Hi everyone. I promised to provide some project examples but I’ve had no time to sit and think so far, mainly due to the NELS conference that is going on this weekend at MIT. I am still going to try to get something worked up and posted by tonight if I can. However, in the meantime, for the purposes of thinking about it:

If you want to come up with your own project, one approach might be to think about the things we’ve looked at so far, to see if any questions arose that you might want to look at further. Even in English there’s plenty to think about. Also, if there’s a language you’re particularly familiar with, or interested in looking at, another easy route to a project would be to take something that we’ve looked about in class and think about how it might work in the language you’d like to work on.

The project is supposed to include reading up a bit on what people have said in the literature. This is probably the trickiest aspect of the project, since the odds are pretty high that just fishing around for papers in the linguistics literature will wind up giving you things to read that require more background than you have (although I think by now we’ve looked at a lot of the major concepts, at least to some extent). If you pick a language and want to talk about how some focus-related phenomenon seems to work in that language, it is possible that there aren’t any papers out there that are particularly on point. In a case like that, the papers you’d look at might well be papers on English, for example, and the extension to the language you’re looking at would be your contribution. The background reading requirement for the project would not be as involved if you are coming up with your own analysis, that’s fine. You could read just one paper, for example, and then show how it applies (or doesn’t) when extended to a different language.

Another approach would be to search around (e.g., with Google scholar) for papers that mention the phenomenon you’re interested in, and just take a look at what you find, and if one or more of the papers look interesting, base your project idea on that, possibly augmenting that by looking at one or two of the papers that your primary article cites, or articles that cite your primary article.

My intention here is just for you to come up with something that you think you’d find interesting to look at. If you can find papers, you can tell me what those are as well. Then, I’ll look it over and see if I can make recommendations, either about other papers that might be relevant (possibly instead of the ones you find), or ideas about how you might refine the project statement. So, this is not a huge commitment, it’s a starting point. Because the time until the semester ends is relatively short, the closer you get to the actual topic you’re going to work on, the better, but it’s also ok to come up with a couple of ideas.

I do still plan to try to come up with a couple of example projects, that you could adopt, in case you are having trouble coming up with something, but while I’m trying to find the time to do that, you can certainly look around on your own as well and see if anything strikes your fancy.