the week of april 23 & the week of april 30

We will continue with the mini-conference. The final project report and the second writing portfolio with two original entries plus revisions (the puzzles of the machines; comments on Noah's presentation) are both due on april 30 at the beginning of class: no electronic submissions, no late submissions. I will enter the grades on the same day. If your work is missing, you will automatically get the grade you would have earned without the missing work. There will be no incompletes.

The final project report should be at least 5 pages of written prose, typed and double spaced, not counting the bibliography, the fieldwork questionnaire or the experimental materials. Please include the full field work questionnaire or all experimental materials - whatever applies to your project. The report should not violate any of the Gricean maxims (in particular, Quantity, Quality, Relevance, Manner), and should explain why you picked your hypothesis and what criteria you used for constructing your questionnaire/experimental materials. The reasoning leading from initial data to a hypothesis and from a hypothesis to test materials is the most important part of your report. Here is a checklist for your report:

Checklist for your report

1. Is there an initial set of data that presents a puzzle or raises a question? 2. Is there a clear statement of what the puzzle or question is that is raised by your initial data? 3. Is there a clearly formulated hypothesis? 4. Did you justify your hypothesis against the initial set of data? 5. Do all of your experimental materials/questionnaire items relate to your hypothesis in a transparent way? 6. Is there discussion of the relation between the hypothesis and the test materials/questionnaire items? 7. Do all of your test/questionnaire items have both a context description and a target sentence? 8. Is the task for the consultant justified and described clearly? 9. Did you report the results? 10. Did you relate the results to your hypothesis? Remember that we are not that interested in numerical results here! It's not forbidden to report numbers, but given the nature of your mini-investigations, there is very little we can conclude by just adding up numerical results. The main goal of your project is to practice scientific reasoning with respect to linguistic data. 11. Is there a conclusion? 12. Did you include all of your test materials/questionnaire items in addition to the 5 pages of prose?

Checklist for violations of Gricean maxims

Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false. This is a matter of academic conduct, and goes without saying. Quantity: This maxim concerns informativity. I am particularly ruthless in penalizing uninformative prose that just fills the page without adding much in the way of information. Relevance: Don't include any information that is not relevant for your project. Keep general information about the language you are working on to a minimum. If you include a map, this will not count as prose. Manner: Write clearly, and organize your report so as to bring out the logic of your argumentation.

Noah's advice for your final project report

In general, the paper should avoid being too personal. So for example, we're not interested in how you came to the topic, or why it's particularly interesting to you, or the fact that you personally have worked on related topics or plan to do related work in the future. At the same time, there is room to discuss the process you went through working on the topic, as long as the process reflects revisions to your hypothesis that are motivated by new data.

As a good metric, something is worth including in the paper if it would be intellectually stimulating to someone whose goal is to better understand the topic. Thus, for example, the fact that your thinking changed on some point isn't interesting in its own right. But the specific competing hypotheses and the reason that you ended up preferring one over the other are highly relevant.

As for how you devised a questionnaire or experiment, again we're not interested in the entire experience you had, but we do want to know about the decisions you made and the reasoning behind them. If you ran into issues conducting the experiment that affect what conclusions can be drawn, these are important to discuss, and you might want to put forward an idea for avoiding the same issues in the future.

If you ever get the feeling that you're story-telling, this should be a warning sign. Five pages double-spaced isn't actually that much space, so the paper should be carefully organized around the linguistic questions, data, and hypotheses you're dealing with. This leaves no room for filler!

contact info

kratzer[at]linguist.umass.edu

constant[at]linguist.umass.edu