Linguistics 1 Course Paper Description

• Linguistics 1 main menu

• Sample paper (German)
• Sample paper (Korean)

• Some more hints
• Grading the paper
• Will we read drafts of the paper?

• Typing phonetic symbols in your paper

Why a paper?

Everybody uses language but few people think about what they are doing as they use it. The purpose of this course is to get you to think about it, and the best way to do that is to have you use some of the tools you will get in this course to analyze your own experiences in language use.

The structure of the paper will be the same for everyone, but all the papers will be different because everyone's experience with language will differ, either because of the languages themselves or the ways the languages have been used.

Paper topic

Theme: The purpose of the paper is to get you to reflect on the "language instinct" by comparing your abilities in two languages. If your ability is weak in one of the languages, so much the better! It will make for a good comparison. One of the languages will be YOUR NATIVE LANGUAGE. The other language will be a language with which you have some personal experience. This could be any of the following:

• English, if you speak a language other than English as your first language.
• A language that you have studied in school, even if only two years in high school.
• A language in which you have some ability because of exposure to it through relatives who speak it, having lived where it was spoken, or any other circumstance.
• Some hints if you don't think any of these categories will work for you.

"Research": This is not a research paper.Your only sources of information should be your knowledge of the two languages you choose and the information you get in Linguistics 1 from lectures and Pinker's Language Instinct. If you choose a language which you studied in school, you may want to consult your textbooks, but you do not need to do any library research.

Length and form: The paper should be 4-6 pages, double-spaced in 12 point type. You will not need a bibliography other than listing a language text you may have consulted, as mentioned just above.

Due date: Papers are due in sections Week 10. NO LATE PAPERS PLEASE!

Outline of Paper

Introduction: Describe your linguistic background as it relates to the paper. This should include information on the context of where you learned each language--at home, in school (including where you studied and the amount of time), living where the language is spoken, etc. If you learned one of the languages in school, say a little about how it was taught--little or much speaking of the language in class, little or much English used during class, much or little emphasis on good pronunciation, much or little emphasis on memorizing grammar rules, etc.

Comparison of sounds: Select one point of comparison between sounds found in the two languages. Examples of such comparison might be

• the difference between Spanish vowels, which are "pure" vowels and English vowels, which are "diphthongized" (compare the pronunciation of of the vowel in Spanish de 'from' with the pronunciation of the vowel in English day)
• the presence of front rounded vowels in French, German, or Chinese and their absence in English
• the presence of palatal fricatives in English (the sounds symbolized by the underlined letters in ash and azure) and their absence in Spanish
• the presence of velar fricatives ("guttural sounds") in German or Hebrew and their absence in English

The sound description need not be technical, but try to use terminology and concepts introduced during Week 4. You should (1) write the sounds using phonetic symbols as discussed in Week 4, (2) provide an articulatory description of the sounds, and (3) give sample words. Include some comments comparing the languages, for example,noting what sounds you tend to substitute for the "hard"sounds of your non-native language.

DO NOT CONFUSE THE ORTHOGRAPHYOF THE LANGUAGE WITH THE SOUNDS OF THE LANGUAGE. TWO POINTS WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY DEDUCTED FOR THIS ERROR. (See an example of the error and how to avoid it.)

Comparison of grammar: Select one point of "grammar" for comparison. This could be a point of

• syntax, such as order of words in a sentence, order of elements in the Noun Phrase, marking words for whether they are subject or object, etc.
• word formation, such as inflection of verbs, marking words for gender agreement, formation of compound words, etc.

The grammar description need not be technical, but try to use terminology and concepts introduced during the lectures on Syntax and Morphology. Describe the way the two languages mark a comparablestructure, e.g. how each language marks past tense, what the orderof a noun and its modifiers are in each of the languages, etc.BE SURE TO INCLUDE EXAMPLES FROM BOTH LANGUAGES!

Language and thought: Find an example of how the two languages express thoughts differently such that a "Whorfian" view would argue that the languages CAUSE their speakers to think differently. Some types of examples you might use are

• one language has several words to express what the other language expresses with one word, e.g. wear (could have different words depending on the article of clothing), break (could have different words depending on type of thing broken), snow (may be expressed with different words depending on quality of the snow), color words may break the spectrum up in different ways in the two languages, etc.
• one language may require different forms of words when addressing older people from the forms used when addressing friends of the same age

Then state why such arguments for "linguistic determinism" are based on fallacious lines of reasoning (see page 13 of the APS lecture book).

Acquisition: Compare the way you "think" in the two languages as related to the way you learned them and the contexts where you use them. For example,

• you create utterances spontaneously in your native language because you learned it through the normal process of language acquisition, but you speak Spanish slowly and falteringly because you put sentences together using grammar rules you memorized in school.
• you speak English with an accent and/or make grammatical errors in English because you learned it after the "critical age", yet you find it easier to discuss technical subjects in English than in your "home" language because you use the latter only in everyday family contexts.

GIVE AT LEAST ONE CONCRETE EXAMPLE OF AN ERROR YOU HAVE MADE OR AN IDEA YOU HAVE HAD TROUBLE EXPRESSING IN YOUR NON-NATIVE LANGUAGE.

TYPING SPECIAL SYMBOLS

You may want to type special symbols in your papers. Up-to-date computers now incorporate Unicode in their operating systems. Unicode fonts are fonts that use exactly the same underlying codes for just about every symbol for every language in the world, so that documents prepared on one platform (Windows, Mac, etc.) look exactly the same on every other platform. If you just need a few symbols, Windows and Macintosh give you a way to insert special symbols by clicking on the symbols displayed in a palate.

WINDOWS

If you are using Microsoft Word, go to the "Insert > Symbol" menu and you will see a box like this:

You can scroll through the character set until you see the symbol that you want. Click on it, then click "Insert".

MACINTOSH

In the menu bar, click on the little American flag:

Select "Show Character Palate" and you will see something like this:

Click on the menu items to the left to see different character sets. When you find the one you want, click on the character, then click "Insert". The character palate in the Macintosh includes Korean Hangul, Japanese Kana, and numerous other languages in addition to symbols based on the Roman alphabet.

Both Windows and Macintosh also give ways to display keyboards that allow you to type from your keyboard. You will have to explore these capabilities on your own.

If you want to download a real phonetic font that you can type using your keyboard in normal fashion, there are all kinds of fonts available from "Fonts in Cyberspace". Scroll down to "IPA" for a phonetic font. There are versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux. I recommend the Unicode version. There are also links to fonts for just about any language orthography that you can think of. Some are downloadable for free, some you have to buy.

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