Liz Evison '10 and other Carleton linguistics students at the University of Chicago for the 2008 Chicago Linguistics Society Conference.
Linguistics
Linguistics is the study of the remarkable human capacity to learn and use natural languages. Prominent questions include the nature of the systems of mental representation (both abstractly and neurologically characterized), how these representations arise, how they change, how they are written, and how languages are put to use in social and literary contexts.
For more information, see the Linguistics department site.
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Liz Evison '10 majors in Linguistics.The hardest project I've worked on at Carleton has also been the most fun. As part of a course called First Language Acquisition, I wrote a substantial paper and presentation analyzing a published work and outlining a hypothetical experiment that examined the acquisition of lexical semantics in one- to two- year olds. To write this paper, I also ran a pilot study of my experiment with one- to two- year old "acquisitionists" I had been observing for the course as sources for primary data. An in depth analysis that requires juggling many threads, critical thinking, and many, many drafts occupying your mind is difficult, but rewarding.I'm not a senior yet, so I haven't started my comps project, but by the end of this year I will have started to think about it. The linguistics comps consists of doing a lot of extended research, writing a paper, and giving a presentation. I am considering a research topic related to some part of semantics and pragmatics. -
Margaret Taylor '10 says:For a linguistics class I got to do a talk on discourse markers. Those are words like "like" and "um" that don't seem to have any linguistic function in a sentence. It involved analyzing actual utterances by Valley girls that I found on You Tube.