Topics in Linguistics: Focus
Having seen a tip to the existence of this on the Language Log, I searched for and found a small bit of a standup routine performed by Alexandra McHale that addresses this SALAD-salad thing. It’s, you know, a standup routine (aired on Comedy Central). The relevant bit is at the very end.
Hi everyone. I promised to provide some project examples but I’ve had no time to sit and think so far, mainly due to the NELS conference that is going on this weekend at MIT. I am still going to try to get something worked up and posted by tonight if I can. However, in the meantime, for the purposes of thinking about it:
If you want to come up with your own project, one approach might be to think about the things we’ve looked at so far, to see if any questions arose that you might want to look at further. Even in English there’s plenty to think about. Also, if there’s a language you’re particularly familiar with, or interested in looking at, another easy route to a project would be to take something that we’ve looked about in class and think about how it might work in the language you’d like to work on.
The project is supposed to include reading up a bit on what people have said in the literature. This is probably the trickiest aspect of the project, since the odds are pretty high that just fishing around for papers in the linguistics literature will wind up giving you things to read that require more background than you have (although I think by now we’ve looked at a lot of the major concepts, at least to some extent). If you pick a language and want to talk about how some focus-related phenomenon seems to work in that language, it is possible that there aren’t any papers out there that are particularly on point. In a case like that, the papers you’d look at might well be papers on English, for example, and the extension to the language you’re looking at would be your contribution. The background reading requirement for the project would not be as involved if you are coming up with your own analysis, that’s fine. You could read just one paper, for example, and then show how it applies (or doesn’t) when extended to a different language.
Another approach would be to search around (e.g., with Google scholar) for papers that mention the phenomenon you’re interested in, and just take a look at what you find, and if one or more of the papers look interesting, base your project idea on that, possibly augmenting that by looking at one or two of the papers that your primary article cites, or articles that cite your primary article.
My intention here is just for you to come up with something that you think you’d find interesting to look at. If you can find papers, you can tell me what those are as well. Then, I’ll look it over and see if I can make recommendations, either about other papers that might be relevant (possibly instead of the ones you find), or ideas about how you might refine the project statement. So, this is not a huge commitment, it’s a starting point. Because the time until the semester ends is relatively short, the closer you get to the actual topic you’re going to work on, the better, but it’s also ok to come up with a couple of ideas.
I do still plan to try to come up with a couple of example projects, that you could adopt, in case you are having trouble coming up with something, but while I’m trying to find the time to do that, you can certainly look around on your own as well and see if anything strikes your fancy.
Due to a faculty meeting, I have to move my office hours earlier this coming Wednesday (Oct 21). They will be from 3-4pm (rather than the usual 4-5pm).
Come one! Come all! Find out more about the major and minor in linguistics, as well as academic programs in French, Spanish, and Italian language and literature. Meet faculty and students who share these interests. Current and prospective students are welcome; please spread the word!
Monday, October 19, 2009 from 3:45 to 5:00 pm, in CAS room 200
Refreshments will be served.
This is also a Facebook event. You are invited to RSVP at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=140005344422.
On homework #3, this is what I mentioned in the class, but here’s what I had in mind.
This is again kind of a “reading assignment” homework. Read the first part of the Vallduví article that I gave out (what I had in mind is reading up to the end of section 3, p. 133, though you can read sec. 4 about English, or, heck, the rest of the article if you want).
The part to write up is a comparison of the discussion of (15) in Vallduví’s article (p. 129) and the facts about rightward movement discussed on section 2.4 of Thursday’s handout (53-56) in Basque. To do this, you might also look again at section 2.3 of Thursday’s homework about movement to the left in Basque, too. The idea is basically to see what Vallduví was doing in (15) and discuss what this might lead us to expect (or at least check) for Basque examples like those in section 2.4 of the handout.
It doesn’t need to be a long writeup, something like a page.
The graphs (that I handed out copies of in class) from the Beaver et al. (2007) paper are now scanned and on the readings page. Or use can use this direct link to those three pages, the username and password needed to download the file is the same as usual.
Hi everyone. It took me quite some time to write up the “clarifications” I wanted to write for homework 2, but here they are:
The essence of the homework is just as it was on the handout, but I added a whole lot of explanation (and fixed a couple of typos), which I hope should make the homework itself much more straightforward.
I did kind of rush on this, in order to be sure that I got it posted. There might still be errors somewhere in there, please let me know if you see something that seems weird to you.
I don’t really know how a seemingly clear day morphed into one crammed with back-to-back meetings, but probably needless to say, you can now stop checking for the homework I said I was going to post. I’ll finish it and hand it out in class tomorrow.
Here, a bit late, are the specs for the homework relating to the reading that we’re doing for the next class (Krahmer and Swarts, 2008). This pretty much matches what I said in class about it.
Write up a short summary of the article, approximately a single-spaced page long, plus or minus a quarter of a page. Mention what they were testing for in the studies, how they tested for these things, and what the conclusions were. It’s not meant to be difficult, if you read the paper. The real substance of this homework is to read the paper.
Because we’re discussing the paper on Tuesday, I would like to get these summaries from you on Tuesday, even though that is less than a week to do it.
Let me know if you have any questions, and see you on Tuesday.
For the undergraduates among you, the University of Ottawa is hosting a conference for Linguistics undergraduates. They have posted a call for papers soliciting abstracts (for 20 minute talks, 1 page abstracts) for undergraduates who are interested in presenting, but the hitch is that the deadline for submissions is today. So, if you happen to have an abstract ready, you’re set. The conference itself is on Nov 21, and even if you aren’t presenting, it might be interesting to attend if you can get yourself to Ottawa.
There are generally a couple of conferences like this each year. Keep an eye out for the McCCLU at McGill the Harvard undergraduate colloquium, which are likely to take place in the spring.