Cambridge University Press eBooks

This Element explores the concepts, benefits, and limitations of the use of AI in language learning, teaching, and assessment. It also looks at AI tools for language teaching and language teachers' roles and competencies required for AI-powered language teaching. In addition, it offers practical ideas for AI-powered language teaching and presents AI-powered language teaching activities based on a…

This chapter deals the nature and typology of null subjects. Three types of null-subject language are distinguished: radical null-subject languages, consistent null-subject languages and partial null-subject languages. Together with non-null-subject languages, these form a four-way typology, which is presented and explained.

Political meritocracy, which selects and promotes officials based on their work performance, is an important explanation for China's rapid development. While prior studies focus on territorial leaders (kuai), less attention is given to functional department leaders (tiao), whose performance is harder to measure, attribute, or compare. This Element introduces an attention-based explanation, arguin…

This Element explores Nietzsche's thinking about fate. As a doctrine, fatalism asserts that whatever happens does so necessarily. 'Fate', however, implies an overall pattern for every individual life which imposes its own necessity on the events of that life, although with some contribution from chance. Nietzsche's ideas on fate were influenced by other thinkers, notably Emerson and the ancient S…

Modern Spain has developed from a complex history, a diverse population, and continual contact with outside influences. This updated and revised volume moves from prehistoric times to the present, incorporating recent scholarship and focusing on politics, society, economy, culture, and personalities. Written in an engaging style, it introduces key themes that have shaped Spanish history. These in…

Modern Spain has developed from a complex history, a diverse population, and continual contact with outside influences. This updated and revised volume moves from prehistoric times to the present, incorporating recent scholarship and focusing on politics, society, economy, culture, and personalities. Written in an engaging style, it introduces key themes that have shaped Spanish history. These in…

This chapter presents arguments in favour of analysing cross-linguistic word-order variation in terms of an asymmetric approach to linearisation based on the proposals in Kayne (1994). There is also a discussion of the Final over Final Condition, roll-up movement and movement types.

A thorough introduction to formal syntactic typology by a leader in the field, Comparing Syntax systematically covers syntactic variation across languages. The textbook covers word-order parameters, null subjects, polysynthesis, verb-movement, ergativity, interrogatives and negation within a comparative framework, ensuring that readers are able to engage with the key topics in the most up-to-date…

Modern Spain has developed from a complex history, a diverse population, and continual contact with outside influences. This updated and revised volume moves from prehistoric times to the present, incorporating recent scholarship and focusing on politics, society, economy, culture, and personalities. Written in an engaging style, it introduces key themes that have shaped Spanish history. These in…

Modern Spain has developed from a complex history, a diverse population, and continual contact with outside influences. This updated and revised volume moves from prehistoric times to the present, incorporating recent scholarship and focusing on politics, society, economy, culture, and personalities. Written in an engaging style, it introduces key themes that have shaped Spanish history. These in…

This Chapter is devoted to aspects of the traditional morphological typology, and looks at Baker’s (1996) proposals for polysynthesis and Huang’s (2015) “deep” analyticity, concluding that these two morphological types are determined by the incidence of syntactic head movement.

Modern Spain has developed from a complex history, a diverse population, and continual contact with outside influences. This updated and revised volume moves from prehistoric times to the present, incorporating recent scholarship and focusing on politics, society, economy, culture, and personalities. Written in an engaging style, it introduces key themes that have shaped Spanish history. These in…

Absence in official records can have profound implications for social memory, civil rights, restorative and transitional justice, citizenship, social welfare, and redress for historical abuse. Scholars of archivistics and early modern New World imperial contexts have uncovered the epistemological problems that archival silences pose for historical research, and I contend that absence deserves sep…

In this chapter we first review the parameters discussed in the preceding chapters and try to show systematically which values each one has in a range of familiar Germanic, Romance and other languages. This leads to a discussion of the Parametric Comparison Method (PCM). Finally, we consider some of the theoretical issues concerning the nature of parameters and parametric variation and conjecture…

This chapter summarises the principal results of Greenberg’s classic 1963 paper (Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In Joseph H. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of Language , 58–90. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press) and subsequent work in language typology developing Greenberg’s ideas by Lehmann, Vennemann, Hawkins and Dryer, concluding with a section…

Modern Spain has developed from a complex history, a diverse population, and continual contact with outside influences. This updated and revised volume moves from prehistoric times to the present, incorporating recent scholarship and focusing on politics, society, economy, culture, and personalities. Written in an engaging style, it introduces key themes that have shaped Spanish history. These in…

Modern Spain has developed from a complex history, a diverse population, and continual contact with outside influences. This updated and revised volume moves from prehistoric times to the present, incorporating recent scholarship and focusing on politics, society, economy, culture, and personalities. Written in an engaging style, it introduces key themes that have shaped Spanish history. These in…

This Chapter deals with cross-linguistic variation in interrogatives. We look at both yes/no questions and wh-questions. Since the use of question particles, grammatical morphemes whose function is to mark (or type) the clause as interrogative, is by far the commonest way of marking clauses as interrogative across languages, we focus to a large extent on these elements.

This Chapter concentrates on Verb movement across a range of languages, including the Romance languages, English, Haitian and Cape Verde Creole, two kinds of Verb-initial languages, Mandarin Chinese, Latin and Japanese.

This Chapter discusses ergativity and various kinds of split ergativity, as well as the apparent lack of SVO ergative languages. An analysis of ergativity in terms of inherent Case is proposed, following Sheehan (2017).