ELA20N223A Sounds of the World
Assignment 2
The Commentary
Write a commentary of no more than 1500 words on one of the following topics agreed in advance with your tutor.
- Collect, analyse and comment on respellings’ for a familiar variety of English from a contemporary text source that interests you. Example texts can include tweets, blogs, novels, poems, song lyrics, cartoons and so on. Your commentary should describe what aspects of pronunciation the text focuses on (e.g. consonant phenomena such as h-dropping, or vowel quality or perhaps a mix of both). Does the writer convey the variety in a novel way, or solely through ‘enregisterment’? Consider the success/failure to convey the accent and whether or not this failure is relevant? You may wish to consider the writer’s purpose here. Perhaps you find some respellings inaccurate despite the writer’s intentions or perhaps you think some vital markers are missing. You may want to suggest alternatives but, if you do, remember to comment on why you think your suggestion is better.
- Write a short creative piece that captures the accent of a familiar variety of English. The ‘piece’ can be, for example, part of a poem or set of lyrics, part of some dialogue for a novel or short story. It could be part of a blog or a book you are writing to help people ‘teach yourself this dialect’. You have considerable choice here. This short piece is your data but the marks come from the commentary. It is advisable to seek advice to make sure that you have created enough data to comment on but also to make sure that you have not produced too much data. When you have sufficient data you should discuss your linguistic thought processes. As for 1, you might wish to define your audience and purpose. Describe your respelling choices from a phonological perspective.
- Propose your own ‘mini-project’ if it is not already covered by 1 or 2 above. In this case, approval from the tutor is vital and your work may not be accepted unless the project is approved.
General Guidelines
- Your deadline is 14.1.21 before 2pm through Turnitin.
- Your work should be anonymous (student number only).
- Please use font size 12 and double-line space your work. Notice that the assignment brief was single spaced whereas the general guidelines are double-line spaced throughout.
- Number the pages.
- Consult, consult, consult. I have deliberately not given you a fixed number of words for your data. You need to have found enough to be able to comment and the forms your select will undoubtedly be embedded in non-relevant words. If I state 250 words, you might have a section with only 5 relevant forms which repeat the same phenomenon. Clearly, this is not enough. It is possible to have 10 words and different 10 phenomena that reveal author intention and success/failure. Conversely you might have 250 which yield the same effect.