FINAL SURVEY

CORPUS LINGUISTICS SECTION (50%)

These questions deal with several aspects of the word stick. Please feel free to use whatever resources and corpora you'd like, other than another human being :-). For each question, please state briefly which corpus/resource you used, and how you obtained the data. Good luck.

Has there been an overall increase or decrease in frequency of this word over time? How would you measure this? What problems would/do you have in getting this data, and what limitations are there on the data that you've obtained?
Is there much difference in frequency between genres / registers? How did you measure this? Any explanation for the differences?
Is there much difference in meaning between genres / registers? How did you measure this?
Does the evidence from collocates of this word agree with the main meanings of this word, given in a dictionary (indicate what dictionary you used).

The response to this question should be about one half to one single-spaced page, plus any charts or tables you might want to include (these aren't required -- you can just discuss them in narrative, if you'd like).

SURVEYS AND EXPERIMENTS (50%)

Look at the design for each of the following three experiments or surveys. In bulleted format (just one sentence each) list four problems you think each study might have, or important issues that you think the design does not address adequately.

1. L2 acquisition: You've discovered what you feel is a fantastic new way to teach vocabulary to second language learners, and you want to show that learners really do learn better with this method. You'll use this method in your 201 class, and you'll compare it to the students in another 201 class, who use the traditional method.

2. Gender differences in conversation: You want to find out whether men or women talk more in typical conversations. You'll listen to six different conversations at the CougarEat, each about 8-10 minutes long. Two will be F/F, two M/M, and two M/F. Because you're also interested in how men and women use the word "like" (he's like ' I'm not going' "), you'll also count how many times men and women use this word in these conversations.

3. Experimental morphology. You want to gain insight into how people form the past tense of English verbs (land/landed, strike/struck, hit/hit, etc). You'll give to each of five different people ten made-up verbs, such as zeech, bling, gack, zost, mulgorb. You'll then have them give you what you think the most common past tense form would be. For example, for zeech they might give he zeeched, he zought, he zouched, etc. You'll use this data to try and figure out what type of analogy or rule-based processes are going on in their brain. (By the way, start out by listing at least five of the made-up verbs you'd use, other than those listed above).

The response to this half of the example will be twelve bulleted items (3 question x 4 bulleted items each), for a total of about one half to one single-spaced page.

For both sections, remember:

specificity (don't just talk in vague generalities), and
conciseness