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

Below you will find a list of titles of linguistics articles within the last few years. In each case, a link is provided to the paper's abstract and/or full text. Even though you may not be able to understand everything in the article or even the abstract, you should be able understand enough in order to answer the questions below.

First, classify each article according to the level(s) of linguistic analysis that are most clearly involved: (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," or "as a discussion of linguistic nationalism, this paper deals implicitly with all levels of linguistic analysis." In each case, give a brief (one or two sentence) explanation of your reasoning, so that we can give you as much credit as possible even if we disagree with your conclusion.

Then, classify the same list of titles according to their connections to topics external to language (if any), or the aims of the study. This is an open-ended list including theoretical linguistics, descriptive linguistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, applied linguistics, computational linguistics, neurolinguistics, linguistic typology, anthropological linguistics, biology of language, forensic linguistics, stylistics. You can also choose other categories that you find in the readings or the course lecture notes. Again, there will often be more than one answer, and you should give a brief explanation to help us understand your reasoning and give you as much credit as possible. 

If you want, you can look at the similar set of questions and answers from an earlier year.

Typically, the title and abstract will contain words you don't know. If understanding a particular technical term seems essential to figuring out how to answer the questions, try searching for the word (perhaps in association with other related words from the text) on Google or the Wikipedia, looking it up in on-line dictionaries or encyclopedias such as those available through the Penn library web site, or using resources such as SIL's Glossary of Linguistic Terms.

If after a modest but reasonable effort you still find a case puzzling, make your best guess and bring your questions up in recitation.

Remember that you do not need to read the whole article. Sometimes, you can answer the questions based only on the title. Sometimes you'll need to make reference to information in the abstract. Occasionally you'll need to skim some parts of the full text of the article (where it is available). We understand that in the first week of what may be your first linguistics course, you can't be expected to fully analyze complex technical articles written by specialists for an audience of specialists.

[ Some hyperlinks will not work from locations outside of Penn's network. If this happens to you, please try to find a way to do the exercise from campus. If you can't do this, we'll try to supply a "local copy" of the abstract. Please let your TA know if there are links that don't work for you ].

List of Articles:

1. Dude
2. Vowel deletion in Latvian
3. Perfects, Resultatives, and Auxiliaries in Earlier English
4. Depleted plural marking in two Afro-Hispanic dialects: Separating inheritance from innovation
5. Linking Valence Change And Modality: Diachronic Evidence From Hup
6. So who? Like how? Just what?
7. Automatic speech emotion recognition using modulation spectral features
8. The real-time processing of sluiced sentences
9. French intonational structure: Evidence from tonal alignment
10. Intensive and quotative all: Something old, something new
11. F0 Declination in English and Mandarin Broadcast News Speech
12. The "Lecturer's OK" revisisted: Changing discourse conventions and the influence of academic division
13. The Inuktitut Marker la
14. Automatically identifying the source words of lexical blends in English
15. Pitch Cues for the Recognition of Yes-No Questions in French
16. Opening a Pandora's Box: Proper Names in English Phraseology
17. An ERP study of regular and irregular English past tense inflection
18. How hard is it to match CVC roots?
19. A cross-cultural comparison of communicative gestures in human infants during the transition to language
20. The Middle English verb-second constraint
21. Visual speech speeds up the neural processing of auditory speech
22. Effects of Vocal Effort and Speaking Style on Text-Independent Speaker Verification
23. Generative metrics and Old French octosyllabic verse
24. The notion of argument in prepositional phrase attachment
25. Disentangling chat