Analysis 4: Choices in sociolinguistic journal writing (HW_A4)

Like HW_A1, this is an assignment in which you will conduct a microsociolinguistic variationist analysis to practice quantitative analysis and reporting skills. It’s an opportunity to consider how the concepts and terminology that you have acquired in this course differ between macro and microsociolinguistics.

Get an online version of an article from the journal Language Variation and Change and one from either Language in Society or the International Journal of the Sociology of Language (ideally about a similar topic or community). You may need to learn how to access journals through the Robarts Library catalogue (Get help with that).

You do not have to read these articles. Search the articles to determine the relative frequency of words from the lists in (a) and (b).

1. identity, culture, gender, performance, situate, problematize, social capital
2. quantitative, variation, change, operationalize, results, correlation, statistical significance
Please note that "statistical significance" is one phrase that should be searched as a phrase, rather than searching for separate instances of the two words. (The same is true for "social capital.")

1. Report your results in a table. In this table, a reader should be able to easily see which journal article included more instances of the words from list (a) and which included more instances of the words from list (b).
2. What do your findings suggest about the focus of each journal?
3. Would you categorize this variation between the two journals as lexical, phonological or grammatical?

Next, select one of the articles assigned for this course. Use it to answer the next 3 questions:

4. Do you think this will be more like the first article you examined or the second, in terms of which type of vocabulary it exhibits? Why?
5. Conduct the same analysis and add these results in a new table that is comparable to your previous table.
6. Were you right in your prediction? Explain.
7. Provide informative captions for each table you submit. Tip: Look at some table captions that appear in any of these articles for help.
8. Provide properly formatted bibliography entries for each article you selected. Tip: Use the format of the citations that appear in any of these articles to help with proper formatting. There are also resources in Quercus on this topic.

 Return to syllabus || Updated Aug. 11, 2020