SOCIOLINGUISTICS

2013-2014
date 4 Feb 11 Feb 18 Feb 25 Feb 4 Mar 11 Mar 18 Mar 1 Apr 8 Apr 15 Apr 22 Apr 29 Apr (18 May, 5pm required reading Meyerhoff Chapter 1 Meyerhoff Chapter 2 Meyerhoff Chapter 3 Meyerhoff Chapter 4 Meyerhoff Chapter 5 Meyerhoff Chapter 6 Meyerhoff Chapter 7 Meyerhoff Chapter 8 Meyerhoff Chapter 9 Meyerhoff Chapter 10 Meyerhoff Chapter 11 Meyerhoff Chapter 12 Hand in course paper) A. Participation and Homework (30%):
COURSE GRADE:

Britain & Trudgill (2005) Levy (2010) Smakman (2012) Fukada & Asato (2003) Smith-Christmas & Smakman (2009) Boberg (2004) Fabricius (2005) Govindasamy & Nambiar (2003) Woods (1997) Kerswill & Williams 92000) -

activity Meyerhoff & course introduction Meyerhoff, research & article Meyerhoff, research & article Meyerhoff, research & article Meyerhoff, research & article Meyerhoff, research & article Meyerhoff & presentation Group 1 Meyerhoff & presentation Group 2 Meyerhoff & presentation Group 3 Meyerhoff & presentation Group 4 Meyerhoff & presentation Group 5 Meyerhoff & presentation Group 6

weekly homework (15%) research presentation (15%)

B. Course Paper (30%): C. Exam (40%)

A. PARTICIPATION AND HOMEWORK (30%)

Weekly homework (15%) Each week, answer the article questions as posted on Blackboard. Please hand them in digitally before the class starts (the start of the class is the deadline), and bring them to class (on paper or your laptop) so that you can use them in discussions. The homework is usually one or two A4s per article (single-spaced). Handing it in late is equal to not handing it in at all. If you dont hand in the homework in a certain week or not on time, then you get a zero for the homework of that week; otherwise, you get a 4, 6, 8, or 10, depending on the quality of the answers. If you hand in the answers to the article questions every week then you will get a bonus (0.5 added to your final course grade). If you wish to receive feedback on your homework questions, then please give your paper version to the tutor at the end of the class.

Research presentation (15%) The (group or individual) presentations are on the basis of experimental research. So, students themselves collect data, organise these data and draw conclusions. During the classes in the first part of the course, we will discuss possible methodologies and approaches. Each presentation starts with a brief introduction into the type of experiment and the linguistic and social variables. After that, the research methodology, the results, and the theory are presented. If you are part of a group, then all presenters within your group get the same grade. Your research presentation (incl. discussion) should last between 30 and 45 minutes. If you are still in the process of doing the investigation, then your presentation can be on the results collected so far or the first impressions.
B. COURSE PAPER (30%)

Each presentation group or individual will be writing a research report. The grade for the report will be the same for each member of the group. Each student should contribute 2,500 words to the report, not including the bibliography and the appendix. The report should look like a research report, i.e. with an Introduction, Literature, Methodology, Results and Conclusions chapter. Tables and graphs are part of such a report, and statistics is allowed but not required. Try to link your findings to Meyerhoff, the articles discussed in class, and to other articles. So, please find new articles to support your claims and compare your research with existing research. An outline of an empirical research report can be found on Blackboard. The deadline for the research report is Sunday 18 May, 5pm. Hand it in digitally (pdf) through SafeAssign. If you wish to receive feedback, then please hand in a bound paper version in addition to the digital copy.
C. EXAM (40%)

During the exam week (19-28 May), there is a multiple-choice exam on 6 chapters of the book. Please study the following chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 11. Learn the relevant terminology, the most important findings and tendencies, and the most important investigations. The slides are not part of the exam material. Sample questions will be posted on Blackboard.
SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Sociolinguists study patterns in language use, perception, and evaluation. The discipline of Sociolinguistics has two distinctive characteristics compared to other areas of Linguistics. First of all, it is largely a parasite discipline, as it makes use of existing, traditional linguistic subdisciplines, such as Phonetics, Syntax, and Pragmatics, as well as non-linguistic fields such as Sociology and Psychology. A second distinctive feature is that sociolinguists tend to take observation rather than theory as their point of departure. It is a descriptive (and often applied) discipline with theory derived from it. The ultimate purpose of Sociolinguistics is to describe patterns in language use and to subsequently find correlations with social variables. The most important social and linguistic variables are in the overview below, as well as the most common sociolinguistic research methodologies:

variables linguistic social matched guise age pronunciation survey sex syntax interview gender lexicon corpus description intra/inter-speaker variation semantics listener variation pragmatics perception (non-)nativeness/accentedness language choice evaluation
THE COURSE EXPERIMENTS

experiments

During the course, we systematically look at the aspects of Sociolinguistics as shown in the table above by reading and discussing linguistic articles and doing experiments. All the major variables and experimental approaches will be dealt with, both theoretically and practically. In the first session, we start with an introduction to the discipline and we subsequently negotiate the possibilities for students to do an experiment for the course. Students will be doing an experiment and report on the results. Six research groups/individuals determine a topic, do the experiment, write a course paper on the research, and present on it in the second part of the semester. Below are some examples of research that would meet the requirements. Through such experiments, theory is tested or created. Examples are: politeness theory, language shift theory, mobility theory, sex/gender theory, creolisation theory, social network theory, the SapirWhorf hypothesis, the Regression Hypothesis, and, for instance, the social approach to language acquisition. Sociolinguistic research descriptions should start and end with such a theoretical approach, and the resultant contribution to theory may be sociological/psychological as well as linguistic.
RESEARCH THEME: THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF SONGS

While the theory presented and discussed during the course is a general introduction to the field of Sociolinguistics, the investigations done by students will specifically be on the sociolinguistic aspects of the language used in songs. Examples of questions you will be answering are: What are the linguistic choices made by artists and songwriters?; Why are many songs sung in a language that is not the native tongue of the singer?; When artists do sing in their native tongue, why do they sometimes change the accent they use?; Do linguistic choices made by songwriters and singers have the desired effect on the audience?; What are the linguistic features of songs and can they be explained sociolinguistically?; Do men sing differently to women?

SAMPLE INVESTIGATIONS

Test the attitudes towards dialect pop in a certain country and interview the artists. What are the factors that determine the popularity and acceptability of the songs; degree of dialect, lexical choices, etc.? Which listener characteristics are relevant? Describe Mick Jaggers pronunciation of certain sounds and words over the decades. Look at phonetic context, setting, and register to lay bare patterns, and explain them. Age (grading) is an obvious point of attention. Play Nick en Simons song Pak Maar Mijn Hand and its English version (Come take My Hand) or Teach Inns two versions of Ding-a-Dong to groups of people with different sexes and test the acceptability and intelligibility of both versions. The perception by men and women of classically sung phonemes at different pitches: at which register and at which pitch do they start to hear a more fronted phoneme than the original, for instance? Record singers and do a perception test. Acoustic measurements are required for this type of research. Amy Winehouses pronunciation of English vowels in singing: a general English accent, Americanised, like her spoken English, or unpredictable? Systematically describe her pronunciation choices. The nature of the English as written by non-native singer/songwriters, like Dutch Anouk. And how it is perceived/understood? The effects of code-switching in Roch Voisines Helene (with and without code-switching) in the evaluation/appreciation of the song. Compare listeners with different ages and language backgrounds. Do a survey on the use of English in Dutch popular music and see if age affects opinions. Describe the degree to which certain regional/dialect songs are deviant from the standard language and test the evaluative effects of various lexical/phonetic choices on listeners. Play songs by Madness (very British-sounding), Gert Vlok Nel (very South-African-sounding), Brad Paisley (very American-sounding), Augie March (somewhat Australian-sounding), and representatives of several other accents of English and test whether listeners recognise the accents and whether the accents evoke certain connotations. Find a singer and a studio and record the same song in two languages. Do a matched-guise test in which the participants indicate how they appreciate various aspects of each version. Test whether the nativeness of the singer is recognised. It is often claimed that in singing someones accent disappears. How does this work? Test the effects of intonation on accent. This type of research requires acoustic measurements. Study the lyrics written by non-native speakers of English and describe syntactic features that may indicate influences from their native tongue. Let native and non-native listeners evaluate the syntactic variation. Ask native and non-native listeners to evaluate the English of Dutch singer/songwriters which have appeared on the De Wereld Draait Door or De Beste singer-songwriters shows. Which techniques do they use to imitate native speakers? Find an artist that has made a striking linguistic choice (for instance, Th Lau, Herman van Veen, or Ren Froger, who have all in their own way explored their native and non-native tongues when singing songs) and interview them on the linguistic/language choices theyve made. In addition, do a matched guise with ordinary listeners to test whether the interviewees aims were met. Age of listeners in particular is an interesting variable. Have non-native speakers of English translate certain phrases from songs to test the way they perceive the meaning of certain (strings of) words and idiomatic phrases.

HANDING IN HOMEWORK THROUGH SAFE ASSIGNMENT

Please do not send your tutor emails with an attached course paper. Instead, post it through Safe Assignment. Please note the following: Safe Assignment automatically checks for Plagiarism, and students can see the plagiarism report. The Safe Assignment can only be submitted once. Students have to make sure they upload the right file before submitting. Post pdf files only. A file must not exceed 2MB or the submission may fail. If theres a submission problem, then please split up the file. The safe Assignment Report (SA Report) is interpreted as follows: Scores below 15 percent: These papers typically include some quotes and few common phrases or blocks of text that match other documents. These papers typically do not require further analysis, as there is no evidence of the possibility of plagiarism in these papers. Scores between 15 percent and 40 percent: These papers include extensive quoted or paraphrased material or they may include plagiarism. These papers should be reviewed to determine if the matching content is properly attributed. Scores over 40 percent: There is a very high probability that text in this paper was copied from other sources. These papers should be reviewed for plagiarism.

PROBLEMS

Most misunderstandings can be solved by talking to the tutor. If you cannot meet certain obligations because you have professional or other obligations, then please indicate this as soon as possible. If there are serious personal problems that prevent you from handing in the homework or research paper on time, then please contact the MA Study Coordinator (Tim Sanders).