 | English Linguistics - Mini-Project
James Madison University |
Instructions: This is mostly a secondary sources research project intended to mkae you familiarize yourself with some of the kinds of linguistic research available and to help you prepare for your bigger project. IT WILL BE GRADED. Thereofre, read the directions carefully and make sure you do all parts.
- Choose an area of linguistics that you think is the area in which you will do your bigger research project and find a possible research topic in that area. (You are NOT making a permanent commitment to a particular topic, although this secondary research could be a good start on that project.) Describe the topic. I will be looking for an ability to choose a focused topic and for an ability to describe this topic using appropriate terminology.
- Find out the names of TWO potentially relevant linguistics journals or conference proceedings that our library carries in hardcopy and TWO that we have access to in electronic format. Determine specifically what kinds of research are published in each, writing a few sentences of description for each and indicating which one(s) are likely to be the most relevant for your research. I will be looking for some ability to assess relevance and some thoroughness in your ability to check the library's resources and to find out about publications.
- Either check out at least ONE book or get a copy of at least one linguistics article that you think may help you with a research project on your current topic. Give me the bibliographic entry for this work (either use MLA format or saying what style you are using), and also give the reference for at least one work taken from the bibliography of this work that you think might also be relevant and tell me why.
- In addition, using the Linguistics and Language Behaviour Abstracts (LLBA) research database, do a keyword search on at least THREE different terms or combinations of terms that are well targeted for finding the kinds of research relevant to your proposed topic. I will be looking for evidence that you have discovered a range of terms linguists seem to use in the relevant research and that you have not focused on the wrong material or missed a big subset of the relevant research. Give the bibliographic entry for at least two references found through this search that you could find highly useful but that you would need to order through interlibrary loan.
- Finally, characterize the type of language data (eg. English conversational data, children's phonological data, literary texts, French songs, etc.) that would be relevant to your research; then find one source for this type of data. Characterize the source in as much detail as possible. How was it collected, how big is it, what information is/isn't available, etc.? If the data available is limited, what method(s) could be used to collect more?
HINT: Our library has some data; there are also online databases of language - spoken and text, some of which exist for other purposes but may be relevant to linguists. Also, your data may be the kind you can find in a newspaper, novel, TV show, etc. You may find a few useful links in the "Linguistics Resources" link at the bottom of our course syllabus.
