LIN 1256: Advanced Language Variation & Change
Language Contact, Corpora & Analysis
Course Research Project
Overview
Your goal is to develop, conduct and interpret a research project that addresses one or more of the "Big Questions" about language contact. The expected outcome is a complete paper suitable for presentation at a linguistics conference.
Topics will be discussed and developed both in and out of class. Group projects are strongly encouraged, as a means of building important skills for working in the field of sociolinguistics, and to enable more data to be analyzed. (This increases the likelihood of reliable and interpretable results. Groupwork skills are important to develop in sociolinguistics.)
The paper will be built incrementally through the course assignments. An outline of necessary components will be developed collectively in class.
Requirements
The proposal assignment and this outline of a prototypical sociolinguistic research paper. provide a framework in which to organize the paper. (Note that not all aspects may be relevant to all papers.) No length maximum or minimum is stipulated.
The focus of assessment will be the research process (how you design the project, collect, organize and interpret the data -- which you will explain in the paper) with secondary attention to the elegance of the write-up.
As you prepare to write, think about:
- Which articles that we read in class present their arguments most clearly? Why?
- How can you use this knowledge in your own writing?
All students/groups will present their ongoing work to the class on April 3 and submit a final paper by 5pm on Thursday, April 10.
It is hoped that the work will also be presented in the LVC Research Group and ideally also submitted to a conference.
Some possible variables to analyze
We will discuss possible topics, variables and hypotheses in class most days. As a starter, here are some possible variables to think about. Doubtless others will occur as you read. You may wish to do some quick searches in the corpus to see how much data would be available.
Project process
These projects will be corpus-based -- data will be extracted from one of the corpora below, coded in ELAN, and analyzed quantitatively. Tools such as ELAN, Excel and/or R, Goldvarb and/or Rbrul will be introduced and used. If you are new to this quantitative approach, you may be surprised at how messy real language data is -- it's not like the "cleaned up" examples that you meet in textbooks! This can be frustrating, but it's all the more satisfying when you can work out systematic patterns that reflect real language usage.
Data available for your assignments and projects
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Please consider printing double-sided, using 1.5 spacing and omitting title pages on your own work, and reading onscreen when possible. |
