LNGST 250
English Language and Linguistics, spring 2020 (first year)
Course Description
Students learn about and analyze the English language, beginning with the building blocks of language: morphology, syntax, semantics, and phonetics/phonology. Students also explore the ways humans acquire language, social and geographical influences on English, and major changes during the history of the English language.
Course Content
Rationale
From my original proposal: This course is at the core of the linguistics program at St. Olaf. It touches on a variety of subjects in linguistics theory, including, but not limited to, phonology, morphology, language acquisition, language variation, and phonetic transcription. This course provides the backbone of linguistic theory for my major.
Reading Presentations
These presentations were given to summarize assigned readings from our course textbooks. One presentation covers a reading from Why is English like that?: Historical Answers to Hard ELT Questions (Schmitt & Marsden, 2006), while the other covers a reading from How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction (Curzan & Adams, 2014). Both presentations are linked below.
Language Survey
This project was the biggest part of this course. For this assignment, I created a survey, partially inspired by the New York Times Dialect Quiz, asking questions about specific words subject to dialectal changes. I sent this survey out to the St. Olaf Extra email alias and received over 100 responses. I analyzed the language background of each respondent and identified how many of their responses aligned with the Southern U.S. dialect. A sample of the survey, filled out by me, is linked below, along with my presentation slides with my results.
Final Exam
The final exam consisted of multiple short-answer questions on a variety of linguistic topics, including theoretical approaches of different linguists, discourse analysis of a sample text, sociolinguistic applications, language acquisition, and bilingualism. The full final exam is linked below.
Takeaways
Rationale goes here
Connections
The language survey I conducted and my interest in examining dialectal differences ended up informing my final senior project, which examined dialectal differences in Norwegian in North America and in Norway. See the Rand Scholar Award Project for more information.
Additionally, many of the sociolinguistic topics discussed in this course linked nicely with other coursework of mine, especially in LNGST 245 (Roles of Language in Equity and Diversity), which was foundationally about sociolinguistic theory. The language acquisition and bilingualism topics connected with EDUC 250 (Second Language Acquisition) and dove more into these subjects in detail.