Linguistics 001 Fall 2000
Homework 1 Due We 9/20
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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 each case, a link is provided to an abstract of the paper (note that the link may not take to exactly the right spot each time, so you may sometimes have to scan up or down a bit).. You will usually not be able to understand everything in the title or the abstract, but you should try to understand enough in order to answer the questions below. 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. A reasonable answer is sometimes something like "this paper deals primarily with morphology while discussing influences from phonology and semantics." In each case, give a brief (one sentence) explanation of your reasoning. 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, linguistic typology, stylistics, and others that you may find in the readings or the course lecture notes (though the list given should be adequate). Again, give a brief explanation of each answer. Extra credit: indicate the levels of analysis involved in each article. Typically, the title and abstract will contain words you don't know; you can try consulting Fromkin & Rodman's glossary (pp. 519-540) or the index in either of the course texts. The online Lexicon of Linguistics may be useful, though it is rather technical, being intended for specialists. You can often learn about a term by searching for it on the web, via Google or Altavista or whatever -- such searches will rarely get you definitions as such, but you will often be able to guess the meaning of a phrase by reading several uses in context. You can also try ordinary dictionaries, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is available on line through the Penn library web site. If after a modest but reasonable effort you still find a case totally baffling, make your best guess and bring your questions up in recitation. Sometimes more than one answer is reasonable, and we will give your answers the benefit of the doubt whenever it is plausible to do so. List 1 (Identify level of linguistic analysis)
List 2 (Identify connections to external topics)
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