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Naomi Nagy
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Course Research Project
Developing a topic
After a period of brainstorming (on your own, in class, in the Discussion Forum in Quercus, through your first survey responses...), the class will develop one or several research projects and form research groups. Groups may range in size from 1 student to the whole class.
Details of the project will be discussed and developed both in and out of class time. The goal is to develop an answerable research question within the framework of variationist sociolinguistics. You may find inspiration in the readings and lecture content, browsing through sociolinguistic journals, looking back at your notes for the courses that are prerequisite to this one, or your observations of the world around you.
Guidelines for the project
- Examine spontaneously-produced speech, available in various corpora. It's important to get practice working with spontaneous speech, not just written texts.
- Select a dependent variable with a well-defined envelope of variation and with 2 (or more) distinct variants. (Find a review these terms in the Tagliamonte textbook.)
- Start early to find relevant background literature that either reports what is already known about the variable you select or provides motivation for exploring something new.
Recent topics
Here are some recent project titles/topics from this course:
- Word-Final Vowel Deletion: Italian’s Influence on Faetar and a Shared Variation
- Cajun French VOT
- Variation in NP number agreement in Brazilian Portuguese: a social phenomenon
- Am I Canadian or Filipino? The Effects of English Contact in Tagalog Heritage Speakers
- The Effects of Age on Quotation, Indirectly
- Filipinos are speak[ing] like this, not talk[in] like that
- On the Future (Tenses) of Louisiana French
- Because Versus ‘Cause: The Use of English Variants in Heritage Language Communities
Data
Data should already be transcribed, given the time constraints of a one-semester course. Students may have their own data they want to work on, or they may use data in the Corpora in the Classroom website and/or the HLVC Project. If you have other options in mind, please talk to the professor.
Learning the skills
This course is organized to lead students through the steps of a variationist sociolinguistic research project, from conceptualizing a research question, through selecting appropriate data, coding and analyzing it, interpreting the results, and writing up and presenting the findings. Each HW assignment focuses on one stage of data preparation or analysis. By completing the sequence of assignments in the course, students will work through the skills needed for the project. Analysis of languages in addition to English will be encouraged, as an important step toward documenting variation in minority, endangered and under-resourced languages.
As the exact skills and resources needed will vary according to students' choices about the project, assignments will be further developed and explained in class, along with the necessary skills for organizing, coding, and analyzing data.
Writing up
A polished paper need not be the goal. Rather your goal is to write a paper which shows that you know the necessary elements for a variationist sociolinguistic research paper and have acquired relevant terminology. Precise guidelines about paper length are not possible. However, the diverse elements that are necessary for a paper will become clear through both the readings for the course (which serve as models), tips in the Tagliamonte textbook, and the elements of the paper that you develop through your assignments. You can also see the rubric for the final paper in Quercus.
- Guidelines about writing an abstract
- An outline of a sociolinguistic research paper (see also the outline offered in Exercise 13 of the textbook)
Updated August 25, 2025.