Semester Project, part 2

ENG 204, Spring 2005, E. Johnson

Grammatical Analysis: Describe morphological, syntactic, and semantic errors.

In this part of the project, you will analyze the speaker's sentence structure and use of words, identifying departures from Standard English.

Start by transcribing in English exactly the words the person uses in three minutes of speech. Do not include the times the interviewer speaks as part of the three minutes. You may summarize the interviewer's questions rather than transcribing those. Be sure to note false starts, hesitations, laughter, special emphasis or intonation, etc.

Go over your transcript looking for morphological, syntactic, and semantic errors.

Morphological: word endings missing or mis-used; wrong verb tenses

Syntactic: word order different from Standard English; words missing or added in error

Semantic: meaning of the word is different; different word used from what a native speaker would say

You may have to collect more data for this part, as you must identify at least ten speech errors.

I will expect you to get examples of all three types of error. Do not count as an error something that would be typical of a native speaker of English in informal conversation, saying, "you know," for example.

Discuss the types of errors you found, including a list of sentences that contain each type of error, grouped by similar errors. In the list, explain exactly what is wrong with the sentence. This may include a re-writing of what the sentence should be. For example:

1. Problems with plural endings: some words that should be plural are singular and words that should be singular are plural

"I bought a textbooks to learn English."

The word textbooks should be textbook.

[this example could also be indicative of problems with use of determiners: which is the more common error?]

Conclude with a diagnosis of the speaker's grammatical difficulties.

You must turn in a transcript, the CD (with a note about where the transcript begins), a description of the errors (in the form of a list), and a summary analysis. Also, a journal entry on transcribing and analyzing data (one paragraph). These should be in a large envelope.