LIN329 – Final paper

Please submit your final paper in hard copy at the beginning of lecture on December 3, 2024.

Length/formatting restrictions

Your paper should fit the following requirements:

•    1.5-spaced

•   Margins of at least 2.54 cm (1 inch)

•    12-point font

•   Eight to twelve pages, including examples, tableaux, and references

•   The paragraph about how you incorporated feedback from your abstract can be on an additional page

Components of the final paper

Your final paper should include the following components. They don’t need to be in this order. The requirements for each of these are explained in more detail following the list.

•   A title

•   Information on the language

•   Definition of the phonological phenomenon

•   Examples from the language

•   Description of the pattern

•   Explanation about what is interesting about the pattern

•   Optimality Theoretic analysis

•   Discussion

•   References

•   A paragraph about how you incorporated feedback from your abstract

Title, information on the language, definition of the phenomenon, examples from the language, description of the pattern, explanation about what is interesting, and references:

These all have the same requirements as in the abstract. They can be taken directly from your abstract or changed as appropriate based on feedback you received. You can also expand upon any of them, since you have more space in the paper than you did in the abstract.

Optimality Theoretic analysis:

Your paper must include an Optimality Theory analysis of the data. This should be a full analysis of all the facts that you have presented about the phenomenon in the language. The analysis should include:

•   A list of constraints, with definitions for all of them

•   At least one pairwise comparison to illustrate how you came up with one part of the ranking

•   A ranking of all of the constraints you’re using

•   At least two full tableaux, illustrating the application of your analysis to two of your examples

•   Each of the two full tableaux should contain all of your constraints and at least four candidates

•   There should be enough candidates in your full tableaux to illustrate the relevance of all constraints

Discussion:

Your paper must include a discussion. This should be around 2-3 paragraphs at a minimum, but can be longer if you have more to say. Some things you could discuss include (but are not limited to): whether your analysis fully accounts for all of the data, any remaining questions, additional points of interest about the analysis, or a conjecture about the applicability of your analysis more broadly in the language and/or for the same phenomenon in other languages.

Paragraph about how you incorporated feedback:

Write a paragraph explaining how you took the feedback from your abstract into consideration in writing your final paper. This can be on a separate page from the rest of the paper.