ENGL 353 History of American English
Fall 2006
Cain
Micro-Research Papers
The intent of these papers is twofold: 1) to encourage your thinking about American
English beyond the classroom and our textbook; 2) to improve your research, critical
thinking, and writing skills. The purpose of having five micro-research papers is to
provide you with the opportunity to familiarize yourselves with a broad range of topics
within the scope of our subject and to practice and improve your work over the course of
the semester. You will be working concurrently on a full-scale research paper, so you
should also use these micro-research papers as preparation for the larger research project.
Requirements of Micro-Research Papers
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Papers must be typed and double-spaced.
Use 12-point New Times Roman font.
Papers must conform to MLA style and documentation.
Papers must use three secondary scholarly sources, of which only one can be an
Internet source. That means your other two sources must be “traditional” sources:
scholarly articles, books, etc. You may wish to consult and use dictionaries and
encyclopedias (or other “tertiary” sources), but they don’t count as secondary
sources. You may use our textbook as a source, but (for our purposes) it will not
count as one of your secondary sources.
Papers must be no more than two pages in length (excluding the “Works Cited”
page).
Topics and Due Dates
Micro-Research Paper #1: 13 September
Choose one:
1) On the whole, we will be concerned with the spoken varieties of American English
rather than the written varieties. What are some of the essential differences between the
two? What do linguists mean when they say that the spoken language is “primary” and
the written language is “secondary”? How do most people relate the spoken and written
varieties?
2) Research the life of one of the following individuals and write about his contribution
to the study of English and/or language in America: John Witherspoon, Noah Webster,
Josh Billings, Edward Everett, Joseph Greenberg, Noam Chomsky, William Labov.
2
Micro-Research Paper #2: 27 September
Choose one:
1) Define each of the following terms and discuss their relationships to each other: speech
community, register, sociolect, dialect, standard.
2) Research some of the lexical and spelling differences between British English and
American English (spelling differences include honour/honor or judgement/judgment,
while lexical differences include torch/flashlight or lorry/truck). Explain how such
differences developed and where they come from.
Micro-Research Paper #3: 11 October
Choose one:
1) What is the DARE project? Explain its significance and findings.
2) What are some of the regional dialect features of the Baltimore area? Be sure to
distinguish features in terms of levels of dialect (i.e., phonological, lexical, etc.). Do not
simply recapitulate any of the readily available (and decidedly “un-scholarly”) guides to
“Bawlmerese.”
Micro-Research Paper #4: 8 November
Choose one:
1) Research the “Ebonics controversy” of 1996? What were the causes and results? How
was the event depicted in the media?
2) Some scholars have suggested that some of the distinctive features of African
American English may be due to the survival of features of some of the West African
languages spoken by West African slaves in the Americas in the early colonial period.
What is the evidence for such a linguistic substrate in AAE?
Micro-Research Paper #5: 29 November
Choose one:
1) A great number of distinct “Americanisms” have been the product of wartime
America. Research and discuss the meanings and origins of several Americanisms
coined during the historical periods of either the American Civil War or of World War II.
2) Research and discuss the role of slang in American life. What does slang have to do
with culture and social networks? How does slang change over time?