Syntactic variation in media Rent a movie or record a T.V. show where an English-speaking character uses a dialect different from your own. You will need to be able to watch the movie or T.V. show more than once to successfully complete this assignment. Do a syntactic analysis of a character’s speech or signing. Do a syntactic analysis, you may, for example, rent The Empire Strikes Back or one of the more recent Star Wars movies that has Yoda in it. Go through the movie and pick out examples where Yoda uses sentence structures that are different from your own. Write down 15-20 example sentences and construct phrase structure rules to describe them (consult chapters 5 & 6 in How English Works to find appropriate vocabulary and labels for your description). Evaluate whether Yoda’s word order strategies are consistent. Methods You will be required to summarize, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate some linguistic data. There are no “right” or “wrong” analyses, but there are more and less systematic analyses and there are stronger and weaker thesis statements and arguments. Here are some suggestions for how to approach your paper and an idea of how I will evaluate your paper. Summary: Give an overview of your data. Write an “objective” description of your spoken, signed, or written data without discussing your opinion or point of view. Assume your reader has never seen the material you are working with and you want him or her to have an unbiased understanding of what that data is like. Analyze: Break your data down into parts. Examine the form, function, and/or meaning of the linguistic variable you are working with. By looking at the “parts” of your data, you can understand how each part contributes to the meaning of the whole. Write a description of the steps you took to analyze your data as you go. You may wish to present your information in a chart, table, extended example, or narrative form. Pick the presentation type that helps the reader understand your data most easily. Synthesis: Consider how your analysis fits in with what you have learned about linguistics in the course this semester. Make reference to the course readings, class discussion, or illustrative examples. Evaluation: Discuss what you have learned about science by developing methods to deal with your data. Make some sort of arguable general statement (your thesis!—this is where your opinion comes in) about your data, even if you have to account for a few exceptions to whatever patterns you might have found. Can you think of a way that your research process or analysis could be useful for another real-world problem? Writing up your data report: Outline for Data Report I. Introduction a. Introduce the topic you chose. b. State a hypothesis about what you expected to find in your study; this should be your thesis statement and should include an “explanation” of your expectations, i.e., on what basis did you “expect” to find one thing or another? If your results did not align with your expectations, briefly mention what you did find. Your hypothesis can be based in either intuition or theory. II. Data a. Tell about the who, what, where, when, why, and how for your data. b. Note limitations for your data that prevent them from applying to any group of language users. III. Methods a. Define any vocabulary needed in your analysis. b. Discuss the steps you took to do the analysis. c. Present the results of your analysis in the form that makes the most sense. IV. Interpretation a. Say whether the data supported your initial hypothesis or not. b. Explain how your analysis and methods were consistent with or how they differed from what we learned in class this semester, i.e., did your study support the theory, refine the theory, or require a new theory? V. Evaluation a. Explain what you learned by doing this project. i. About language ii. About speakers iii. About doing research b. Explain how you or another person might use your findings or your methods to deal with another real-world linguistic problem?