Linguistics 001 -- Fall 1998 -- Homework A

(Due Wednesday 9/23)

This assignment assumes understanding of the lecture on Approaches to the study of language.

Below you will find two lists of titles of articles or books published in linguistics within the last few years, many of them from Language, which is the journal of the Linguistic Society of America. In one case, where the title seemed insufficiently descriptive, a short description of the content is provided.

Classify the first list of titles according to the level(s) of linguistic analysis that seem to be most clearly involved. That is, each title should be classified as involving (one or more of) phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, or pragmatics. You can give a brief explanation of your reasoning, if you think the case is not completely obvious.

Classify the second list of titles according to their connections to topics external to language (if any). The available categories include theoretical linguistics, descriptive linguistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, applied linguistics, computational linguistics, neurolinguistics, stylistics, and others that you may find in the readings or the course lecture notes (though the list given should be adequate). Again, explain your reasoning if it is not obvious.

If a title contains words you don't know, try consulting Fromkin & Rodman's glossary (pp. 519-540) or the index in either of the course texts.You may also sometimes find something useful in the online Lexicon of Linguistics, though you should be warned that this last source is sometimes quite technical.

List 1 (Identify level of linguistic analysis)

  1. Passive and stative in Chichewa.
  2. A general theory of inflection and word formation.
  3. Word order in Ancient Greek.
  4. Speech acts and conversational interaction.
  5. Verb movement and expletive subjects in the Germanic languages.
  6. Word order in discourse.
  7. Plastic glasses and church fathers.
    Distinguishes between core and extended referents, and presents a theory of the development of word meaning in which both play a role.
  8. Distributional criteria for verbal valency in Chinese.
  9. Pitch movements under time pressure: Effects of speech rate on the melodic marking of accents and boundaries in Dutch.
  10. Stress as an inflectional formative in Russian noun paradigms.
  11. Investigating language use through corpus-based analysis of association patterns.
  12. Vowel quantity and syllabification in English.
  13. Diminutives and intensifiers in Italian, German and other languages.
  14. Transitive nouns and split possessive paradigms in Central Guerrero Nahuatl.
  15. Case marking, verb agreement, and inversion in Udi.

List 2 (Identify connections to external topics)

  1. The linguistic relationship between Armenian and Greek.
  2. Prosodic structure in young children's language production.
  3. Spanish in four continents: Studies in language contact and bilingualism.
  4. The role of diffusion in the genesis of Hawaiian creole.
  5. Sound and meaning in Shakespeare's sonnets.
  6. Evaluating behavioral and neuroimaging data on past tense processing.
  7. Literacy, emotion, and authority: Reading and writing on a Polynesian atoll.
  8. Alcohol and speech.
  9. Maternal responding patterns in vocal/verbal exchanges with normally-developing and developmentally delayed children.
  10. Probabilistic word classification based on a context-sensitive binary tree method.
  11. Mechanisms of jitter-induced shimmer in a driven model of vocal fold vibration.
  12. A compendium of recent results in Etruscan linguistics.
  13. The representation of tonal register.
  14. The Basque dialect of Lekeitio.
  15. Minor Mlabri: a hunter-gatherer language of northern Indochina.