project

English G301, Fall 1998
This is last fall's project handout: I'll be updating it for our use in the next few weeks. In the meantime, it will give you a sense of the kinds of project you can think about.

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Final Project Overview, Timeline, Basic Guidelines, Poster Information, and Project Suggestions

Overview. This final project is a chance for you to explore in more detail some theme, issue, or aspect of language that grows out of our earlier work together. This is also a chance for you to learn some strategies for doing historical language research. The list of suggestions that appears below is a guide; you may choose one of those projects, or you may invent your own. I’ll be happy to help you in any way I can as you make your choices. Whatever you choose, remember that a successfully completed project must include a significant element of research. The goal for this assignment is that you come to an informed conclusion about some dimension of language use, change, history, or variety. See also Advice for the Final Project, or What She Really Wants, being a useful compendium of strategies for developing an excellent project proposal and research plan, evaluating material and attitudes, and analyzing said material and attitudes in a most satisfactory and satisfying manner, written for the students of English G301, etc., etc......(proof positive that reading too many historical tracts affects one’s views of titles).

The timeline: A project proposal is due by October 28; you must complete some sort of peer review on a draft of your work by Thanksgiving; posters are due on December 2 (you bring the work, I’ll brin g food). The proposal must specify your area of interest, the question you are asking or the problem you’d like to solve, and it should list at least 3 good sources that will help you address your issue, and any questions you have.

If you need help locating information in the library, you might want to consult the web site that I’ve made for English W132 students (http://www.iupui.edu/~sharrin/132/home.htm), which offers a nice guide to some of the library indexes ; there are also some research starting points on our course home page (http://www.iupui.edu/~sharrin/hel.html).

Basic Guidelines. Consult Advice for... for more particular guidelines, but the following principles are important:

1. Make sure your project revolves around a question or problem; don’t simply report what you learned; use what you learn to answer a question or solve a problem.

2. Consult the syllabus section on ethics, and your handbook on integrating sources and documenting them. You may use either APA or MLA format--whichever you use, follow the guidelines slavishly.

3. Finished essays will be 7-10 pages long in most cases; if your essay will be significantly shorter or longer, come see me, as there may be a problem with the scope of your project. Generally speaking, your bibliography should have 5- 10 sources.

Poster Day. Think back to your 7th-8th grade science fair days on this one. As you complete your project, think of some way to create a poster that conveys your project to other people. This is a way for you to have an expanded audience for your work--I don’t want to be the only person who reads it! (Those of you who want a really wide audience for your work can link to the course homepage; just let me know.) The poster should convey your research question or problem, your data and your conclusions. Be creative; use oaktag or other material we can hang on the walls or display on desks; if you need a computer, let me know and I’ll try to arrange one. Your poster should have the following characteristics:

· it should accurately reflect the position you’re taking regarding your project

· it should contain some indication of the problem/question at the heart of your project

· it should contain some indication of the particular details or data of your project

Posters will be graded by all of you; there will be short response cards that allow you (and any visitors--this would be a good day to invite family or friends to come to class with you) to respond to your project posters. No ballot stuffing allowed!

Some Suggested Projects:
1. Make your own historical dictionary, following the lead of the OED. The OED is the greatest English historical dictionary, but it is less than satisfactory for very recent words or words from particular registers of English. Use the lexicographic techniques of the OED to construct entries for English words of your choosing. Your dictionary should have a clearly defined scope; the words should not appear to be a random selection. Your dictionary should also have a preface that exp lains your method and your rationale for the construction of the dictionary. If you choose this option, you’ll have to consult sources, document quotations and create a quotation file, and select and prepare entries. You may need some help with etymology; try to include all parts of the entry.

2. Examine new words at a particular point in the history of the language. American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society, contains a new word section in each issue. Issues of AS are available in the library (PE2801 .A6; the library has vols. 1-40 [1925-1965], and 71- [1996-]; the Bloomington library has the complete collection). New word sections are frequently found in dictionaries, as well, and if you look in a library for older dictionaries you’ll be able to research there as well. You might analyze these new words from a variety of perspectives; you might explore how some dimension of external history affected new words or borrowings; you might explore the grammatical nature of the new words (nouns? Verb s?) and speculate on the reasons for their prevalence.

3. A related project: You could also approach the study of new words or borrowings using the CD-ROM OED (or the online version if you go to Bloomington). With the search capacities of the OED, you could look at words borrowed from parti cular languages, or at particular periods. What does the pattern of borrowing say about patterns of contact, or attitudes towards other languages? You could also look at ways in which words are borrowed through intermediary languages--for instance, many N ative American words were borrowed into English through other languages. What are the implications of that?

4. Examine reviews of Webster’s Third International Dictionary, Unabridged, finding some positive and some negative. Make sure to read Dwight McDonald’s critical review from The New Yorker, 1961; and the exchange of articl es in the Atlantic; other reviews were published in 1961 and 1962; use the Book Review Index or newspaper indexes to find reviews from other places, such as the NY Times, Chicago Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, etc.). Examine the cl aims made in at least 3-4 reviews against the dictionaries themselves (Webster’s 3rd [Reference PE1625 .W36 1966 as well as on lecterns around the library] and Webster’s 2nd [Reference PE1625 .W3 1939]), both available in the library.

Alternatively, you could explore last year’s controversy over ethnic slurs in Merriam-Webster’s 10^th Collegiate Dictionary, which started with debate over the entry for nigger and expanded to address the inclusi on or, or labels for, a whole set of derogatory terms. Examine the claims made on all sides in this debate and use your historical knowledge to analyze the issue.

5. Choose a novel whose characters speak in different dialects. How does the author represent different dialects. Are those dialects really different, or are they eye-dialects, dialects that appear different in writing but do not differ in actual pronunciation ? What are the social consequences for different characters and their different languages? How does the depiction of dialect help to define characters? What attitudes does the author, or do the characters, convey about language? Alternatively, you could look at the use of a particular dialect, such as African-American Vernacular English, in a novel like Toni Morison’s Beloved (which won a Pulitzer Prize). To what extent should lexicographers pay at tention to such awards and honors in judging what words to include in dictionaries? What constitutes the "best" use by the "best" writers?

6. Examine a novel like Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue, in which a new language is invented. What does this form of invented English hope to accomplish? What problem does it solves/ Based on your knowledge of language histor y and language reform, how likely is such a project to succeed? Will any part of that reform be accomplished in English?

7. Using an assortment of handbooks and grammar books (or even dictionaries), examine the history of a rule devised in response to a (perceived) usage problem. Rules like "Never end a sentence with a preposition" or "don't use ain't"", for example, would be good for this exercise; objections to particular words (such as who(m), hopefully, nouns ending in -ize, nouns converting to verbs (in sentences such as Let '’s prioritize our work so that we can judge how correct citation prac tices impact grades or Hopefully, you'll work together to learn how to acknowledge sources well, thereby avoiding disappointment later). Choose one or two issues, and examine the historical roots of the rules/guidelines/proscriptions. What sort s of attitudes or differences of opinion are represented?

8. Review two or three contemporary dictionaries (the American Heritage Dictionary, Webster’s Third, the Random House Dictionary, etc.) and evaluate their approach to language change, variety, and usage. What attitu des does the dictionary embody? What are the historical roots of those attitudes? What types of readers would find which dictionary appealing? Dangerous?

9. Explore the language of a group or region, and the ways in which that language evolves and is used. For instance, you might prepare a guide to campus slang/jargon/language.

10. Examine the evolution of style in a particular genre--say, newspaper writing or magazine writing, using the same source over a period of time. Evaluate shifting style in terms of vocabulary, grammar, tone, etc; you may want to use a historical dictionary to aid your evaluation of the vocabulary.

11. Alternatively, you could take a particular word, phrase, or grammatical feature, and research it using online texts. There are some online databases that are searchable (see the course homepage for links), and there are also million s upon millions of words searchable on the Internet (AltaVista is the best search engine for finding particular words). What conclusions can you come to about changing usages, or patterns of usage?

12. An alternative history of English. Speculate what would have happened to English if, say, the Germans had won WWII, or if King Harold had turned back William the would-be-Conquerer, or if women had developed the major historical dic tionaries, or if........ Whatever scenario you envision, develop a specific description of the ways in which English would be different. What kinds of words or structures would be missing? Where would English be spoken? Written? What would be different? D epending on the scenario you invent, the types of analysis possible will change.

13. What do teachers need to know about African-American Vernacular English, in the wake of the Oakland controversy? Or what do teachers need to know about the history of English, or language variation? Prepare a resource guide, position paper, or teac hing materials for teachers or future teachers.

14. Examine the treatment of accents in a set of films, videos, radio excerpts, or other oral medium. You might choose a set of related works (e.g. the most recent Disney videos), or two or three movies set outside the US (Out of Afr ica, for instance, was set in Africa, and had characters speaking in a range of accents to represent certain things about their origins or geographic location; in some Daffy Duck cartoons set in France, the characters speak English with a "French" acc ent). What sorts of characters have what sort of accent? What sorts of conclusions does this lead viewers toward? What are the roots/causes of such conclusions? What language attitudes are embedded in these films or videos or radio spots?

15. Design your own project. Let me know how I can help.

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