March 3, 2003

Final Project Assignment

Proposal due in class, Monday March 10 2002

Project due by 5:00 pm on Wednesday May 19
in Prof. Cumming's mailbox: South Hall 3613
(Late projects result in an Incomplete grade)

The final project involves synthesizing two or more of the concepts we've covered in this class and applying them to the analysis of a single persuasive text. State what the author's goals are, and then show how the author uses linguistic choices to achieve his or her goals.

Proposal

The purpose of the proposal is to allow us to help you choose practical project topics that are likely to succeed. Before writing your proposal, read the description (below) of the final project.

The proposal should be a typed paragraph of coherent text. It should indicate

1. what (two or more) linguistic phenomena you plan to look at
2. what kind of data you are planning to use (you don't have to have a specific text, but you should be as specific as possible as to the kind of text you are going to analyze
3. briefly, how you think the phenomena might relate to the goals of the text

Project

Select some data -- a text containing persuasive discourse of some kind. You can use any kind of naturally occurring data (don't use elicited or experimental data), but if you use audio or video data, please provide a transcript. The length of text you need depends on the phenomena you choose to look at; you should have about 10-20 examples in the text that contribute to your analysis. For most topics, a page or two should be enough.

Analyze the text using at least two of the concepts we've discussed in class. That is, look for examples of the devices we've discussed, and think about how these devices contribute to the author's persuasive goals. For instance, you might want to look at metaphor and euphemism, or evidentiality and presupposition, or style, jargon and metaphor.

Write up your analysis as a research paper, using the following format:

Introduction: make a general statement of what topics you looked at and state (very briefly) what you found -- i.e. what the author's (speaker's) goal is and how the text works to achieve it.

Description of data: say what the data is, who produced it, what the intended audience is, how you selected it, and anything else about it that is relevant to your analysis.

Analysis: Present examples of the devices the author uses to accomplish their goal(s), with a brief discussion of each example. Even though you're appending the data, please repeat the example in the text (don't just refer to "line 10", for instance). You don't have to give every single example of each phenomenon you found; instead, you can classify the examples into categories and give one or two examples from each category.

Conclusion: This is where you can make a general statement about the way the text achieves its goals. You can also comment here on other things you might have noticed about the text that fall outside of the specific devices we've discussed in class, and the effectiveness or usefulness of the categories you used in your analysis.

Bibliography: You don't need to use any references beyond your own observations. If you do cite specific readings, class notes, or other materials, however, use a standard citation form. You may use any you're familiar with; linguists use the standard "social science" citation form, giving the author's name, the date of the paper, and the page number if there is a verbatim quote. For instance: "This language is 'loaded' as defined in Bolinger (1980:72)".

If you cite published work, you should include a bibliography listing (only) the works you cite. You should include the author's name, the year of publication, the title of the work, and (for books) the publisher and the city or (for journals) the journal name and volume number. Example:

Bolinger, Dwight (1980). Language: the loaded weapon. Longman: London.

Appendix: Append a photocopy of the data you analyzed.

The paper should be typed or word-processed and of course should have your name at the top. It should be about 3-5 pages long (not including the appendix), though if your examples are lengthy it can be longer.