We talked a little bit about the final project on Tuesday. The idea I had originally had was to assign a couple of already stated universals that you could explore using the online database tools, or maybe even try to discover new correlations. My own experimentation with this wound up making it clear to me that it was not going to work particularly well in that form.

So, what I proposed is basically three options. The first two options are a bit more creative and will probably be more interesting.

Option one is to pick a topic and read up on it a little bit, providing me with something like a short literature review on what you read and discovered. I had in mind here something like 2-3 papers, and you might start the process by looking at the readings page at readings that are related to the topics we discussed. In any event, the writeup you give me should be a reasonable length. Probably 5 pages or more, not as many as 10 pages.

Option two is to look in depth at a language with some of the universals and typological parameters we’ve talked about in mind, and do a writeup of that instead. For this, you would probably need access to a native speaker or a detailed grammar. Does the language conform to the universals we’ve talked about, how would it be classified? You can look at things like adverb positions, adpositions, other word order facts, phoneme inventories, words for colors, anything we’ve covered. This writeup too should be somewhere in the 5-10 pages area.

Option three is more like what I originally had had in mind. I handed out Greenberg (1963), which has a list of his universals at the end, and you can pick any five that you can test with the WALS database and discuss what you find. What kinds of exceptions are there, where are they geographically? Are the exceptions numerous enough to put the universal itself into question? This, like the other options, should result in a 5-10 page writeup.

Feel free to let me know what you’re thinking about working on. This is the homework for the rest of the semester, the project should be turned in on the last day of classes.