Ling 241     Final paper

Each student is required to complete a final paper on some topic relating to one or more American Indian language. It will count for 40% of the final grade. Length will vary depending on the topic, but 15 double-spaced pages is a reasonable minimum. You will also have about 10 minutes during our final class meeting to present your topic to the rest of the class — tell everyone what you’re looking at and what you’ve discovered so far, and get feedback and perhaps guidance on other things to think about. In April you will submit a paragraph describing your intended topic, with at least one or two sources that you have consulted so far; identify how these sources will help you, and what other places you intend to look for relevant information.

You are free to choose a specialized topic on your adopted language, on some related language, or on a completely different language. The topic can also involve a language family or a set of languages defined in some other way (e.g., by geography). There is just one requirement: the paper must be primarily focused on at least one indigenous language of the Americas.

A few possible topics are:

• An examination of a grammatical topic in one language. Some examples: word order; the marking of new vs. old information in discourse; a complex phonological alternation; morphological processes; or the semantic categories that are encoded by a set of prefixes. To do this you are likely to need a good, clearly written grammar, and possibly a dictionary and collection of texts. You could, for instance, search for examples of the use of some construction (e.g., a change in word order) or morpheme (e.g., a specific suffix) in order to understand what meaning it conveys and how it is used. This is perhaps the best way to make a real contribution to research.
• A comparison of several languages, related or not, according to one or more of these grammatical topics. In what ways do they differ? What logically possible differences seem to be absent?
• A survey of the evidence for some language family that has been proposed. For example, you might assemble all the forms that Greenberg gives for some family, and evaluate their persuasiveness. Or you could get dictionaries of possibly related languages, find your own sets of cognates, and analyze the sound correspondences.
• An examination of the social history or current situation of a language or languages, possibly including efforts at maintenance and revival.

I recommend three ways to think of a topic:

• Review the homework assignments. If you found one to be particularly interesting, pursue the same sort of question for a new language, or investigate further the questions raised for the language in the homework.
• Look at the readings and handouts that we have used in class. If one mentions a topic that you find interesting, explore a similar topic for a different language, or some aspect of the same language that is not fully treated in the article. An obvious place to start is the bibliography at the end of an article. The textbook has "suggested readings" at the end of each chapter.
• Go back to the library and browse through the books on American Indian languages, this time thinking about what you might like to write a paper on. You can also surf the web for ideas or inspiration.

In past offerings of this course, students wrote papers with the following titles (listed in no particular order); this should give you a sense of the possibilities.

• Comparative Verbal Morphology of Crow and Hidatsa
• Nahuatl Language Maintenance: Dilemmas and Solutions
• European-Native American Mixed Languages: A comparative study of Mitchif, Mednyj-Aleut, and Media Lengua
• The Keres Pueblos: Keresan Education and "Literacy" in the Pueblos of Cochiti, Acoma, and Laguna
• A Comparative Look at the Effect of Spanish Contact on the Numbers and Numeral Classifying Systems of Itzaj, Tzotzil, and Tz'utujil
• The Influence of European Contact on Native American Languages and Cultures in the United States
• The Conception of the Self: The Generic and the Particular in Wintu language
• The Amerind Controversy
• Determining the Origins of Mobilian Jargon
• Native American Language Revitalization: Dominant Language Interference and Prospects for the Future
• Ojibwe Language Preservation
• The Origins of Yurok and Wiyot Sound Symbolism
• The Yuki-Wappo Language Family: A Case of Contentious Classification
• Code Talkers: A Look at the Navajo and Comanche Systems
• An Analysis of Quechua’s Influence on the Verbal System of Andean Spanish
• The Mixed Métis: A Historical and Linguistic Analysis of Michif’s Genesis
• Proto-Quechumaran as Evidenced by Quechua Complex Stops
• A Multitude of Strands: An Examination of the Potential Linguistic Properties of Inca Quipus