Announcements:
- The final exam will be Tuesday, May 6, 2-5pm in STA217 (final exam schedule)
- I will be available by email until May 6, and I will have office hours
in either Keiper 103 or Keiper 109 from 11:00 am to 1:30 pm on May 6.
Schedule
Course description: LIN120: Sociolinguistics is an
introduction to the study of human language viewed from a social and
historical perspective. Students will acquire a variety of tools for
linguistic analysis, covering phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, and
discourse. The course will focus on linguistic changes in progress in
American society; relevant case studies from other languages will be
incorporated as well. Students will engage in field projects and will learn
to use quantitative methods to analyze the results. The course has no
prerequisites and is appropriate for any student interested in language and
its use.
Materials:
- Many of the assigned readings will come from the
course textbook, Miriam Meyerhoff's Introducing
Sociolinguistics (2006, Routledge, available from the campus bookstore). Additional readings
will be distributed in class or made available online.
- To complete the
course assignments, you'll need access to a computer where you can (i)
listen to online sound files and (ii) run Excel or a comparable spreadsheet
program. Visit User
Area Services, or see me, if you need help arranging this.
- It may
also be helpful to have recording equipment of some kind (laptop with mike,
portable tape/MP3 recorder, etc.), but this isn't required.
Requirements: This course meets only once a week and we will
be covering quite a bit of new material in each meeting. It is therefore
very important that you attend every class and complete the readings and
written assignments on time. In general there won't be opportunities to
make up late or incomplete work (except in case of a genuine medical or
personal emergency, in which case you should contact me as soon as you
can). There are three kinds of assignments that will be graded:
- Homework: Most weeks you will be asked to complete a
homework assignment to be submitted either online or at the beginning of
the following class. Homeworks are designed to give you practice in
applying the data-collection methods, analytical techniques, and
linguistic principles learned in class, and are graded on a scale of 0 to
10. You are encouraged to work together on homework assignments, but you
should write up your answers independently (i.e., no word-for-word
identical responses) unless otherwise instructed. We will generally go
over each homework together in class immediately after it's been turned
in. This means that
late homeworks cannot be accepted unless you've made prior
arrangements with me or there's a genuine emergency. However, your lowest
homework grade will be automatically dropped from the calculation of
your final grade at the end of the course.
- Exams: There will be a one-hour, in-class midterm
exam on Wednesday, March 5, and a two-hour comprehensive final exam
on Tuesday, May 6 at 2:00 pm (final exam schedule). Both exams
will consist of short-answer, multiple-choice, matching and
fill-in-the-blank questions. I will schedule extra office hours and/or a
study session during the reading period, May 2-5.
- Field project: Working either individually or in pairs,
students will investigate a case study in language variation by collecting
and analyzing their own linguistic data. In most cases, field-project
topics will develop from one or more of the weekly homework assignments,
and you will have opportunities to receive guidance and feedback in
installments throughout the semester. The final project will be submitted
as a 5- to 6-page written report, due
April 30 at the beginning of class. Grading will take into account
the skill with which you carry out your fieldwork, your accurate and
appropriate use of the analytical tools covered in class, your demonstrated
understanding of the background theoretical issues, and the clarity of your
written presentation.
Grading: Your final grade will be calculated as follows:
Homework: 40%
Midterm exam: 15%
Final exam: 25%
Field project: 20%
(Class participation is not a formal component of your grade, but it will be
taken into account in determining whether borderline grades are rounded up
or not.)
Some links of interest:
SCHEDULE Check regularly for
updates!
January 23
Introduction: Prescriptive and descriptive grammar. Sources of
linguistic evidence. Issues in sociolinguistics. The sounds of
language: Phonetic transcription.
January 30
Phonology: the structure of sounds. Place and manner of
articulation. Syllable structure. Principles in the study of sound change.
- Reading: Meyerhoff ch3
- Homework 2
- Begin working on interviews for short-a
project (instructions to be posted soon)
February 6
Review of concepts in phonology. Short-a in American speech. Language
and style.
February 13
Language and
social class. Basics in acoustic phonetics. Introduction to Excel.
- Reading: Labov (2007) (excerpts; see
homework), Meyerhoff ch7 (skim)
- Homework 4
- Submit short-a data (instructions) via
Blackboard by the beginning of class on February 20.
February 20
Word structure. Morphology-phonology interactions. Morphological variation and change.
February 27
English t/d deletion and -ing. Real and apparent time (lecture slides).
Midterm review.
- Prepare for midterm exam.
March 5
Midterm exam
March 12
Class canceled.
March 19
No class (spring break)
March 26
Semantic change. Language and ethnicity. Features of African American Vernacular
English.
April 2
Sentence structure. Using corpus data to examine syntactic
change. Measuring statistical significance.
April 9
Sentence structure continued. The syntax of early English. Graphic display of quantitative information.
April 16
Multilingualism and language contact. Language birth and
death. Discourse structure. Variation in verbs of quotation.
April 23
Verbs of quotation continued. Preliminary feedback on field projects.
- Finish field projects
- Reading: slides from class presentations of Blyth et al. 1999
and Nagy 2001 (posted on Blackboard under Course Documents)
April 30
Field projects due. Wrap-up and final exam review.
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