This course compared to ELang 223

Why get own data?

• Many cases where already there:
  • knowest thou > do you know
  • Singaporean vocabulary
  • who/whom
• Other cases where need to get your own:
  • adjectives in tabloid newspapers
  • LDS vs evangelical vocabulary
  • frequency of given word or phrase over time
  • features of Utah English

Where does language take place:

• In the brain / mind (psycholinguistics)
• As part of groups of people (sociolinguistics, discourse analysis)
• In written texts (text / corpus linguistics)

Ways of gathering data:

• Observations / case studies / recordings
  • Listening to conversations
  • Recording TV / radio
  • Recording conversations by L1 / L2 learners
• Interviews -- somewhat more structured
  • Rural life 60-70 years ago
  • Medical personnel
• Experiments
  • Wug/z/
  • Lexical decision tasks: relatedness of divine/divinity, rose, might/mighty, mean/meaning
  • PET scans / brain activity
• Questionnaires
  • What word would you use for __
  • Reading the following: he's still here, he works at a steel plant
• Corpora
  • Structured corpora (e.g. BNC)
  • Non-structured: Google, LDS.ORG, newspaper ads

What might be the best for the following:

1. Most common words with *heart* (and in which genre are they the most common)
2. Pronunciation in central Texas
3. Adjectives that came into the language c1820s
4. New words since 2000
5. Words that are used more by LDS (Utah LDS?)
6. Who / whom
7. Most common phrasal verbs with down (turn down, put down), and which genre/register
8. Words that characterize medical or legal
9. What makes ads different from academic textbooks?
10. How do men and women's speech differ?
11. What words to Australians use more (doco, barbie)
12. How does Alzheimer's affect language?
13. How big is the vocabulary of a two-year old?