LINPP04 Assignment 2 2023-1_-1302797472
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NUCES - Lahore *
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Nov 24, 2024
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LINPP04 Project Assignment Questions
The following questions represent a range of practical, investigative pilot studies which reflect the topics covered across the module. You should choose ONE
of these topics. You are, however, free to design a question/investigation of your own, or adapt one of the following, as long as you discuss this with me first and as long as it relates to sociolinguistic topics. Please read the ethics note at the end of the assignment sheet below.
Given the possible on-going constraints on being able to freely collect data and recruit participants presented by continuing COVID 19 circumstances, some of the questions below may only be possible within a restricted community (e.g. family, flatmates). Some data may be possible to collect remotely via online video interviews, audio recordings made by the participants themselves, or digital surveys.
The assignment should be 3,250 words (+/- 10%) including references. We will discuss the possible structure and format of the assignment in class and there will be additional resources
available to guide you with this. Project proposals
(a brief summary of your project aims) are due April 4th (see separate guidelines for this on Canvas). I will have individual discussions with each of you in week 11, following the submission of your proposals, but you
are, of course, encouraged to contact me in advance of submitting your proposal too to discuss your ideas.
The research project is a piece of work that will require forward planning
. If you are collecting data from participants you will need to give yourself enough time to do this (participants can sometimes be difficult to recruit), to go through the university ethics procedure and to gain informed consent from your participants. The ethics process is compulsory
if you are collecting data from live participants (even if it is only a written questionnaire) It is perhaps a good idea to construct a research study that is possible in practical terms to conduct within the relatively limited time constraints of the module
, so you should perhaps be modest in your ambitions and save the bigger ideas for your dissertation. The project is, in fact, a good preparation for the dissertation which will require some similar elements of research design, planning and ethical procedures.
A project of this scope and size cannot realistically aim to gain statistically significant results so if you are adopting a quantitative approach to data collection, you should treat this as a pilot study.
At the end of this guidance there is a list of previous projects by former students that might provide some inspiration.
Please submit your assignment via Canvas by 11.59pm on Friday April 28th
. Any accompanying recordings should be submitted digitally with the project.
1.
Linguistic variation study
a) Identify and describe a linguistic variable (e.g. a phonological feature that varies across accents such as t-glottalisation, rhotic /r/, the quotative); whose variants occur in a speech community with which you are familiar, and which correlates with one or more social factor such as sex; age; ethnicity; region; attitude to region; register; setting; social network. Review any existing relevant sociolinguistic studies which have also looked at this feature. The linguistic variable may be in English or another language.
b) Design a study that correlates your linguistic variable to your social factors, specifying the following:
i) The social characteristics of your speech community
ii) How you plan to elicit the language you require from the speakers (in current circumstances this is likely to be conducted online and/or remotely).
iii) How you plan to analyse the language
iv) Any additional research (e.g. follow-up interviews, attitude surveys) you plan to do
(Your discussion of your design should be contextualised by reference to relevant existing studies as well as to methodological discussions of approaches to sociolinguistic data)
c) Perform a pilot study in which you try out your design on a small sample of speakers. Present and discuss your findings. What shortcomings can you identify? 2.
Dialect levelling study
Investigate the evidence of dialect levelling and/or geographical diffusion in one or more city in the UK or elsewhere in the world (e.g. your home country). You may approach this in a number of ways, e.g:
a)
Design a study that identifies a small range of highly regionalised features (e.g. vowel pronunciation; lexical items) and their ‘levelled’ counterparts in a particular
region/speech community (perhaps your own) and attempt to correlate this with socially stratified variables (e.g. age, sex). Perform a pilot study in which you try out your design on a small sample of speakers (e.g. using reading passages and/or word lists, or a questionnaire to elicit participants’ reporting of their use of the features). Present and discuss your findings. What shortcomings can you identify?
b)
Design a study that analyses the evidence and distribution of a recognisable ‘levelled’ feature in a Scottish city whose origins lie in language shifts in the South East of England (e.g. th-fronting; invariant tags; l-vocalisation; fronted
vowels). You could choose to make this a comparative study between different locations in Scotland, or between different groups of people (e.g. over 65 and under 25). Perform a pilot study in which you try out your design on a small sample of speakers (e.g. using reading passages and/or word lists or a questionnaire to elicit participants’ reporting of their use of the features). Present and discuss your findings. What shortcomings can you identify? c)
Using broadcast data (from TV, radio and the internet), design a study that analyses evidence of the emergence of MLE (Multicultural London English) as described by Cheshire et al (2008). How does the distribution of specific MLE features correlate with evident ethnicity? What shortcomings might be associated with this kind of study?
Your discussion of dialect levelling, geographical diffusion, MLE etc should be contextualised with reference to existing studies.
3.
Language Contact/Code-switching study
Investigate evidence of the effects of language contact by examining the speech/writing of a multilingual community (i.e. speakers who speak more than one language fluently). Carry out a study that captures or observes how
, when
and why
people switch between languages. What are the social and linguistic factors that occasion these switches? You may collect naturally occurring spoken interaction, or you may use existing available data
- e.g. film, broadcast data, youtube videos, or social media interaction (facebook, we-chat,
Instagram) in which evidence of language contact (e.g. code switching, language mixing) occurs. Alternatively you may be in a position to observe and record code-switching in your home if you share it with others.
Your discussion of multilingual language contact and code-switching should be contextualised with reference to existing studies.
4.
Community of Practice study
Carry out a sociolinguistic investigation of a particular community of practice (in current circumstances this is likely to be an online community; a family living in the same home; a regular panel show on TV; a fictional CoP in film or on TV). What linguistic features characterise membership of this community (perhaps in contrast to other communities of practice)? Collect a sample of observational data from your chosen community which attempts to correlate the distribution of a particular linguistic feature with group membership. Present and discuss your findings. What shortcomings can you identify? Finally, consider the following questions: How does a CofP account differ from a ‘social network’ account? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of approach
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(particularly in comparison with a traditional variationist approach) to providing an account of social identity?
Your discussion of Communities of Practice should be contextualised with reference to existing case studies.
5.
Gender Performativity study
Record and transcribe a stretch of talk in which (or within whose setting) you think gender is a salient feature. You may use non-fictional broadcast data (e.g. a news report, documentary, interview, Prime Minister’s Questions) if you wish. Analyse the data for relevant linguistic features that seem to be related to gender identity, using insights from performativity theory, and drawing on techniques and methods from ethnomethodological
and ethnographic approaches to analysing gender identity. Discuss your findings in relation to some of the advantages and limitations of the various approaches you have employed. Your discussion of different methodological and theoretical approaches should be contextualised with reference to existing theory and case studies.
ETHICS
Some of your studies will involve the participation of live informants. If this is the case, there are a number of ethical considerations to bear in mind. You are required to complete
an ethics approval form which will need to be approved by your module convener and submitted to the Faculty Ethics committee (details of this process and the relevant forms will be available on Canvas).
1.
You must provide information about the nature of your research and their involvement in it. Information should cover what a potential participant needs to know in order to give freely given, fully informed
consent. You ought to cover the following information:
who you are;
what you are doing and why (the aims of the research, what’s happening, and what will be done with the research);
what the research involves: o
how participants have been identified and approached;
o
what participation involves (including any risks, inconvenience or discomfort)
o
what happens to the information they provide (including confidentiality, and any
limits on that, storage of data, who will have access and dissemination of research
findings.
During the research, their right to change their mind at any time without repercussions: to withdraw from the research completely, or to refuse to answer an individual question
If they have any questions about the handling of the research, and who these are to be directed
to – i.e. Superviser, HoD, Ethics Committee etc.
2.
you will need to obtain freely given, fully informed
written
consent from your research participants and guarantee anonymity and confidentiality. If this is not possible, you will need
to provide an explanation. You may need to gain consent for the archiving of data involving them, and for permission to publish or disseminate materials involving data they have provided.
3.
As part of the informed consent process, you have to explain to participants what will happen to the data they provide. This includes:
How their data will be stored.
All data should be stored safely and securely - e.g. identifiable
data should be in password protected data files, hard copies of data (paper, video recordings and so on) should be kept in locked filing cabinets. If they will have access to their data. It is good practice to offer participants a copy of their data - e.g. a recording or interview transcript. You should also ask if they would like to see a copy of the finished report
How long their data will be kept for. The recently published Research Councils UK (RCUK)
Code of Conduct
states that data should normally be kept for up to ten years (up to 20 years for projects of major significance). However, for student research five years would be a reasonable length of time. It is worth remembering, however, that data might be redeployed in
postgraduate research, so it is better not to promise to destroy data after only one year.
LIST OF PREVIOUS RESEARCH PROJECTS:
The loss of [x] in Central Scotland
English lexical borrowing by Chinese students studying abroad
Dialect shifting among Saudis
Gender stratification of th-fronting in Glasgow department stores
Defining ‘not really’ and ‘kind of’: A sociolinguistic study
Code-switching between Hindi and English in Big Boss
Gender performativity and identity indexing in Paris is Burning
A case study of the Wisconsin accent
The use of French backward slang Verlan
in French films between the 1980s and 2020s
Code switching among Bangladeshi-born, UK citizen teenagers.
Consonant cluster [r] and [l] acquisition by Thai students learning English
With regard to the dominant conventions of gender, how far do the differences between male and female speech influence behaviour in the House of Commons?
The role of code-switching in group identification: a social network case study of four bilingual Greek students in Stirling University
A case study of the Luanping dialect in China
Perceptions and social attitudes towards the term ‘woke’ in the UK
Hot towels, scissor and shavers: A Turkish barbershop as a gendered setting
The influence of the rhotic accent in northern China on learning British English
‘Masculine’ and ‘feminine’ adjective use in describing pictures of baby animals: a
gender performativity approach.
Is usage of hedging and boosting in news interviews more strongly related to gender or community of practice?
Dental fricatives in Norwegian speakers of English: an age comparison.
Dissociative Identity Disorder and Gender Performativity in speech
The function of code-switching in the Singaporean film I Not Stupid Too
The influence of Irish on the accent of Coatbridge: A CoP study
Gender and conversational dominance: Are male interviewers biased against female interviewees in Talk Shows
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