LIN 1256: Advanced Language Variation & Change
Language Contact, Corpora & Our Changing Society
Course Research Project
Overview
Your goal is to develop a research project that addresses one or more of the "Big Questions" about language contact.
You will develop:
- a brief plan (i.e., proposal, idea)
- an abstract and bibliography
- a paper outline (or, alternatively, submit a critical review of a chapter of RNK)
- You will develop analytic skills by exploring relevant corpora through several assignments
Topics will be discussed and developed both in and out of class. Group projects are encouraged, as a means of building important skills for working in the field of sociolinguistics. This increases the likelihood of reliable, replicable and interpretable results. Group work skills are important to develop in sociolinguistics.
Format
Every one will prepare the project plan, abstract and bibliography.
Each student will choose whether to develop a complete paper outline or, alternatively, write a critical review of a related chapter in RNK.
If you choose the Paper Outline:
This outline of a prototypical sociolinguistic research paper provides a framework in which to organize the paper outline that will be the final submission for the course. It may need to be adapted for corpus linguistic inquiries -- to be discussed. No length maximum or minimum is stipulated.
The focus of assessment will be the research process (how you design the project, including how you propose to collect, organize and interpret the data) 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 and submit a final outline by the final class meeting.
It is hoped that the work will lead to work that can be submitted to a conference or, eventually, publication.
Some possible variables to analyze
We will discuss possible topics, variables, hypotheses in class most days. You may wish to do some quick searches in your favourite 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 and Rbrul will be used. I anticipate that you have been introduced to these methods. Still, 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
