Introduction to Sociolinguistics

Intro to Sociolinguistics Spring 2011 Course Materials
Syllabus/Calendar
Film Trailer for Bliadhna agus Latha
Handout on Scottish Gaelic
The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language
Pinker – The Blank Slate and review/critique
Pinker talk on swearing – Part 1 and Part 2
Topics and Links for Debate
 Read Economist article (comparing theories on origin of language).
Where does this leave us in the nature vs. nurture debate about the origins of language?
Dunn et al’s article from Nature
Additional Resources
NY Times: “…Vanity Heart Through Song Lyrics”
Popular Linguistics Magazine- New evidence for Whorfian Hypothesis in recent scientific studies
From Science News magazine- “Aboriginal Time Runs East to West”
RSA Animate – Language as a Window into Human Nature
For Independent Research
PBS- “American Tongues” or “Do You Speak American?”
Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) American English dialect recordings
Speech accent archive at George Mason University (GMU)
BYU’s list of corpora for American and British English
American Memory archives list and other sound recording archives from US Library of Congress
NPR’s StoryCorps
List of sound recording collections, compiled by British Library
BBC “Voices” project (similar to PBS)
Middlebury Library e.g. Lexis-Nexis, online newspapers, etc.
Federal News Service has all sorts of transcripts–old and new
MICASE- Corpus of academic English transcripts
Television Transcripts Database
Movie scripts and transcript- e.g. IMSDb
Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE)
Presidential Speech Archive
Solar Decathalon (“home” or “environment” or other ‘tropes’)
Media analysis (building on or testing Daily Show or Colbert Report segments)