Reply
Thu 9 Sep, 2010 10:17 pm
Hello, I am new to this forum. I have been looking for a topic for my Bachelor rapport I'm doing. I came here because I was wondering whether any of you have any ideas (perhaps topics you have dealt with earlier)? The areas I have looked at are: Phonetics/Phonology, Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, Language Acquisition, Historical Linguistics. I have difficulty narrowing it down further. Something within English linguistics could be interesting too, since I studied English the first two years of my BA. Any ideas or suggestions? Thank you.
regards Anonymous user
@SoundWave,
A friend of mine did a part of her doctoral dissertation (she is a Linguist) on the infix.
The morphosyntactic structure of polysynthesis. There are lots of grammars on polysynthetic Native American languages in most university libraries. You could also cross lingusitically compare a single feature. Language death is a currently popular subject with plenty of literature and if you live close to any Native American reservations you could probably get a few live interviews. Jargon among subcultures is also fairly trendy right now as well as netspeak and internet related issues.
Thanks for all the replies
Unfortunately I live in Denmark and even though I don't know my neighbors personally I doubt they are Native American Indians. But your suggestion was good. Jargon and netspeak sounds interesting.
@SoundWave,
I imagine that since it is an undergrad thesis that you do not have to have original research. A nice thesis on jargon and/or argot can have a rich historical component in which the attributes of the subpopulation that uses the jargon have different than the general population can be compared and contrasted with other similar groups through history up until modern net-speak jargon in specific net groups. A historical component could credibly fill a lot of pages, and it helps set the modern stuff that is really going to analyzed in the contexts of history and universal socio-linguistic tendencies.