FORMAT:
➢ Approximately 3-5 pages in length, not including the data you collect or attach.
➢ A cover page on which you include your name, the course, the date, and the project title.
➢ An appendix consisting of your data
➢ A reference page listing any resources you’ve used

B. Language Variation and Sociolinguistics
1) Spend a week keeping a journal in which you record your own and others’ use of any of the following expressions:
a) “dude”, or if you want to work in Spanish, “güey”
b) rising intonation in statements (otherwise known as “uptalk” or “High Rising Intonation—HRT”)
c) “be like” or “be all” as introductions to quoted speech
You should document as much of the utterance as possible, the context or situation, the speaker (age, gender, any other relevant information) and the addressee(s) or audiences for each instance.

Analyze the patterns that you find (who uses these forms more than others? What communicative functions do they serve?), and compare them to patterns reported in any one academic article from the following:
* For “Dude,” see Scott Kiesling, in the syllabus and his online database at:
http://www.pitt.edu/~kiesling/dude/dude.html
* HRT has been studied by David Britain in New Zealand (Language Variation and Change, v4 n1 p77-104 1992); see also references at the end of the following Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal.
* For articles on quotative “like,” see references at the end of the following Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like and the article and references on the following page:
http://www.pbs.org/speak/words/sezwho/like/

2) Subtitling and the original. If you have sufficient competence in English and another language, study a film that has been subtitled (a foreign language film into English, or and English film into a foreign language). Transcribe 10 minutes of this film in the original language and then match up your transcription with the translations found in the subtitles. Compare and contrast the original and the subtitled translation for issues that may include (but are not limited to): a) what is said in the original but left out in the translation; b) how slang and idiomatic expressions are translated; c) if and how different accents or dialects are translated; d) how social and pragmatic meanings are translated, and how successfully this is done. You may also do this project on close-captioning using ASL, or English subtitling of ASL.