Topic description and stories

Winston Churchill’s famous Battle of Britain address, adapted here for a wartime poster, is one example of a remnant of the Verb Second constraint in English, which could hint at the existence of a universal grammar.

“Never was so much owed by so many to so few”: Could phrases like this hold clues about universal grammar?

16 Dec 2015

A new research project examining a linguistic construction called the Verb Second constraint could, academics believe, help to explain how people...

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GCSE students discover the wonders of German

18 Jun 2015

“A human translator will beat any machine any day” proclaims Klaus Fritz, the translator of the Harry Potter books into German.

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Announcement of the new Schröder Professor of German

25 Sep 2013

Professor Sarah Colvin, currently at Warwick University, has been announced as the new Schröder Professor of German, and is to start in the...

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Nicholas Boyle

Endowment creates “the most attractive job in German Studies in the world”

26 Mar 2012

A distinguished Professorship of German at the University of Cambridge has been endowed in perpetuity thanks to a generous £2 million benefaction...

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