LIN120: Sociolinguistics             Spring 2008              Franklin and Marshall College
    Instructor:
    Marjorie Pak (mpak at fandm.edu)
    www.ling.upenn.edu/~mpak/

    Office hours:
    Wednesdays 5:00-7:00 pm (before class), Keiper 103
    If you have questions outside of office hours, don't hesitate to email!

Class meetings:
Wednesdays 7:00-9:50pm
STA217
1/23/08-4/30/08 (no class 3/19/08)

Course homepage:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~mpak/fm120.html/


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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.
  • Study for final exam

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page maintained by Marjorie Pak