Page 1/6 LIN203H1F: Assignment 1 Due: Wednesday, October 28, at 11:59 PM Toronto time, via Quercus submission. Total 15 points Caution #1 Instructions are meant to outline your task for this assignment and to provide you with context. If you decide to use ideas and/or wording from these instructions in the text of your assignment, you absolutely must cite and reference these assignment instructions (and either paraphrase or use quotation marks). Please consult the Using Sources section below for more information. Let Marisa and/or Ilia know if you have any questions. Introduction The icebreaker activity on the LIN203 message board this semester asked you to share something interesting about your name (either your family name, or a middle name, or a nickname, or a first name that your parents gave to you, or a first name that you gave to yourself). This assignment builds on similar questions! The study of names (especially personal names, but sometimes also corporate names and sometimes place names) is called onomastics (from Greek onoma- ‘name’), and it is adjacent to etymology and linguistics. If you are already familiar with one or more examples of a community/cultural group and its practice in terms of first names (personal names rather than family names), you can think about it to inform this essay (you can also read more about it as long as you cite your sources). If not, select a community/cultural group (from any country or language) to do some research about in terms of personal names practices. Caution #2 If you are researching a culture or minority community that you do not belong to yourself, this is okay; however, be careful in selecting your sources. Seek out perspectives from either community in-group members or well-trained anthropologists/linguists. Outsiders commenting may have perspectives that are inaccurate, unhelpful, or downright bigoted. Page 2/6 Purpose This assignment has several specific goals in mind. By completing this assignment, you will be able to… • Extend your understanding of key concepts in the academic study of linguistics by placing them in a familiar, practical context. • Reassess a familiar, practical context by approaching it from a new perspective (the academic study of linguistics!) • Reflect upon the broader applications of linguistics, including how the study of linguistics impacts our everyday, non-academic lives. • Gain practice in key academic critical thinking and writing skills such as the identification and interpretation of evidence and knowledge integration. Instructions Write a 2-3 page essay that addresses three of the following questions: answer Question 1, Question 2, and one of the two choices for Question 3. 1. Culturally, historically, where do names in this community or culture come from? In order to provide a complete answer to this question, you may want to consider the following smaller questions: are names in this community or culture sourced from oral history? From old works of literature? Are they influenced by a neighbouring culture, or by a language that came into contact? Do people make up new names often? If so, are those based more on sound than meaning? If not, do names preserve something about older forms of the language? 2. How semantically transparent do names tend to be in this community or culture (in other words, do speakers of the language have good intuitions about what your name means)? In order to provide a complete answer to this question, you may want to consider the following smaller questions: Is it obvious that a name means (e.g.) ‘desert flower’ because it is exactly the same as the words for ‘desert flower’ as a noun? Are there subtle changes? Or are the etymological meanings obscure or inaccessible to speakers? 3a. If names are semantically transparent: do they act and look the same as nouns that aren’t names? Again, to provide a complete answer to this question, consider the following smaller questions: are names ever multimorphemic? Do affixes ever make their way into names? 3b. If names are not semantically transparent: are there sets of sounds that begin to act like morphemes, endings that sound like names for particular genders (or at least sexes assigned at birth), or different names for different social categories otherwise? Page 3/6 Formatting Your assignment should be 2-3 pages in length (but you can add a fourth page for the bibliography if you need to) with the text double-spaced (or 1.5 spaced) in an ordinary 12-point font and with 1” margins. In terms of audience, you are writing primarily for your course teaching team (Marisa and your TAs will be your immediate readers). Imagine that you are writing to someone with a baseline understanding of your community or culture, but someone who is not necessarily an insider to that community or culture; provide your reader with enough background and information that they can understand your points, without being an insider to the community or culture about which you are writing. You must submit your paper via Quercus by 11:59 PM Toronto time on Wednesday, October 28, 2020. Academic integrity This is a solo assignment. Buying essays from anyone else is prohibited. (Even attempting to do this is a breach of academic integrity.) Do not share your work with any of your classmates, or accept any offers to look at classmates’ (or anyone else’s) attempts at the assignment. Any essays that look similar to each other will be investigated for academic dishonesty. If you have questions about the assignment, you can always send Marisa an email and/or set up an appointment and/or visit office hours if you are having problems – that’s her job! Page 4/6 Tip Sheet: Finding and Using Sources (compiled by Erin Vearncombe, Writing-Integrated Teaching Program) As you know, this assignment invites you to respond to three questions about names and naming practices, or onomastics. You may choose to use sources to support your claims about the naming practices of a specific culture or community. Note that you are not required to use sources for this assignment, and you may choose to write about your own pre-existing knowledge. A. Finding Sources It is important to evaluate sources before using them. A Wikipedia entry, for example, is not as reliable a source for information as, say, an article published in a scholarly journal. Wikipedia pages can be good starting points for research, however! The links and references included at the end of a Wikipedia page may include great sources for your assignments. For example, the Wikipedia page for “Chinese personal names” included a reference to a book called Chinese American Names: Tradition and Transition by Emma Woo Louie. If you’ve found a source that you love or seems really useful, particularly from the internet, run it through the CRAAP test before using it in your assignment. Is your source…. Current? Relevant? Authoritative? Accurate? Purposeful? If you’re not sure about how some of those terms might apply to your source, more information about the CRAAP test criteria can be found here: https://researchguides.ben.edu/source- evaluation. If you have found a source using the University of Toronto Libraries catalogue, it will be highly, highly likely to pass the test. If you don’t want to have to run through the CRAAP test, here are four pre-approved sources that will get your thinking and writing moving in the right direction. The Oxford Dictionary of First Names will be a solid resource for this assignment, though the focus of this resource is more on so-called “Western” cultures. 1. Head to the University of Toronto Libraries catalogue, https://onesearch.library.utoronto.ca/. 2. In the search box, type hanks dictionary first names and press enter. Page 5/6 3. On the right side of your screen, you will see Hanks, Patrick. dictionary of first names / under Books. Click that option. 4. On the next screen, scroll down until you see A dictionary of first names [electronic resource]. Click Oxford Reference Library under that selection. You will then be prompted to log in to the system using your UTORid and password. 5. You’re in! From here, you can browse the dictionary in order to brainstorm ideas for your essay if you’re feeling stuck, or you can search for a particular name. Some names will yield quite a bit more information than others, so browse around a little bit. Behind the Name: the etymology and history of first names is another solid source for this assignment: https://www.behindthename.com/. The site includes some helpful links, https://www.behindthename.com/info/links, as well. Just be careful about following a long chain of internet links… remember the CRAAP test, above! If you want to dive in deeper, you can check out The Oxford handbook of names and naming, also available online. If you search for oxford handbook names naming in the U of T Libraries catalogue, this book should be listed under Books on the right side of your screen. Click The Oxford handbook of names and naming [electronic resource], and then, on the next screen, click Oxford Handbooks Online. Once you’re in, note that not all of the chapters of the book will be relevant to our assignment. You might look at the “Names and Meaning” chapter in Part I, “Personal Naming Systems” in Part III, or “Names in Society” in Part V, for example. There is a scholarly journal called Names: a journal of onomastics accessible through the U of T Library catalogue as well. This journal publishes much more specialized articles, so if you browse this journal (which you can find by searching for names journal onomastics, scrolling down to Journals & Databases, and clicking the first result, Names [electronic resource]: a journal of onomastics; finally, select Taylor & Francis Library SSH – CRKN, 03/01/1997 to present under Holdings, and you should be in), it will help to have a specific question or topic in mind. Typing in a single first name will not be likely to yield any results. If you’re interested in WeChat usernames, however, you could search for that topic, or for business names in Korean, or for the social use of Yorùbá personal names. B. Using Sources If you are writing about your own pre-existing knowledge, you do not need to cite sources unless the ideas are closely tied to course material, in which case you will need to cite, reference, and either paraphrase or quote the sources of those ideas (textbook, lecture slides, etc.). If you use any sources, you must either: Page 6/6 a) paraphrase the idea (in your own words), put in a citation in a bracket immediately afterwards, and put the source in a references list at the end; or: b) use the exact words from the source inside quotation marks, put in a citation in a bracket immediately afterwards, and put the source in a references list at the end. A citation of the lecture slides can simply look like "(Lecture 1)" and citing the textbook as "Denning et al. 2007:16)", where the number after the : is the page number, is also enough. You can use any kind of established style/formatting for citations and references (most linguistics journals have their own conventions!), as long as you are consistent and have provided all the details a reader needs to look up the source. Possible entries for references list: Denning, Keith, Brett Kessler, and William R. Leben (2007). English Vocabulary Elements (2nd edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lecture 1. LIN203: English Words (instructor: Marisa Brook). University of Toronto, St. George campus. Asynchronous. Week of September 14-18, 2020. An entry from the Oxford Dictionary of First Names could be cited like this: Hanks, Patrick, Kate Hardcastle, and Flavia Hodges. (2006). “ ‘Abd-al-Qādir.” A Dictionary of First Names. Oxford University Press. Oxford Reference. Accessed 13 October 2020.
f/9780198610601.001.0001/acref-9780198610601-e-3349>. If you have questions about citing your sources at any point during your writing process – how to cite, when to cite, why we cite – please contact Marisa or your course TA. We are here to help! Citation is a skill that takes a lot of practice. 欢迎咨询51作业君
