WRT 285 - Analyzing Linguistic Data (4 Cr.)

(GCR DA-AC)

This course has four main goals: to introduce students to some areas of linguistic study such as dialect variation, register analysis, and sociolinguistics; to explore some of the ways that linguists use data to learn more about language and how people use language; to examine how linguists, academics in general, and students themselves use written language; and to introduce students to the genre of scholarly linguistic writing (and academic writing more generally). Students will read scholarly and popular works in the field of linguistics; collect, analyze, present, and write about linguistic data; conduct group and individual research; and share their findings with the class. Students will learn to work with several corpora including the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Dictionary of American Regional English and will also create and analyze data from their own corpus. The class will culminate with students developing their own research question, conducting their own research, and presenting it to the class as both an oral presentation and a paper written in the style of published linguistic research. This final paper will be a multi-draft paper, and we will conduct peer review and one-on-one conferences to help students revised their work. Prerequisites: WRT 181 - Writing Studies (4 Cr.) or WRT 181H - Writing Studies - Honors (4 Cr.) or FYS 100W - First Year Seminar Writing (4 Cr.), and GCR Data Analytics Foundational Level completion. This class fulfills both the WEC and DA-AC requirements. Fall semester. Garrett.