The final project is due to the courtesy of Dr. José A. Santos Cartagena who has agreed for his material to be included in this course.

UPR-Cayey / Dr. José A. Santos Cartagena                                                 English 3225 – Introduction to Linguistics

Research Project

[Adapted from James Paul Gee.  1993. An Introduction to Human Language.  New Jersey: Prentice Hall.]

1. Find a native speaker of a language you know little or nothing about, a speaker who is willing to help you learn about his or her language. 

2. Ask the consultant questions about his or her language so that you can determine the answers to the questions below.  Never tell your consultant that you think he or she is wrong, and never push the consultant to answer if he or she appears to be unwilling; do the best you can under the conditions you find yourself in.  If the situation renders the research impossible, find another consultant.

3. Make clear to the consultant that you want to know how people say sentences in the language, not how one writes them.  It is all right to let your consultant write the sentence down for you when he or she has thought about how to say it and after he or she has actually said it.

4. Once you have the sentence in writing, write down an English “gloss” (literal translation) beneath each word or morpheme in the sentence.

1. Determine if the language has a fixed word order in simple declarative sentences (for example, in sentences like ‘The girl kicked the boy’, ‘The girl killed the boy’, and ‘The girl loved the boy’).  If it does, what is it?  If it doesn’t, which orders are grammatical?  What determines when you use which order?
2. How does the language you are working with indicate what a subject is in a sentence that also has an object in it (like ‘The girl killed the boy’)? How does it indicate what the subject is in a sentence with no object (like ‘The boy cried’ or ‘The boy died’)?  How does it indicate what the object of the sentence is (in a sentence like ‘The girl killed the boy’)?
3. How does the language you are working on form a yes/no question?  How does it form a content (wh-)question [i.e Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?]?  Describe how the way it does this differs from English.
4. Does the language have a case system (like Latin) for its nouns?  What about its pronouns (like ‘He likes her’, ‘She likes him’)?  Describe the language’s system for marking case.  You can use the attached handout “Latin Declensions” as a guide, though that language may have more or fewer cases than Latin does.
5. How does the language mark its verb tenses (Simple Present, Simple Past, and Simple Future)?
6. How does the language mark its semantic roles?  Use the list on pages 192-193 as a guide.  Have your consultant give you the gloss for the sentences provided as examples of each semantic role?
7. Analyze and discuss your informant’s responses.

5. After, and only after, you have the data directly from your consultant, do a library/internet search on the following:

1. history of the language (its development through time);
2. general characteristics;
3. dialects[1] that may exist and the places where they are spoken (identify the variant of prestige, if any);
4. family of languages it belongs to;
5. its speakers, places where it is spoken;
6. other information you may find interesting.

6. Prepare the oral report. 

1. Identify yourselves and explain how you are going to proceed in your presentation.
2. State the Motivation and Purpose of the Study.
3. Describe the Methodology: Setting; Participant; Data Collection and Analysis
4. Present, analyze, and interpret your Findings.
5. Discuss your Conclusions.
6. Identify any Limitations of the Study.
7. Finish with important Recommendations for Future Research.
8. Make sure everyone has equal participation. 
9. Support your presentation with visual aids.

7. Prepare the written report.

1. Include all the sections of the oral report plus a References section.
2. Give credit to your sources.
3. Make use of the necessary degrees of headings.
4. Wordprocess it; use font size 12.
5. Hand it in on the assigned date.
6. Keep your own copy.

Back to the course home page