Data Collection Project Topics

Students in Sociolinguistics I are expected to choose from among these topics listed below. Why? Because it is difficult, as a beginning researcher who may never have conducted fieldwork before, to design a good project that will yield meaningful results and anticipate known pitfalls in one short academic quarter. (It’s much more important to design a good study than to conduct a novel study. So, it is fine to simply do one of these projects.)

See what the syllabus has to say about the evaluation of this project here.

If you really think you have a GREAT project idea, different from any below, that you want to pursue, you must obtain permission to do it. You will be asked to show that you really know: 1) your research question, 2) the limitations and advantages of your proposed methodology, 3) how your research is situated within a tradition of sociolinguistic research.

General Calendar:

The notations for WEEKS show a recommended schedule for working on the project without having a frantic rush at any one time.

1. WEEK 2: In class this week, you will choose a presentation. Carefully consider making your data collection project tied to this presentation. This is because you want to have a good understanding of some of the extant research on your topic around which you can structure your project. Previous research also gives you 1) good insight into how to narrow a topic of appropriate size for focused study, 2) insight into the theoretical and research questions that sociolinguists ask.

2. WEEKS 3-4:

Make a final decision about your research topic. First, read the options, below, under “Project Topics.” Choose one of these, perhaps as part of a group doing the same topic. You still have to collect data and figure out how you will do other parts of the projects that are uniquely yours. You will also have to write up your part of the work. But, together you all might have more interesting findings because you have more data than one person would, alone.

Refine your research questions. Begin considering how you will find speakers to record for your study. What languages and groups of speakers are available to you reliably, without too much effort making contacts?

Reserve recording equipment by talking with the instructor, or signing up on the sign-up sheet, if used.

Design your elicitation instruments. It is recommended that if you’re working in a group, you test your instrument on a group member(s) so you know how it will work.

3. WEEK 5-6: Collect data. Finish designing and testing your elicitation instruments, obtain permission from speakers. Set up your recording times with your speakers and Collect your data.

4. WEEKS 7,8: Begin analysis. Depending on your topic, you will need to either transcribe your conversational data, begin spectrographic analysis, or other analysis. Begin tallying results

5. WEEKS 9,10: Finish tallying results; write report of your study. If you have followed this schedule to this point, you will have enough time to give the instructor a draft of your work. This is an excellent way for you to see whether you are

Project Topics

If you are interested in geographical variation, consider:

• Pacific Northwest vowels study: This is a sociophonetic dialect study. For this study, you will collect a small amount of data for PHONETIC analysis from a small sample of speakers who are native to the Pacific Northwestern United States. Your methodology is predetermined; it follows the methods laid out for either Pacific Northwest dialect study currently underway in the sociophonetics laboratory (see: http://faculty.washington.edu/~wassink/Brown%20Bag/Elicitation%20materials.htm).

Each speaker will be recorded in a brief, casual, unscripted conversation, and then as they read from a word list. You will analyze acoustically (e.g., in Praat) the vowels produced in the word list and 10 minutes of casual speech for each speaker. The resulting data will be summarized visually on an F1xF2 plot. You will then compare the locations of your PNW speakers’ vowels to those of speakers from other dialects as reported in the literature (e.g., Hagiwara, R. (1997) “Dialect variation and formant frequency: The American English vowels revisited, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 102(1)). Your write-up should discuss the importance of vowels in differentiating American English dialects, and report how your speakers’ vowels conform or do not conform to the systems you find in the literature. (Note: You may obtain the word list and demographic questionnaire from the instructor.)

• Urban Voices study: This is a report on a sociolinguistic variable in British English. There are many good studies of dialect variation in British English (see references, end of paragraph). Choose one of these and look for a linguistic form that constitutes a sociolinguistic variable in the British Isles. Find some speech data in which to investigate the distribution of your variable. The Foulkes and Docherty book listed below comes with an accompanying cd-rom containing soundfiles of different varieties of British English. Using this cd, you can listen to the interviews provided with speakers from different regions in the UK and check the occurrence of a good many variables, from the GOOD/FOOD merger, to the occurrence of 3^rd person singular –s in non-third person subjects (e.g., “I hates him, I does”). See what you can find out from the literature about the history of your variable (is it a class marker? a gender marker? a regional marker?), and then report on how the speakers on the Urban Voices CD use it. The Urban Voices CD is available for student use in the CALL lab, Language Learning Center, rooms 112-113, in the basement of Denny Hall.

--Wells, J.C. (1982) Accents of English, 3 vols. New York: Cambridge

--Paul Foulkes and Gerard J. Docherty (1999,eds.) Urban Voices: accent studies in the British Isles. London : Arnold ; New York co-published in the U.S.A. by Oxford University Press

--Trudgill, Peter (multiple titles)

• American English sociolinguistic marker study: A good many linguistic variables, from all levels of the grammar, are listed in the glossary to be found in the appendix to W. Wolfram and N. Schilling-Estes’ book, American English (1999: Blackwell Publishers). You may choose any of these variables and design a small-scale project investigating its occurrence in a variety of American English to which you have access. As with all sociolinguistic variables, your chosen variable will have it’s own history. It may additionally be undergoing change currently in some variety of the US. Your report should attempt to trace the history of your variable, and discuss whether it is a stable marker or indicator, and what it marks. Note any other reasons why the variable may be of interest to sociolinguists. Need help obtaining data from US dialects? see “Obtaining data”, below.

If you are interested in bilingualism or codeswitching, consider:

• Bilingual codeswitching study: The goal of this project is to identify some grammatical or phonological constraints on codeswitching. You will not be able to do an analysis of speaker-triggered or domain-triggered variation in the space of the quarter, because this would involve having to collect data for one speaker in multiple conversational contexts. Few students have time to do this, AND transcribe all their data in 10 weeks.

Success of this project relies upon having read and digested a scholarly account of the operation of codeswitching for your (or a very similar) language pair, e.g. Spanish ~ English, as language may differ and sociolinguistic settings will surely differ in terms of switching sites. It is recommended that you:

1. Collect data for one pair of bilinguals

2. Transcribe the conversation

3. Code one category (e.g., nouns)

4. Count the # of nouns in the overall corpus

-- produce a count for:

--Spanish nouns occurring in Spanish contexts

--Spanish nouns occurring in English contexts

--total Spanish nouns (all contexts)

--English nouns occurring in English contexts

--English nouns occurring in Spanish contexts

--total English nouns (all contexts)

5. Set aside ambiguous tokens or clear borrowings

6. Those forms remaining (Spanish forms in English contexts; English forms in Spanish contexts) may be said to constitute switches

7. Consider linguistic constraints: e.g., the morpho-syntactic features of these two groups of switches. For example,

--are they similar to nouns in the same-language context (English nouns in English contexts)?

--are they produced with determiners/without determiners?

--do types of nouns (generic nouns, proper nouns, etc.) pattern differently?

If you are interested in terms of address, consider:

• Variation in terms of address study: The goal of this study is to investigate how status conflicts are resolved or status differentials are reflected in some interesting role relation or setting.

(a) Status conflict study:

Find a pair of speakers who must interact (with each other) in a range of settings. Obtain their permission to record their conversations in 2-3 of these settings (for ½ hour, each setting), and compare the ways they show variation in how they address one another. Does one setting emphasize one aspect of their relationship (kinship, for example), while the other emphasizes another? How do they resolve role conflicts when the setting does NOT clearly emphasize one role relation?

(b) Status differentials study:

Find a setting (e.g., a university classroom) where you may observe a status differences at work. Some students have chosen a classroom with a young lecturer, and compared this to a classroom with an older lecturer. Observe how students refer to the instructor before, during and after class. Do students of different genders use different patterns? International from American students? etc.

If you are interested in communities of practice or language attitudes, consider:

· New Orleans community study: The goal of this study is to find an online forum that brings together members of the displaced New Orleans community. Explore chat room discussion for statements reflecting how displaced individuals find “belonging” in new places. How do they self-identify in these new places? How do they describe their “communities” now? Is language discussed as a marker of “New Orleanian identity” at all? One helpful place to start are the forums initially set up by the New Orleans Times/Picayune Newspaper, http://www.nola.com

Methodological Considerations

Obtaining data

Students who do not have ready access to local speakers may choose to use the corpus resources available in the sociophonetics laboratory, which you may peruse online at:

http://faculty.washington.edu/~wassink/BBagCorporaHO.htm.

The website contains a table listing all the corpus holdings in the lab, including the type of data contained, register of the recording, extent of demographic information reported (if available), and whether or not the data are transcribed.

Sample Elicitation tools

Another resource on the instructor’s website is a “clearinghosue” for methods used in studies in our department. This is one good place to go for examples of word lists, demographics questionnaires, and other elicitation instruments:

http://faculty.washington.edu/~wassink/Brown%20Bag/Elicitation%20materials.htm

Sample Titles from (successful) Past Term Paper Topics

• Gender- and age-related differences in the use of politeness terms in Japanese emails
• Self-expression in the use of Vietnamese terms of address
• Codeswitching in Cantonese-English children
• Terms of self-reference used by Khmer royalty
• The effects of social network on AAVE features in Seattle-born African-Americans
• Gender differences in negotiation strategies in students at the UW business-school
• The effects of mobility and age of arrival on the acquisition of English of ESL women from 3 different ethnic groups with different network structures
• Canadian Raising in Whatcom county, WA
• Dialect levelling in the speech of Chicago-born immigrants to Seattle and the NCS (loss of Chicago dialect in Chicago residents vs. Chicago-born Seattle dwellers)
• Differences between TAs and Profs in the use the passive voice in lecture style
• Variation in the use of the subjunctive in UW undergraduates