Report Card

I'll return to Cyprus next week, but I just wanted to take a detour to praise myself a bit, as I just received a copy of my current transcript here at the University of Brighton. To beef it up a bit, and in case anyone out there is thinking about grad school and might appreciate an example of what classes and assignments might be like, I'll give a brief description of each item.

Grammar and the English Language
This module was obviously about English grammar, but we didn't learn any grammar, per se. At the beginning of the course, we were all given a handout with 20 or so grammar activities, like:


Explain the difference between the two sentences:
The sewing machine is working perfectly now.
The sewing machine works perfectly now.

And then we just argued about what we thought was going on in each one for the whole term. We also did fun vocab quizzes and word games.

There were two assessments for this module:

Task 1: Analysis of a Grammatical Problem (from the handout or another topic, if approved) (1,500 words; weighted 40%)
For this essay, I chose to analyze the various uses of the word "some." I can't think of what they are right now, though. Haha.

Grade: 65% (Merit)

Task 2: Essay on some topic relating to grammar (2,500 words; weighted 60%)
This is where I started to hit my stride. I remembered my linguistics professor from college talking about conversational uses of the word "like," so I wanted to write about that. I didn't know how that would relate to grammar so much, but then I found out that linguists have been referring to "like" as a word undergoing a process called grammaticalization, in which a word develops new and often non-standard functions in speech. So I wrote about that. This led to my dissertation topic, which I'll mention at the end.

Grade: 78% (Distinction)

Grade for the module: 73% (Distinction)


Semantics: Word Meaning
In this class we learned about a bunch of bogus theories on how to analyze what words mean and how we process word meaning cognitively. It was still fun.

There was only one assessment for this task, a 4000 word essay on something related to one or more of the theories we discussed. I chose to apply a theory called Prototype Theory, in which members of groups are cognitively represented by prototypical members that best exemplify the features of the category, to the verb "talk." What I concluded was that although prototype theory can work nicely for noun classes (the most famous example being that a robin is a prototypical bird), it doesn't work so well for verbs and other parts of speech.

Grade for assessment/Total grade for the module: 72% (Distinction)

Meaning, Truth, and Use
This was a pragmatics course, in which we studied how context affects how we interpret language. Like, if I said, "Wow, you're really smart," you might be able to tell through the context of our conversation that I really mean that you're an idiot, even though semantically I said the opposite.

This was another class with just one assessment, an essay having to do with philosopher David Kaplan. I don't remember the exact essay question, but I talked about how Kaplan is wrong about proper names being directly referential (i.e. the name refers directly to the appropriate person and "means" that person) and that he is also wrong about the sentence "I am here now" being logically true. Neener neener.

Grade for assessment/module: 65% (Merit)

Semantics/Pragmatics Interface: Approaches to the Study of Meaning
In this class we combined the second and third modules above and talked about how you can't really separate what language means linguistically and what it means contextually, although there is a whole spectrum of theories as to where the interface occurs. Some people are Minimalists, thinking that "what is said" can mainly be determined semantically, and others are (Radical) Contextualists, thinking that pragmatics mainly determine what is said, and everything in between.

The essay here was to argue for one particular approach as being the best one to explain the interface. Of course, this is always loose, so I talked about how the most radical Radical Contextualist, Francois Recanati, doesn't make a clear enough distinction between what he calls primary and secondary pragmatic processes--what he thinks we use to figure out what is said.

Grade for assessment/module: 66% (Merit)

Topics in Sociolinguistics
In this module we talked about affects/is affected by culture and society--the notion of "women's speech," how English is viewed and used in postcolonial times by former British colonies, whether the media affects or simply reflects language change.

The essay for this class was probably my favorite. We had to do a research project involving gathering real data via questionnaires, interviews, online videos, or something similar. I chose to investigate how Stewie Griffin's British accent in The Family Guy was seen by Americans, Americans living in the UK, and UK natives, and whether people recognized stereotypically British characteristics in him and were conscious that he is a stereotype. I concluded that yes and yes, among other things.

Grade for the assessment/module: 78% (Distinction)

Research Methods
This was a module that met for both terms, and was allegedly only scheduled "sometimes," so we really weren't doing much more for this than the other one-term courses. We had this class with another group of language students--the ones studying Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Media-Assisted Language Teaching, and another concentration that I never learned. Ner. Anyway, THOSE people hardly ever had to come, but the Linguistics and English Language people were only ever given two or three weeks with no class. This class was really boring, too. We just learned mostly about research methods that were not appropriate for our groups--none of us will be doing interviews or sending out surveys, or conducting focus groups. On the up side, there was hardly ever any reading for this, and it was mostly easy.

This is another module with two assessments (although the teaching group only had one, grr):

Task 1: Poster of proposed dissertation topic (weighted at 50%)
Because I had so much fun with my "like" paper in Grammar class, I decided to take in a different direction and look at "like" from a different perspective. The poster started out with a presentation that we all had to make--not like a get-up-and-make-a-speech presentation, but more like a science fair presentation, where we all had to hang our posters up and explain what we wanted to do for the dissertation to teachers and other students milling around. This part wasn't graded, and a good thing, too, because our course leader grilled the hell out of all of us and would have failed us all for not having a research question adequately and clearly laid out in the poster. We then got a month or so to meet with her on how to improve the thing, redo it, and submit it for assessment. That was a little scary.

Grade for the assessment: 63% (Merit)

Task 2: Dissertation Proposal (3000 words) (weighted at 50%)
Next we had to expand the poster from a lot of chunks of outline and bullet points into a proper dissertation proposal, in essay form. Although I wasn't up to my usual standard with the poster, it was still good enough for me to use it to expand into the proposal. My course leader told me the other students couldn't do that and basically had to start from scratch in the proposal. A couple of them told me they'd failed and had to do the poster again before the proposal. That's rough. So I was glad I'd done okay. While I was writing the proposal and after I met with my course leader another time, I realized that what I was really trying to do hadn't quite formed in my brain, which is why I did so poorly on the initial poster attempt and why my grade on the final poster was a bit low (for me). But then it finally clicked and the proposal was one of the easier things I'd written all year.

Grade for the assessment: 85% (Distinction)
It's interesting to note that a Distinction is achieved at 70%, but the scale is cut into two sections. From 70 to 79% is a Distinction, but from 80% up is also a Distinction, just listed separately. Ed tells me that some schools/professors have a policy of never giving grades higher than 79, because that would be unreasonably high, too close to 100%. So getting an 85 is frigging amazing.

Total grade for the module: 74% (Distinction)

So, anyway, I've done pretty well for myself academically over here, and if I get a 70% or higher on my dissertation, then I graduate with Distinction, which isn't extremely common for Master's level, I don't think...

My dissertation topic, by the way, ends up being an investigation into how "like" is used vernacularly, what functions it performs, why it performs those functions, and how all this has affected previous accounts of its use. Since several researchers have differing opinions on what "like" is and what it does, and the rest either follow one of their theories or combine two or more, a taxonomy of the nonstandard functions hasn't been agreed upon. So basically I'm looking at why that is. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to accomplish that, but you know, baby steps.