Essays due: Monday, May 17th

Essay (on which your presentation will be based, though you may choose a different topic if you wish).

General
Whichever essay topic you choose, your essay will consist of two parts: I. Linguistic background, and II. Corpus investigation (in addition to a brief Introduction and Conclusion):

I. Linguistic background

In this first part of the essay, you will present a critical and comparative overview of how various reference works describe the linguistic phenomenon in question. How Note any significant differences in the type of information given, and try to explain them – remember to consider how detailed each reference is, what audience it is aimed at (native speakers or learners? experts or laypeople?) and whether it is prescriptive or descriptive.

II. Corpus investigation

In this second part of the essay, you will report on a small corpus investigation that you have carried out to test a specific hypothesis about one aspect of the usage of the phenomenon. Your hypothesis should relate to what you have found out in the first part of your essay, but you will probably need to choose just one or two aspects to focus on to make the task manageable. This part of the essay should be structured as follows:

i. Methods: State the hypothesis you decided to test (and why). (It need not be earth-shattering – you might end up simply hypothesize that usage in the corpus will exactly match that predicted by the references works you have consulted!) Describe your corpus and your method clearly; say why you have chosen to use the particular (sub-)corpora that you have, and how representative they are of a particular register or text-type, or of language use as a whole.
Explain how and why you have categorized / analysed your data as you have. You’ll probably want to give some examples of both typical and difficult cases you encountered.

ii. Results: Present your data appropriately (using tables or graphs where these may be helpful, and % in addition to raw figures if helpful / appropriate, and giving some examples). You should not try to present all the facts and figures that you came up with; concentrate on those that are relevant to your hypothesis and that show whether it is supported or disconfirmed. Remember to give any tables a number and a title (e.g. “Table 1: % frequency of the dative after trotz in Corpus A”)
Describe how

iii. Discussion: Discuss your results in the light of your hypothesis – attempt to explain any differences between what you found and what you hypothesized. This is also the place to comment on any problems with your “experimental design” and to discuss any difficult cases that your data produced.

End the essay with a brief conclusion.

Reference your work appropriately and include a full Bibliography at the end (alphabetical by author – see separate handout on how to present bibliographical references).

Working on the project before you write up the essay:

One of the hardest parts of a corpus study, especially for you while your knowledge of German is not yet perfect, is making sure that you make sensible decisions about how to categorize and analyse your findings. Think hard about how best to discuss the divide the examples you find in the corpus into categories that are useful, and ask for help about this. Make sure that you actually understand the examples – you will often have to use dictionaries to be sure you’ve used the data well. If you’re unsure how to interpret a particular example, you can exclude it from your results.