Any linguists here?

[Kent Edwins]

I have to do a "Linguistic Investigation" for my Intro to Linguistics class, and I must say I have absolutely no idea how to start. Proposals are due in about a week. Does anyone else like linguistics, or at least know a little bit about them? Any help would be much appreciated.

[SleepyWitch]

Hi Kent, nice to meet you. I'm a Linguist (of sorts). could you be a bit more specific about your task? what does your teacher mean by "Linguistic Investigation"? are you supposed to do research (as in reading articles etc) or are you expected to do a mini field study of your own? or to read up on a specific question or do some corpus research about it? :confused:

edit to add: are you expected to write a term paper or give a presentation or both?

[Karl Rommel]

How about chatting to some friendly people at Essex University. The linguistic department is one of the best in the U.K. You might have to do some surfing to get a contact - I don't think there is a forum as such - let us know if there is.

[Kent Edwins]

Wow, thanks for some replies! Nice to meet you both, too. Here's a more in depth idea of what I have to do.

This is straight from the syllabus.


As you take this class you will become more aware of how people speak, and you will undoubtedly notice how often “language” is the subject of discussion. One of the goals of this class is to introduce you to linguistic analysis and to encourage you to think scientifically about language. To facilitate this, you will select a phrase or utterance that interests you for its uniqueness or peculiarity and examine it using the tools of analysis you will be developing in class. You can approach this analysis by examining any combination of the following: the subset of linguistic components (phonetics, phonology, morphology), grammar (syntax), and/or semantics. The proposal for this investigation is due Feb. 20. The final analysis, which you will submit to me on April 30, should be approximately five typed pages. The analysis must refer to at least three features of linguistics discussed in class. You will also report orally on your analysis in a small group in May.

[SleepyWitch]

ok.. that doesn't sound too difficult. can you pick a sentence from a newspaper or book etc? if you want to fill lots of space with syntac analysis, pick a sentence that's fairly complex, e.g. one that's got a relative clause in it or one that's got several adverbials. what kind of syntax analysis do you do? did you talk about Chomsky? did you draw those funny Chomsky trees where the sentence splits up into NP, VP, det etc? I can't do these at all.
or did you do CGEL (Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, by Quirk et. al)? I've practiced and taught that for a couple of years, so I could help you with that (but keep in mind that I'm only a lowly student tutor, i.e. a student who gets paid by the univ to clean up the mess that the professor left ;) )

or maybe you could pick a text from a flashy magazine that's got lots of new words in it (including nonce-formations, i.e. words that the writer made up on the spur of the moment) and talk about word formation?

you could also watch a video of an unscripted interview or something (try CNN.com etc) and do something about spoken language. Like, you could write down what the person said and check if you can find sentence boundaries at all. i.e. in writing we separate sentences by full stops (periods) but in spoken language it can be almost impossible to tell where one sentence ends and another starts, so the largest units you can find are clauses. may be you can even get a transcript of the interview, so you could check to what extent they cleaned up the interviewee's speech in the transcript.

hm... semantics... I don't know... choose some word field, e.g. different kinds of walking (walk, stroll, saunter, run etc) and compare how different dictionaries treat them, i.e. whether the differences in meaning become clear from the definitions, you could use OALD 5/6/7 (Oxford Advanced Learners' Dictionary, 5th, 6th and 7th edition), LDOCE 4 (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English), the Longman Language Activator (a foreign learner's dicionary that groups words by semantic criteria, e.g. you will have an entry SAY that explains the differences btw. say, remark, observe, blurt out). Then you can compare these to some dictionaries directed at native speakers, e.g. Concise Oxford Dictionary or Merriam Webster.
this works even better with nouns referrring to plants and animals. with these you often wouldn't understand what the definition talks about at all and it only becomes clear if there's an illustration.

[Kent Edwins]

Wow, thanks quite a bit. You've given me lot of ideas. Sorry if the question seemed a little silly, but the professor gave us an assignment before explaining what any of the 5 areas of linguistics were :(.

I'll message you if I have anything else to ask. Thanks again!

[SleepyWitch]

ok.

phonetics: the study of the formal properties of speech sounds, e.g. how they are produced by the speech organs (=articulatory phonetics), how they travel through the air (e.g. the frequnecy of their sound waves etc) (=acoustic phonetics), how they are perceived by the ear/brain (=auditory phonetics); the tools of phonetics can be used for the description of sounds in any language

phonology: the function of speech sounds in a particular language, e.g. love vs dove differ in only one sound, so the function of this sound is to distinguish between two different forms with two different meanings. if you exchange these two sounds, you get a different meaning (in English). cf. the 'dark' L in film: if you exchange this with a clear L ( as in lip), the pronunciation is strange but it's still the same word; phonology is language-specific, for example in English you cannot exchange L an R without changing the meaning of the word (e.g. lip vs rip), but in Japanese you can. So sounds can have different functions in different languages.

morphology: the study of the internal structure of words. morpheme= the smallest linguistic unit that carries meaning. e.g. teacher has two morphemes teach (like the verb) and -er (the person who does something, in this case, the person who does the teaching).

syntax: the study of the structure of sentences

semantics: the study of the meaning of words and sentences (usually without any reference to the 'real', extra-linguistic world, psychology, the history of the language etc). structuralist semantics describes the meaning of words by treating language as an isolated system and comparing the meanings of different words within this system

pragmatics: the study of the meaning of utterances (i.e. things concrete speakers say in concrete situations), utterance meaning can differ from semantic meaning, e.g. Could you open the window?, semantic meaning: abilitly question, i.e. are you able to do it,
pragmatic meaning: I want you to open the window