University of Alberta LING501: Research Seminar

Anne-Michelle Tessier
Linguistics Department, University of Alberta
amtessier at ualberta dot ca

"I'm always amazed by those people who get up at 5 and write till 8
and then eat a peach and walk their canary and write two hours more
and then are free to collect firewood for the rest of the afternoon."
-- Richard Greenberg, New York Times 03/26/06

LINGUISTICS 501: Research Seminar * Fall 2010

Course Syllabus

Course Slides

Back to my Teaching Page

Hello, and welcome to LING501: Research Seminar

This page contains mostly Links to Resources, as grouped together under the headings below.

1. Research Ethics including how to get approval for your experiment
2. Resources for Being a UofA Grad Student Linguist, including Awards and $$$
3. Advice on Writing Linguistic Things, Being a Grad Student, etc
3.5 Style Guides for using APA style, including references, and also interlinear glosses
4. Online Linguistics Resources

This page owes a considerable debt to previous 501 course materials, especially those prepared by Sally Rice and Terry Nearey, whom I hereby gratefully acknowledge.

1. RESEARCH ETHICS

Ethics Courses Online
As you will see in the syllabus, you are supposed to complete the two tutorials below some time before the end of week 3 in the semester.

* SSHRC ethics tutorial on the Tri-Council policy statement: Ethic Conduct in Research Involving Humans. The tutorial should take about 2 hours. You may recall that at our orientation, Johanne mentioned that the section of the Tri-Council policy statement that relates to Research Involving Aboriginal Peoples was well worth your time, if this is relevant to your research.
Once you have finished this tutorial you should end up with a Certificate of Completion, that you can then email me.

* The GET course on ethics, created by FGSR, is available via eClass (soon you should be registered in it... am working on it.)
Once you have completed this one you click on the My Grades tab on the left hand side of the screen, and you should get a report showing you finished all the modules. Just print out that page and give it to me.

Getting Ethical Approval for your experiments
* Registering to use the HERO system for the UofA's Faculties of Arts, Science and Law Research Ethics Board -- see on this page the little link on the right hand side that says 'To self-register'? Beneath it there is a link to Registration, where you invent yourself a username and password. Go nuts.
*A Sample completed HERO form from a recent experiment of mine. The only thing it doesn't help with is how to identify yourself, as a student investigator... to be discussed in class.

*Sample Consent Form as a PDF and as an MSWord doc

Our current appointee to this Board is Johanne, so when your application is all done and you have submitted it on HERO, she will automatically receive it, and then you will hear either from her or from someone else at the REB by email as to your application, whether it needs any tweaking, and/or when it is approved. Note that if you are running an experiment through SONA using our undergraduate pool, the CCP co-ordinator, right now being Karin Nault, will need the approval code you get from the REB people to approve your study.

The LSA's Ethics Statement in Progress, along with a blog for comments and discussion is here.

2. ONLINE RESOURCES FOR UofA GRAD LINGUISTS, INCLUDING AWARDS AND $$$

Our Department
* Linguistics Department Grad Handbook ...which you should read this week! If and when you have questions about how your program works and when you have to do what, this is the first place to check.

Faculty of Graduate Studies & Research
* FGSR Graduate Program Manual broken down into sections. This manual is the last word in grad student policies.
* FGSR Info for Current Students

* University Awards and Fellowships, meaning money that you can get from the University rather than an external funding source, are all listed here.
In normal cases, what you will be applying for are General Awards; these are open to all students, regardless of citizenship or permanent residency. On that page, scroll down to the bottom where there is a link to an MSWord Application Form. As you will see there, last year's deadline was March 5 for departments to submit applications to FGSR -- but that was really late! The year before it was February 1, and that's more normal. Anyway: usually the department sets an internal deadline of one or two weeks beforehand, so that advisors and grad co-ordinators have enough time to write supporting letters. Terry Nearey as Grad Co-ordinator will let you know once that deadline has been set.

External Money
* Applying for SSHRC Fellowships, which is all done via online applications, is explained here. NOTE that SSHRCs are only available to Canadian citizens and permanent residents.
* The SSHRC website log-in, at which you fill in your online application and a kind of CV (for which SSHRC has all its own rules).
Before you start writing your CV or your application attachments (which include the research proposal part) read the SSHRC instructions!!.

Someone, maybe me, maybe Terry, maybe we'll be lucky and Sally will do it despite sabbatical, will offer a SSHRC application workshop a couple weeks before our internal deadline. Watch your email.

The internal deadline for submitting student SSHRC applications to the department is TUESDAY OCTOBER 19.

* Other External Awards Do you qualify for the Alberta Lung Association award? Who knows? Check here.

3. ADVICE ON WRITING LINGUISTICS, BEING A GRAD STUDENT, etc.

Reminder about the place to start
Before looking anywhere else, you should always check the department grad handbook and the FGSR grad manual for advice on all graduate matters. They are the last word in local policy and procedure -- you shouldn't focus on another university's description of how dissertation defenses work, because how do you know that's what we do?
If you are looking for advice on something specific to your program, or to your own work (term paper/GP/thesis), ask the Grad Co-ordinator or your advisor.
If you are looking for something else, read on.

On Being a Grad Student
I have a sneaking suspicion that most advice about being a grad student is probably a little wrong and moderately useless, but you still need to think about these things, and having input into your thinking is almost always wise. Some of the better things I know of:

* Some advice, some of it good, on choosing an advisor
* At the bottom of this page, a bibliography of grad school advice . About the page itself: this page was prepared for a chemistry journal, actually, and so some of the advice is not that relevant to most of you. Grains of salt should be taken.
* Advice from grad students, especially on why you are in grad school, is provided by psych grad students here and by math grad students here.
* A summary of faculty reports on being a grad school superstar , that I think is really on target. Note: that researchers are reported to have found "four factors" that were mentioned most often in defining superstar grad students, and then the page lists five factors, so I would add a six factor: Proofread Everything.
* Some notes on Doing the writing , much of which I like.

Help in Doing Research
From a fairly theoretical phonologist Jen Smith at UNC Chapel Hill, here are:
* An excellent Guide to Ling Conferences Out There, put together by a fairly theoretical phonologist.
* Good tips On finding references.

Also:
* Some tips from a psychologist at the University of Buffalo on building a research career that seems for the most part very sound to me.

* The UofA library system offers Library and Research Tools workshops for new students that are listed in this flyer. Look it over -- if the description of the workshop includes a skill or tool you don't know about, you should definitely check one out. This flyer is from last year, but they have these every year, just with different dates. Go to the library website and/or the actual physical library, and find this year's.

On Writing Abstracts
* Various links to tips on writing abstracts and more writing abstracts
* Some big conference give lengthy explanations of how reviewers guidelines for abstracts: most notably the BUCLD guidelines.
* The LSA also provides a set of Model Abstracts that you might find helpful.

On Asking for Recommendation Letters
* Good letter-requesting guidelines, prepared here for undergraduates, but with a little tweaking the same advice goes for grad students.

On Giving Talks and Posters
* The best slides I've seen on all aspects of presenting -- talks, posters, presentation, visuals from Stephanie Solt, a grad student at CUNY.
* Two sets of instructions about dealing with the threats of mountain lions and questioners respectively, which I believe were written by Geoff Pullum (who was then at UCSC.)
* Some excellent advice on making posters from phonetician Elliott Moreton, UNC Chapel Hill, and then some more poster advice
General note: do not take poster advice, or writing advice, from someone who has done a bad job of making their slides or writing their advice, respectively. So, just because this (nonlinguist) person, whom I shall keep anonymous, thinks they have good ideas on using gratuitous graphics in posters doesn't mean you should listen to them.

On Dissertating
* Ideas about getting started on your dissertation ... the further into this page, the less helpful it gets. I would advise not to read past 'print out every draft of your dissertation on a different colour of paper'.
* Various tips about getting started, getting finished... which cites a really high drop-out rate after ABD; in our circumstances, you could translate that 'ABD' to 'MA', I think.

3.5 STYLE GUIDES

The standard style used in linguistics, for the most part, is APA style: that is, the style standardized by the American Psychological Association. The most important parts of this style are, I think, how to format your references, how to cite, and how to organize your examples.

Despite this APA standard, many linguistics conferences and journals have their own styles, and in particular they vary widely in how they want headings and titles formatted and numbered. The best policy is: if the venue you are writing for has any particular requirements, follow them. For those things that are left unspecified by the venue's requirements: when in doubt, use the APA style.

APA style guides

Dr. Abel Scribe (um, which is no one's real name) is the best and most frequently updated info online about APA style.
Here is the most recent web version of the APA Crib sheet, which you can also download in pdf format.

Here is a sample paper all formatted in APA style: in MSWord format , so you could use it as a template, and in PDF format so you can use it as a reference guide in any other word processing program.

On interlinear glosses

Quoting and working with other language data within your prose, and giving it all the right glosses, is tricky. The accepted standards for this procedure (called interlinearing glossing) are the Leipzig Glossing Rules, which you should check out and refer to as you quote data.

Overall Caveat ... do not freak out about all of this style too much. The most important thing is that you are consistent. The second most important thing is that you get the formatted examples, the references and the citations. The rest is usually easily sorted out.

4. ONLINE RESOURCES FOR DOING LINGUISTICS

General linguistics sites
* The Linguist List, which is most useful for its job postings and its conference calendars. If a conference is happening or a job is being advertised, it is almost certainly on the LList, so this is your one stop shop. You might want to subscribe to the List itself, or to the Lite version, but then again you might not.

* The Linguistic Society of America , which publishes the journal Language, runs a huge conference every January, and a major student Summer Institute every second summer.
* Speaking of which, the LSA2011 Summer Institute is at University of Colorado Boulder, which is beautiful and interesting and everything. Why don't you go? It would be great. You can apply for a fellowship to attend the institute, usually sometime in February, for which you will need the sample LSA fellowship application form, or rather the real one when it becomes available.

* The Canadian Linguistics Association, which publishes the Journal of Canadian Linguistics, and runs a yearly conference in May/June, during the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences.

* SIL International which used to stand for Summer Institute in Linguistics. If you do not know what the SIL does or what they are about, you should read their What is SIL? page. SIL is also behind the...
* Ethnologue which provides encyclopedia-style entries on "all of the world's 6,912 known living languages". Can be very useful.
* Lexicon of Linguistics hosted at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
* Glossary of Linguistic Terms, also hosted by SIL.

Other Linguistics and Ling-Related Associations
* The International Phonetic Association, home of the International Phonetic Alphabet, including audio recordings.
* Association for Linguistic Typology
* Association for Computational Linguistics whose proceedings are widely read, cited, and not understood.
* International Cognitive Linguistics Association
* Society of the Study of the Indigeneous Languages of the Americas, which meets at the same time as the general LSA in January.
* Acoustical Society of America
* International Association of Applied Linguistics
* Canadian Association of Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists
* Indigeneous Languages Institute

Databases and Corpora
* UofA Library Databases From this page, you can access all the databases you want to search with your subject or keywords.
I recommend searching the following three databases:
-- LLBA (Linguistics and Language Behaviour Abstracts)
-- Linguistics Abstracts (co-run by Benjamin Tucker)
-- if you want psychological literature, PsycINFO (for which you can get abstracts from the present back to 1882!).

* CHILDES, the Child Language Data Exchange System, is the biggest set of child data online, and is part of...
* Talkbank, which like CHILDES uses the CLAN tool (downloadable) to search and also browse various corpora.
* Corpora via Mark Davies including the BYU-British National Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the TIME magazine corpus, and some Spanish/Portugese corpora.
* Online Concordancers, also including access to the Brown Corpus apparently
* Linguistic Data Corsortium which distributes the CELEX corpus (Dutch, English, German), among many others.
* International Corpus of English, including the ICE Canada project headed by John Newman
* Edinburgh Associative Thesaurus of word association results
* WordGen, a tool for generating lexical stimuli that I have not used...

Archives of Linguistics Papers
* Rutgers Optimality Archive, which houses most of what gets written about Optimality Theory, primarily in phonology but also syntax, acquisition, and semantics/pragmatics.
* ACL Anthology, a digital archive of computational linguistics

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last updated Sept 7, 2010