1 FINDING A 120A TERM PAPER TOPIC In selecting a topic and/or a data source for a 120A paper, a couple of good sources are the following: • Teaching grammars of the language you would like to write on, particularly traditional teaching grammars from the 1950's or earlier. These are written for beginners, so they will describe the sounds, including alternations in some detail (generally described in terms of the orthography, with statements like “pronounce the letter g as soft before i” to describe a g/d!ʒ alternation), and they will usually give lots of examples. Your main task is to“translate” the non-linguistic description into serious phonological terms and formalisms. • Reference grammars of the language you would like to work on. These are the most obvious type of book to look at, so you should probably start here, but reference grammars are often kind of technical, and typically they don’t include a lot of examples of particular phenomena, so you may have to supplement the data from a speaker of the language, a dictionary, or a teaching grammar. • Problem sets from introductory phonology textbooks. The 120A syllabus lists a number of introductory phonology textbooks in addition to the Hayes book that we are using. Most of these include problem sets at the end or each chapter or have accompanying workbooks with problem sets keyed to the chapters. There are also stand-alone workbooks on phonology, such as Birgitte Bendixen, Workbook in Generative Phonology, mention in the list of topics for individual languages. Just about any of the problems from these sets could be the basis of a 120A paper. You would, in most cases, have to supplement the data from other sources, such as grammars, dictionaries, or your own knowledge if you speak the language, and you would have to consult one or more books on the language for further background to include in your paper. • The online library reference page. Under keyword, enter "X phonology" (where “X” is the language you want, and the phrase is enclosed in quotation marks so that you don’t get all the books on “X” AND all the books on “phonology”!). You will usually find one or more books that will potentially be useful. If you then go to the general shelf area of the call number of one of those, you will find a lot more books on the same language, some of which will probably also be useful. • amazon.com. You can use the amazon search function kind of like the UCLA library page, but it is often easier to use. In the first place, a library search will usually give a huge number of references, which can be confusing. Many of these will be technical, in foreign languages, very old, etc. Amazon will have more recent things in English and aimed at a less technically oriented audience. You can get an idea of what the book is like from the amazon page, then look it up in the library if it looks useful. Below is a list of ideas about some of the more widely spoken and better described languages. Prof. Bruce Hayes compiled this list with particular reference to finding a topic for a “replication” paper, that is, a paper in which you see how someone else has described a phenomenon in some language, then check with native speakers of that language to see whether you can either “replicate” the published description with dataTerm paper ideas for Linguistics 120A 2 you collect or show differences from published descriptons. Most of the ideas here and the reference sources would be useful for a straight descriptive paper as well. In order to get this posted as quickly as I could, I have pretty much taken Prof. Hayes’s list as-is, with a few small addtions. I hope to expand this with time. General for most European languages and lots of other languages. A good source of phonological alternations (which is the best type of topic for a 120A paper) is verb paradigms. These add suffixes and/or prefixes that change from person to person and tense to tense and have varying effects on neighboring sounds, cause shifts in stress, and the like. Grammars will often list the interesting ones—the ones that have phonological alternations!—under “irregular verbs”. If a language has a case system, like Russian or German, noun and adjective paradigms with different affixes marking case, gender, and number are also often rich sources of alternations. Armenian Examine the pattern of reduplication exemplified in pairs like sev ‘black’ ~ sep-sev ‘very black’. Try to determine whether the reduplicated form is predictable. Test the productivity of the system by examining borrowed or made-up adjectives. Reference: Bert Vaux, The Phonology of Armenian. Cantonese Look at what happens to tones in reduplicated constructions, like [hoΝ  ] ‘red’ ~ [hoΝ  hoΝ ¬ dΕi ¬ ] ‘kind of red’. Collect a set of pairs, consisting of simple forms and their reduplicated forms, and determine the rules for tone change in reduplicated constructions. English (i) Diphthongization and other phonetic aspects of tense vowels: The problem of [o] vs. [o!ʊ] before /l/ addressed in the first class generalizes to other vowels of English. For example, in my speech there are near-minimal pairs for a regular [i] and a velarized [iˠ], for example in freely [ˈfrili] vs. mealy [ˈmiˠli] The phonetic difference seems to depend on the division into morphemes (so, what would happen in monomorphemic words like Healey?). I think I understand what is going on with [o!ʊ] but I suspect other vowels work differently. (ii) Alternations affecting /æ/: Find a speaker of a dialect of English that has a distinction between two kinds of /æ/: a lower [æ"] in banner ‘flag’ and a higher [æ"] in banner ‘one who bans’. Such speakers usually grew up in Northeastern coastal cities, from Boston to Philadelphia. The speaker can be yourself, if you qualify. For most such speakers, it is possible to predict in most words which kind of [æ] will occur. Collect a large number of words containing /æ/, and try to write