Assignment
Elaborate in words on a topic of your choice, applying the skills you've learned in this course to explain that topic to your peers. You will also revise what you previously wrote for Part 2 based on previous feedback.
Objective:
Think about what topic(s) you've found interesting, challenging, and/or underexplored in this course and push yourself to expand your knowledge slightly or apply what you've already learned to a new language.
Instructions:
A. Specifics. As last time, the document should be double-spaced, one inch margins, PDF file format, name included at the top of the document. Include both the revised version of Part 1, Part 2, and the new draft of Part 3 (1000-1500 words) in your document with bold headings that say 'Part 1', 'Part 2', 'Part 3'. You should also include a brief cover letter (no more than one page) which addresses how you arrived at the topic for Part 3, any questions you'd like me to address in my feedback, and if you are aiming to receive credit for mastery of a course topic (more on this below).
B. Topic. You should identify a topic of interest that intersects in some way with at least one of the core course topics (Philosophy of Linguistics, Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Language Acquisition) elaborate in introduction/literature review on that topic to an audience of your peers. We will devote some in-class time to identifying a topic but please also feel free to use office hours to explore topic ideas with me! Remember that your topic needs to be narrow and defined enough to fit in words! Some potential starting points are given below:
a. How does [course topic] work in [specific language / context]?
i. How do you study phonetics of American Sign Language?
ii. How is morphology in German different from English?
iii. How is syntax of African American English different from Standardized Academic English?
b. What did we not fully cover or address in [course topic]?
i. How do you draw syntax trees for questions?
ii. What women were involved in the cognitive revolution?
c. How does [course topic] cross over with [other thing I'm interested in]? (It will be especially helpful to meet with me for these types of questions!)
i. How do virtual assistants like Siri understand speech? How is it similar or different to humans? [though, this question might be too big for this assignment]
ii. What aspects of Korean pronunciation are particularly difficult for do English-speaking college student learners? Why?
C. Mastery. You can try to use this paper to earn mastery credit for one of our core course topics. If this is the case, please address it in your cover letter so that I can provide direct feedback on this draft on whether you have shown sufficient evidence of mastery. It will probably also be helpful to meet with me in office hours while you are coming up with a topic so that we can come to an understanding of what should be addressed
D. Documentation. You probably should be incorporating one or two primary or secondary sources for this portion of your paper. When providing citations, you may use APA style (Links to an external site.) for references and citations (and feel free to come to office hours with questions about what and how to include citations if you have them).