3.0

Spring 2025

Wed, 01/15/2025 - 00:00

Wed, 05/07/2025 - 00:00

Adv Tp Lin: How To Trap An Attitude

Prereq: A course in a cognate field at the LIN 500 level of equivalent, or by discretion of DGS.

Attitudes, beliefs, subjective correlates or more generally "language regard" is a required area of investigation if all the problems of language variation and change identified in Weinreich et al. (1968) are carefully attended to. They also assert that such matters are not automatic byproducts of even carefully conducted, variationist studies of language performance. They must be determined independently. This course will survey how such independent investigations have been done, ranging from carefully controlled experimental work, typical of much sociophonetic research, up to and including discoursal and ethnographic studies more common in anthropological and pragmatic approaches. To a certain extent, that range is from the quantitative to the qualitative, but, as we shall see, that may be a caricature of research targets and methodologies of data acquisition and interpretation at both ends of the spectrum. We will read representative, exemplary work from this range of studies, and each member of the class will provide an oral, critical report on one such study and also carry out a research project in one of these areas. Students who plan other use of their data than this classroom practice are advised that IRB approval is required.