Naomi Nagy

Linguistics at U of T

Linguistics Resources

General Linguistics Information

Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto

Linguistics resources, a site maintained by Stanford University's Linguistics program

popular books about linguistics

Canadian Linguistics Association / l'Association Canadienne de Linguistique

The Linguistic Society of America

The Linguist List. This is a great on-line resource of e-mail communiqués for the international linguistic community. It includes conference announcements, calls for papers, debates on many issues, job announcements...

A great book describing possible research projects:

Wray, Alison, Kate Trott & Aileen Bloomer. 1998. Projects in Linguistics: A Practical Guide to Researching Language. London: Arnold / NY: Oxford. (P126 .W73 1998 )

Research with Human Subjects Ethics guidelines (U of T)

Many projects students may undertake as part of their Linguistics training can be overseen by the Ethics Committee within the Department of Linguistics.

A list of films about linguistic issues, and a list of films about endangered languages

The CHILDES database, a big collection of transcribed children's speech (L1 and L2)

Sociolinguistics

Searchable (but elderly) database of research and resources on Canadian English.

A comparison of American & British English vowels (sound files and vowel quadrilateral diagrams)

How to write a sociolinguistics paper

Tools for multivariate regression analysis

Goldvarb
- Download Goldvarb from:
  http://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/goldvarb.htm. (for Mac, Windows, or Linux)
- Instructions to use Goldvarb to analyze multivariable sociolinguistic data
- Extracting tokens
- Recoding and multivariate analysis (instructions use this .Tkn file)
- Other (updated to work with ELAN) instructions from a class research project
Rbrul
Shiny Rbrul (graphic interface)

Phonetics

IPA chart

Distinctive features

Lexical sets (John Wells's set of words representing vowel sounds)

Making vowel plots:

Here are 2 options. In both you can normalize across speakers at the same time.

NORM makes individual and group plots very quickly, without needing much technical training. You just have to organize your data in a specific way (and the website has good instructions on that).

Another option is the R package phonR. It is more customizable and easier if you have a lot of manipulations you want to try on one data set. It has many plotting functions, allows multiple measurement points and supports IPA and other unicode fonts. To get started (putting your own data into R), here is a good youtube channel (watch only the first few videos). Then download the packages phonTools, vowel, phonR. Its author is Daniel McCloy.

Links to interesting phonetics websites

Typology, Syntax, and Morphology

The World Atlas of Linguistics Structures on-line is an excellent resource if you want to see what sorts of syntactic and morphological structures can be found in particular parts of the world. Check out the neat maps.

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is a database of 385 million words that is publicly available with a user-friendly interface. You can use it to find items with the same prefixes or suffixes, or longer collocations of words. It's updated with 20 million words each year.

Ethnologue is a site that lists all of the languages in the world, along with their family classification and often some references to dictionaries and grammars. If you want to find out what family a language belongs to, or whether something is a dialect of something else, this is the place to go.

Transcribing

You can transcribe in ELAN. It's FREE, very versatile, and there are lots of directions for using it for transcribing, extracting, and coding sociolinguistic data here. It has all the functionality of Express Scribe (see below), and a whole lot more.

You can transcribe directly in Praat by creating a TextGrid. Here's how to do that. (But I'd recommend using ELAN -- see one line up.)

Guidelines for transcription and for extracting tokens in a word processing program.

Express Scribe is another free transcribing software (for Mac and Windows). This lets you control a digital recording (Play, Stop, Rewind, change speed, etc.) from inside your word processing program for efficient transcription of recorded speech. You can download it for Mac or Windows. It's very quick and easy to learn. You stop and start the recording using Hot Keys.

There is one little piece of information that isn't mentioned in Express Scribe's help files that you'll need to know, at least for the Mac version. In order for the program to read the .wav (or .aif or .mp3) files on your computer, you need to go in to the Incoming panel of the Preference settings and designate a folder where you will/have put the sound files, choose how you want the files to load (one at a time or all at once) and choose what file types you want it to load.

Transcriber is also free transcribing software for Mac. You can download it here. I have these directions for use (.doc).