E318M Spring 2008 Homepage
E318M: Introduction to the English Language (34960)
Spring 2008
Kevin Psonak
University of Texas, Austin
Class Time/Place: MWF 9-10, PAR6
Course web address: http://instructors.cwrl.utexas.edu/psonak/
Office Hours: Thursday, 9:15-10:45, in FAC9A
Course Policies
Grades:
- Three 5-page papers: 1st Submission 2nd Subm.
Paper 1: (advisory) 20%
Paper 2: 10% 20%
Paper 3: 10% 30%
- Quizzes, Particip., Present.'s, & Attend.: 10% ---
Scholastic Honesty: Turning in work that is not your own, or any other form of scholastic dishonesty, will result in a major course penalty, possibly failure for the course. A report of the incident will also be made to the Office of the Dean of Students, and filed in your permanent academic record. Be sure you read and understand the Statement on Scholastic Responsibility in chapter 6 of The Student Guide to First-Year Writing:
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/rhetoric/rhe306/student_guide/chapter_6/.
Students With Disabilities: The University provides upon request appropriate academic adjustments for qualified students with disabilities. For more information, contact the Office of the Dean of Students at 471-6259, 471-4641 TDD.
Keep your email address up to date in the UT directory since Blackboard will be used periodically for class messages.
http://www.utexas.edu/directory/faq.php#modify
Required Text
Curzan, Anne and Michael Adams. How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction. New York: Longman, 2005.
Bring the Curzan & Adams textbook to class every day.
Useful Writing Guide: Ruszkiewicz, Hairson, & Friend. "SF Express." Prentice Hall; 2nd edition, 2005. Available at http://www.amazon.com/SF-Express-John-Ruszkiewicz/dp/0131969862/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203299680&sr=8-1
New, powerful computers are available to you in PAR102.
Papers
- To pass the course, you must turn in on time a first submission and a polished final submission of each paper. The instructor will look at and comment on these submissions. To complete each final submission, you must consider the comments you received on your first submission thoughtfully, act on them and go beyond them in order to improve your submission substantially.
- Paper grades drop one letter grade for being late and then one letter grade for each additional day late.
- Write all papers in Microsoft Word and deliver them as *.doc files.
- Deliver to the appropriate folder in the Teacher Folder, available to you on all CWRL computers (PAR6 or PAR102).
- Instructor comments will be inserted right into your documents and you will be able to retrieve them from the Teacher Folder. Upon opening the file with comments, look for red marks and comments in the right margin. If you don't see any, select View | Markup from the Microsoft Word menu. Also, on second submissions, be sure to hide all markup before submission.
- Format requirements
-- In order to earn at least a C on a paper, you need to have 7-8 pages: Title Page (1 page) + Body (5-6 pages) + Works Cited Page (1 page)
-- Title page: your name, course title, assignment name, date, and paper title.
-- Paper Body: A full 5-6 pages of writing. The writing starts at the top of the first page of the body, with no carriage returns between the top and the first paragraph and with no reappearance of the paper title.
-- Works Cited Page (must be on a page of its own): Follow the MLA standard.
-- Double space the lines.
-- Use 1" margins all the way around the text (right, left, top, and bottom). Note that Microsoft Word defaults to different settings.
-- Times New Roman 12-point font.
-- No extra carriage returns between paragraphs.
-- Style Suggestions
--- There is no hard and fast rule on paragraph length, but, generally, a paragraph that takes up a full page is too long and a four-line paragraph is too short. Maybe aim for two paragraphs per page.
--- Use block quotes for quotations that would take up three lines or more in a regular paragraph.
--- Make the paper title interesting.
--- Students who visit the Writing Center once per submission tend to write better papers and to get better grades. Undergraduate Writing Center, FAC 211, 471-6222: http://uwc.fac.utexas.edu/ Learning Center, JES A332A, 471-3614: http://www.utexas.edu/student/utlc/.
Attendance
Students missing more than six classes fail the course. Sick days and emergencies count as absences. Two late-arrivals count as an absence.
Religious holy days: A student who misses classes or other required activities, including examinations, for the observance of a religious holy day should inform the instructor as far in advance of the absence as possible, so that arrangements can be made to complete an assignment within a reasonable time after the absence.
Paper Topics (mostly from Curzan & Adams 2005)
Paper 1
Write on one of these topics:
1. Argue for or against one of the following spelling reforms. Consider whether having one word for one meaning and another for a second meaning would make sense.
night/nite; tonight/tonite
cigarette/cigaret
catalogue/catalog; dialogue/dialog; monologue/monolog
judgment/judgement
eerie/eery
doughnut/donut
though/tho
through/thru
2. Is there a linguistic reason to prefer the active or passive? Does generative grammar offer insight into why we might prefer one voice to another? Explain where writers might prefer active constructions and where passive. Use evidence taken from sentences in books, newspapers, etc., that you have encountered.
3. Review one of the following passages [selections in How English Works pp. 473-6] and explain which words are Old English reflexes. What is the proportion of words coming from OE rather than another language? What other languages are words in the passage from? Which word parts are from OE? What patterns do you notice with regard to the types of words that come from one language rather than another? Comment on the relation between the type of text and the types of words.
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Paper 2
Write on one of these topics:
1. Is there a linguistic reason to prefer the active over the passive voice? Using examples from at least three texts you have studied in English courses, explain where writers might prefer active constructions and where they might prefer passive constructions. Possible questions for exploration: Which witers use passive voice especially frequently? Which writers seem to rely almost exclusively on active voice? Are there other patterns in choice of voice that you spot?
2. Treating either phonology (Chapter 3) or syntax (Chapters 5 & 6) in depth write a linguistic autobiography. Use ten or more terms from among those given in the book for these fields. Feel free to talk about other areas of linguistics, such as semantics and morphology, too, but be sure to focus on phonology or syntax.
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Paper 3
Write on one of these topics:
1. (Textbook Exercise 11.4.3) (Use at least 10 words from the glossary that you have not used in previous essays.) Imagine that in a conversation with a friend, you describe what you have been reading about in this book: that all dialects, both standard and nonstandard, are linguistically equal. Your friend says, "Oh come on, that is just not true. Those nonstandard dialects are just ignorant--people who don't know how to use English right." How would you explain to your friend the linguistic equality of dialects? What examples or analogies do you think might be useful in making the case?
2. (Textbook Exercise 11.4.4) (Use at least 10 words from the glossary that you have not used in previous essays.) In your experience, what phonological, lexical, syntactic, or discourse features mark class differences? Ask ten speakers at your school what features they consider important in marking class. Are there similarities among the responses? How do those responses correspond to what you've learned about variation throughout the book, but especially in this chapter? If there are few similarities among the responses, how do you account for that? What does it suggest about the relationship between class and speech? What does it suggest about the ways in which perceptions of class in speech differ from, for instance, perceptions of region, gender, race, or ethnicity? Are there significant intersections between perceptions of class and these four categories? Does hypercorrection figure in any of the accounts of class markers? If it does, what do respondents make of it? If not, what do you make of its absence?
3. (Textbook Exercise 14.1.2) (Use at least 10 words from the glossary that you have not used in previous essays.) Find ten examples of print advertisements, billboards, and other forms of advertising and copy down the text. Do you find evidence here for how advertising copy can stretch, if not break, the rules of Standard English, in terms of both vocabulary and grammar? Explain.
4. (Textbook Exercise 14.3.2) (Use at least 10 words from the glossary that you have not used in previous essays.) Find a blog that you think is doing interesting things with the English language as it is written down. Provide three examples of language that stretches conventions or surprises you in each of the following categories: words, meanings of words and phrases, morphology (e.g., prefixes and suffixes), and syntactic patterns. How do these examples resemble or differ from spoken American English?
5. (Textbook Exercise 14.3.3) (Use at least 10 words from the glossary that you have not used in previous essays.) The internet opens new venues for the promotion of minority languages, dying languages, dead languages, artificial languages, and more. Choose a language that you are interested in that falls into one of these categories (e.g., Manx, Cornish, Latin, Esperanto) and explore the resources that are now available for that language on the Web. Describe your findings and speculate about their implications for the vitality of this language.
6. (Textbook Exercise 14.4) (Use at least 10 words from the glossary that you have not used in previous essays.) Here is the scenario: This textbook is being revised for a second edition and the editors are debating whether the subsection in this chapter currently titled "World Englishes" would be more appropriately titled "World English," given the material in the chapter on English as a global language. The editors have e-mailed you, as a user of the book, to get your informed opinion about which would be a more appropriate title. Compose a response that provides detailed justification of why you think one title is more appropriate than the other.