Recommended topics

If you are having difficulty choosing a topic for your data collection project, you should choose from among these topics: (It’s much more important to design a good study than to conduct a novel study. So, it is fine to simply do one of these projects.)

• Pacific Northwest vowels study: This is a comparative dialect study. For this study, you will collect a small amount of data for PHONETIC analysis from a small sample of speakers who are native to the Pacific Northwestern United States. Your methodology is predetermined; it follows the methods laid out for the Pacific Northwest Vowels study currently underway in the sociophonetics laboratory. Each speaker will be recorded in a brief, casual, unscripted conversation, and then as they read from a word list. You will analyze acoustically (e.g., in Praat) the vowels produced in the word list and 10 minutes of casual speech for each speaker. The resulting data will be summarized visually on an F1xF2 plot. You will then compare the locations of your PNW speakers’ vowels to those of speakers from other dialects as reported in the literature (e.g., Hagiwara, R. (1997) “Dialect variation and formant frequency: The American English vowels revisited, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 102(1)). Your write-up should discuss the importance of vowels in differentiating American English dialects, and report how your speakers’ vowels conform or do not conform to the systems you find in the literature. (Note: You may obtain the word list and demographic questionnaire from the instructor.)

• Urban Voices study: This is a report on a sociolinguistic variable in British English. There are many good studies of dialect variation in British English (see below). Choose one of these and look for a linguistic form that constitutes a sociolinguistic variable in the British Isles. Find some speech data in which to investigate the distribution of your variable. The Foulkes and Docherty book listed below comes with an accompanying cd-rom containing soundfiles of different varieties of British English. Using this cd, you can listen to the interviews provided with speakers from different regions in the UK and check the occurrence of a good many variables, from the GOOD/FOOD merger, to the occurrence of 3^rd person singular –s in non-third person subjects (e.g., “I hates him, I does”). See what you can find out from the literature about the history of your variable (is it a class marker? a gender marker? a regional marker?), and then report on how the speakers on the Urban Voices CD use it. The Urban Voices CD is available for student use in the CALL lab, Language Learning Center, rooms 112-113, in the basement of Denny Hall.

--Wells, J.C. (1982) Accents of English, 3 vols. New York: Cambridge

--Paul Foulkes and Gerard J. Docherty (1999,eds.) Urban Voices: accent studies in the British Isles. London : Arnold ; New York co-published in the U.S.A. by Oxford University Press

--Trudgill, Peter (multiple titles)

• American sociolinguistics study: A good many phonological and grammatical variables are listed in the glossary to be found in the appendix to W. Wolfram and N. Schilling-Estes’ book, American English (1999: Blackwell Publishers). You may choose any of these variables and design a small-scale project investigating its occurrence in a variety of American English to which you have access. As with all sociolinguistic variables, your chosen variable will have it’s own history. It may additionally be undergoing change currently in some variety of the US. Your report should attempt to trace the history of your variable, and discuss whether it is a stable marker or indicator, and what it marks. Note any other reasons why the variable may be of interest to sociolinguists. Need help obtaining data from US dialects? see “Obtaining data”, below.

Obtaining data

Students who do not have ready access to local speakers may choose to use the corpus resources available in the sociophonetics laboratory, which you may peruse online at:

http://faculty.washington.edu/~wassink/BBagCorporaHO.htm.

The website contains a table listing all the corpus holdings in the lab, including the type of data contained, register of the recording, extent of demographic information reported (if available), and whether or not the data are transcribed.

Other examples of (successful) Past Term Paper Topics

• Gender- and age-related differences in the use of politeness terms in Japanese emails
• Resolving status and solidarity: competing demands on social role expression in the use of Vietnamese terms of address
• Codeswitching in Cantonese-English children
• Terms of self-reference used by Khmer royalty
• The effects of social network on AAVE features in Seattle-born African-Americans
• Gender differences in negotiation strategies in students at the UW business-school
• The effects of mobility and age of arrival on the acquisition of English of ESL women from 3 different ethnic groups with different network structures
• Canadian Raising in Whatcom county, WA
• Dialect levelling in the speech of Chicago-born immigrants to Seattle and the NCS (loss of Chicago dialect in Chicago residents vs. Chicago-born Seattle dwellers)
• Differences between TAs and Profs in the use the passive voice in lecture style
• Variation in the use of the subjunctive in UW undergraduates