding key patterns in the history of life.
How Christian people have framed the meaning of violence within their faith tradition has been a complex process subject to all manner of historical, cultural, political, ethnic and theological contingencies. As a tradition encompassing widely divergent beliefs and perspectives, Christianity has, over two millennia, adapted to changing cultural and historical circumstances. To grasp the complexity of this tradition and its involvement with violence requires attention to specific elements explored in this Element: the scriptural and institutional sources for violence; the faith commitments and practices that join communities and sanction both resistance to and authorization for violence; and select historical developments that altered the power wielded by Christianity in society, culture and politics. Relevant issues in social psychology and the moral action guides addressing violence affirmed in Christian communities provide a deeper explanation for the motivations that have led to the diverse interpretations of violence avowed in the Christian tradition.
This short history of Shakespeare in global performance-from the re-opening of London theatres upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to our present multicultural day-provides a comprehensive overview of Shakespeare's theatrical afterlife and introduces categories of analysis and understanding to make that afterlife intellectually meaningful. Written for both the advanced student and the practicing scholar, this work enables readers to situate themselves historically in the broad field of Shakespeare performance studies and equips them with analytical tools and conceptual frameworks for making their own contributions to the field.
In the first decade of life, children become bilingual in different language learning environments. Many children start learning two languages from birth (Bilingual First Language Acquisition). In early childhood hitherto monolingual children start hearing a second language through daycare or preschool (Early Second Language Acquisition). Yet other hitherto monolingual children in middle childhood may acquire a second language only after entering school (Second Language Acquisition). This Element explains how these different language learning settings dynamically affect bilingual children's language learning trajectories. All children eventually learn to speak the societal language, but they often do not learn to fluently speak their non-societal language and may even stop speaking it. Children's and families' harmonious bilingualism is threatened if bilingual children do not develop high proficiency in both languages. Educational institutions and parental conversational practices play a pivotal role in supporting harmonious bilingual development.
Derek Parfit (1942–2017) was one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This Element offers a critical introduction to his wide-ranging ethical thought, focusing especially on his two most significant works, Reasons and Persons (1984) and On What Matters (2011), and their contribution to the consequentialist moral tradition. Topics covered include: rationality and objectivity, distributive justice, self-defeating moral theories, Parfit's Triple Theory (according to which consequentialism, contractualism, and Kantian ethics ultimately converge), personal identity, and population ethics.
This Element is a philosophical history of Social Darwinism. It begins by discussing the meaning of the term, moving then to its origins, paying particular attention to whether it is Charles Darwin or Herbert Spencer who is the true father of the idea. It gives an exposition of early thinking on the subject, covering Darwin and Spencer themselves and then on to Social Darwinism as found in American thought, with special emphasis on Andrew Carnegie, and Germany with special emphasis on Friedrich von Bernhardi. Attention is also paid to outliers, notably the Englishman Alfred Russel Wallace, the Russian Peter Kropotkin, and the German Friedrich Nietzsche. From here we move into the twentieth century looking at Adolf Hitler - hardly a regular Social Darwinian given he did not believe in evolution - and in the Anglophone world, Julian Huxley and Edward O. Wilson, who reflected the concerns of their society.
This Element provides a concise review of the existing literature on content, antecedents and consequences of economic news coverage. It tests and refines prominent assumptions and hypotheses in this area. Relying on communication science theories such as framing, news values and media dependency theories, we first outline and explain how media cover the economy. Additionally, it demonstrates that coverage has a fundamental impact above and beyond the state of the economy, both on economic perceptions and political attitudes of citizens, as well as on political decision makers and media reputation of a wide variety of organizations.
This Element provides an introduction to the hiddenness argument, as presented by John Schellenberg, and its up-to-date discussion in a comprehensible way. It concludes with a brief assessment of where things stand, from the author's point of view, and why divine hiddenness should not reduce a reflective theist's confidence in theism.
This study examines a network of writers that coalesced around the publication of The History of Mary Prince (1831), which recounts Prince's experiences as an enslaved person in the West Indies and the events that brought her to seek assistance from the Anti-Slavery Society in London. It focuses on the three writers who produced the text - Mary Prince, Thomas Pringle, and Susanna Moodie - with glances at their pro-slavery opponent, James MacQueen, and their literary friends and relatives. The History connects the Black Atlantic, a diasporic formation created through the colonial trade in enslaved people, with the Anglophone Atlantic, created through British migration and colonial settlement. It also challenges Romantic ideals of authorship as an autonomous creative act and the literary text as an aesthetically unified entity. Collaborating with Prince on the History's publication impacted Moodie's and Pringle's attitudes towards slavery and shaped their own accounts of migration and settlement.
The main body of this Element, about Kant's theory of conscience, is divided into two sections. The first focuses on exegesis of Kant's ethics. One of the overarching theses of this section of the Element is that, although many of Kant's claims about conscience are prima facie inconsistent, a close examination of context generally can dissolve apparent contradictions. The second section of the Element focuses on philosophical issues in Kantian ethics. One of the overarching theses of this section of the Element is that many positions traditionally associated with Kantian ethics, including the denial of moral luck, the nonaccidental rightness condition, and the guise of the objectively good, are at variance with Kant's ethics.
This Element develops an analytical framework for understanding the role of ideas in political life and communication. Power in Ideas argues that the empirical study of ideas should combine interpretive approaches to derive meaning and understand influence with quantitative analysis to help determine the reach, spread, and impact of ideas. This Element illustrates this approach through three case studies: the idea of reparations in Ta-Nehisi Coates's “The Case for Reparations,” the idea of free expression in Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook policy speech at Georgetown University, and the idea of universal basic income in Andrew Yang's “Freedom Dividend.” Power in Ideas traces the landscapes and spheres within which these ideas emerged and were articulated, the ways they were encoded in discourse, the fields they traveled across, and how they became powerful.
Musical community is a notion commonly evoked in situations of intensive collective activity and fervent negotiation of identities. Passion Square shows, the daily singing of Chinese pop classics in parks and on street corners in the city of Wuhan, have an ambivalent relationship with these ideas. They inspire modest outward signs of engagement and are guided by apparently individualistic concerns; singers are primarily motivated by making a living through the relationships they build with patrons, and reflection on group belonging is of lesser concern. How do these orientations help complicate the foundations of typical musical community discourses? This Element addresses community as a quality rather than as an entity to which people belong, exploring its ebbs and flows as associations between people, other bodies and the wider street music environment intersect with its various theoretical implications. A de-idealised picture of musical community better acknowledges the complexities of everyday musical experiences.
Along with twentieth-century developments in playing techniques, technologies, and concepts of musical sound, the notations employed by composers have also changed. Composers of what Umberto Eco calls 'open works' often employ intentionally ambiguous music notations. These open notations ask the performer to play a radical and active role in co-creating the musical work. Scores that feature open notations have been part of the Western classical music landscape since the mid-twentieth century, and continue to have a vibrant community of practitioners today. In this Element, Tristan McKay considers intersections of ambiguity, authority, and identity in works with open notations. He develops a semiotic approach to open notation analysis and puts it into practice with in-depth analyses of openly notated works by Earle Brown, Will Redman, and Leah Asher.
This Element documents the diversity and dissensus of scholarship on the political resource curse, diagnoses its sources, and directs scholarly attention towards what the authors believe will be more fruitful avenues of future research. In the scholarship to date, there is substantial regional heterogeneity and substantial evidence denying the existence of a political resource curse. This dissensus is located in theory, measure, and research design, especially regarding measurement error and endogenous selection. The work then turns to strategies for reconnecting research on resource politics to the broader literature on democratic development. Finally, the results of the authors' own research is presented, showing that a set of historically contingent events in the Middle East and North Africa are at the root of what has been mistaken for a global political resource curse.