Advice on Homework

Matters of Substance

A lot of the learning in this class goes on as you plan and write answers to the homework problems. They are designed to guide you in the right direction but require you to creatively develop and structure your answer. The questions will almost never have one ‘right’ or expected answer. Rather, as we comment on and evaluate your papers we are principally concerned with how well you apply the ideas developed in class to the problem at hand. Most of your paper should be prose justification for the answers that you propose. By making explicit the reasons that you have for giving your solution, you both show us how you arrived at your conclusions and will likely discover further consequences of your ideas.

The problems on the homework will typically present some data, some contextualizing discussion, and then pose a goal question whose answer will be the focus of your write-up. Sometimes additional specific questions are given to help get your thinking started. What you submit as your answer should be a coherent prose discussion which address the questions posed. The structure that you give to your answer might include a brief restatement of the problem before giving your answer. Your answer should not be simply a series of brief, disjointed answers to the specific questions posed.

Here's a way to measure how coherent your answer is: Imagine what would happen if you lost your paper on the way to class and someone who is not in the class picked it up and read it. Would that person be able to make general sense of your answers or would they feel that they were listening in to just one side of a conversation which did not make sense on its own? The former kind of answer should be your goal.

Other familiar but good bits of advice are: reread your answer before turning it in, preferably out loud, to catch omissions or infelicities. Don’t be afraid to edit or correct your answer before turning it in; revision is a fundamental part of doing good written work. For the midterms and final take-home problems, you should prepare a draft of your answers well in advance of the submission date and then set it aside for at least twenty-four hours during which you think about other things. Then go back to reconsider, revise and recopy or reprint it for submission.

Cooperation and Acknowledgement and Academic Integrity: The problems we set are never such that you could get the answer directly out of a book. You are free, and indeed encouraged, to discuss the data in the problems and your proposals with other people in the class. Doing so usually increases the range of ideas you consider and deepens your understanding of the issues. However it is of paramount importance that you write up your answer on your own. If you make use of someone else’s idea in your paper, give them credit. The boundaries of acceptable cooperation end clearly at the point where you turn from conversation to writing up your answer. Violations of academic integrity will be addressed and may lead to failing the course.

Because the assignments are designed to be done at a certain point in the course, they should be done at the time assigned and submitted on the date due. Late homework is accepted only under very special circumstances. If you miss a class when an assignment is distributed, it is your responsibility to get a copy of it from the web or someone in the class in time to submit it on time. If you happen to miss class on a day when an assignment is due, you should get it before the next class day, preferably the same day, to the instructor’s mailbox in Cowell faculty services (220 Cowell).

Matters of Form and Style

Here are some admonitions on form and style, some of which are obviously general, and some of which have to do with the peculiarities of writing about language in a lingustics course.

[1] Because we want to be able to respond to your ideas at the point at which it is relevant, we need some space on your paper to write. You can provide this either by writing only on one side of the paper. Use only 8.5" ´ 11" paper. Number your pages and make sure your full name and the assignment number are on the first page.

Staple the sheets of your submission together in the upper left-had corner! Paper clips, failed attempts at origami in one corner, or creative uses of bits of string, wire or vegetation are not acceptable substitutes for staples.

[2] The use/mention contrast. In writing about language, we frequently must mention a word or short phrase in the text. When you do this, mark the mentioned word by underscoring it (or if you are using a word-processor, put it in italics). For example:

The verb forget presupposes the truth of its complement, but deny does not. The difference between Jerry Brown and Jerry Brown is very easy to see: Jerry Brown contains ten letters, but Jerry Brown doesn’t. In English, the definite article the is morphologically invariant; in Spanish, the definite article la/el/las/los shows different forms for singular and plural, masculine and feminine.

[3] When we want to discuss larger pieces of language, like sentences or small texts, they should be set apart from the text near where they are mentioned and numbered. Then the text can contain references to the number. So for example we see that sentences (1) and (2) are synonymous, and (3) is ambiguous:

1. The chickens ate the corn.

2. The corn was eaten by the chickens.

3. The chickens are ready to eat.

Often the fact of interest about an example is that it is grammatically ill-formed or nonsensical. We indicate our judgements about particular sentences by prefixing them with an asterisk when they are clearly ungrammatical or semantically ill-formed, and a question mark when there is some semantic oddness (anomaly) about them. Sentences which are presented with neither are * or ? are assumed to be well-formed, meaningful sentences.

4.  This sentence is perfectly grammatical.

5. *This sentence are ungrammatical.

6. ?The length of the room cut each other.