The seven stages of a successful project

We will walk you through several stages of your project. By the time you present your project to the class, you want to be in stage six, and, in most cases, that means you have gone through stages one to five. For each project description you hand in, we will tell you which stage we think you are in. How fast you move from one stage to the next depends on the nature of your project, your background in linguistics, and the effort you put in. As long as your project work has all the properties associated with stages one to five by the time you present your project to the class, you have made optimal progress towards completion of your project, even if it took you some time to get from stage one to stage two, for example. There may be slow-downs in some places and growth spurts in others.

How to present linguistic data from a language other than English

Your linguistic data are the center piece of your project. If the data are not from English, they must be accompanied by left-aligned interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses. Here is a link to the Leipzig Glossing Rules, which tell you how to do interlinear glosses. If your data are from Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Greek etc., you present them in the Latin alphabet, using some standard romanization. In an English article on Russian, for example, you do not present your data in the cyrillic alphabet. As you can imagine, romanization is far from trivial, so don't invent your own system. You can find widely accepted romanization tables for various languages on the internet.

Guidelines for oral presentations

If you present early, you are not expected to present a finished project. In fact, you can use the presentation to get intensive feedback on what you are doing. The presentations will be in the form of a 10-minute slide presentation. Florian sent you a style sheet that you can use with whatever word processor you usually use. You do not need Power Point. Please prepare the presentation according to the style sheet and send it to both of us 1 week ahead of your presentation. You'll get some feedback from us at that point and can still make changes. Florian will then assemble the presentations for each session into a single slide show that will be projected from my laptop. Check with Florian about when he needs the final version of your slides. Also tell us whether you allow us to make your slide show available on the course website. If you feel uncomfortable with this, we will produce handouts of your slideshow for people to take home. The last take-home will include questions relating to the mini-conference.

1. The intended audience are your classmates. They should understand what you are saying.
2. Present the relevant data and state the puzzle they pose.
3. Relate the puzzle to something you have read.
4. Present your strategy towards elucidating the puzzle (make progress towards solving it).
5. Present your questionnaire or experimental design.
6. If already available, present the results of your investigation and discuss possible conclusions. If data are not yet available, talk about expected results and/or difficulties.

The time limit is very important. Given the size of the class, we can only give you ten minutes, unfortunately.

your final project report

The next step after your presentation is to complete your project (run your experiment, test your questionnaire, work out your analysis) and prepare the final project report. Consultations continue to be highly recommended. The project report should be (at least) five typed pages of prose, plus appendices containing e.g. all experimental materials used, the questionnaire, relevant tables with results, additional data, computations, etc. Don't forget the bibliography. You are welcome to show us a draft of your paper. The paper is due on May 12 at the beginning of class. I cannot give any extensions because I am leaving the country on May 15. Even if you are working in a group, the paper has to be your own individual work. The paper has to be specifically written for this class. If you have written or will write a related paper for another class, add an appendix describing in what way the paper submitted for this class is different. The UMass Academic Honesty Policy applies.