This assignment builds on your understanding of the lecture Approaches to the study of language. The goal: to help you with the concepts and terminology behind the two types of traditional distinctions covered in that lecture: levels of analysis and motivations for analysis.

Below you will find a list of links to papers and news or feature stories. Even though you will probably not be able to understand everything in these articles, you should be able figure out enough in order to answer the questions.

First, classify each item according to the level(s) of linguistic analysis that are most clearly involved: (one or more of) phonetics, phonology, morphology, lexicon, 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 (one or two sentence) 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 using a general or specialized dictionary such as Wiktionary or 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.

You should not be surprised to find yourself puzzled, since the correspondence between classificatory taxonomies and the real world is often fuzzy. So the point of the exercise is to show that you understand the taxonomy and also (to the extent that you can at this point) that you understand what kind of analysis the various articles are trying to do, and why.

Remember that you do not need to read the whole article. Occasionally, you can answer the questions based only on the title. Sometimes the abstract is enough. Sometimes you'll need to skim (some parts of) the full text of the article. 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 of the hyperlinks may not work from locations outside of Penn's network, unless you have the GlobalProtect VPN running (which situates you within Penn from the network's point of view). Please let your TA know if you have problems with this. ].

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