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), or the purpose of the study. 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. Again, there will usually be more than one answer, and a brief explanation will help us understand your reasoning and give you as much credit as possible. 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 the index in the course text. 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 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)

1. Speech Repairs, Intonational Phrases and Discourse Markers: Modeling Speakers' Utterances in Spoken Dialog
2. The grammaticalization of the proximative in Tok Pisin
3. Using Corpus Statistics and WordNet Relations for Sense Identification
4. Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations: The What's X doing Y? construction
5. Episodic -ee in English: A thematic role constraint on new word formation
6. The origins of consonant-vowel metathesis
7. Um infixation and prefixation in Toba Batak
   
8. Identificational focus versus information focus
9. The mechanisms of denial
10. Probabilistic top-down parsing and language modeling
11. Developmental Trends in Voice Onset Time: Some Evidence for Sex Differences
12. On raising in Tagalog
13. Tohono O’odham (Papago) Plurals
14. Constant "segmental anchoring" of F0 movements under changes in speech rate
15. Acoustic Characteristics of Greek Vowels

List 2 (Identify connections to external topics)

1. Revisiting Tungusic classification from the bottom up: A comparison of Evenki and Oroqen
2. Identifying the creole prototype: vindicating a typological class
3. Word Association norms for two cohorts of English adults
4. Alliance and betrayal in the Dutch orthography debate
5. Sound and meaning in Shakespeare's sonnets
6. The complexity of nested structures in Japanese
7. Vowel Elision in Hiatus Contexts: Which Vowel Goes?
8. On stress and accent in Indo-European
9. On the Virtues of Theft Over Honest Toil: Grounding Language and Thought in Sensorimotor Categories
10. Noun Specification and Classification in Uzbek
11. Why is colour naming difficult?
12. The Language of Igbo Ethnic Nationalism
13. Split intransitivity in Japanese and the unaccusative hypothesis
14. Aphasia therapy: past, present and future
15. Co-Evolution of Language-Size and the Critical Period