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Activities

These activities are designed to broaden your understanding of linguistic description and to introduce you to a few methods for conducting small research projects. Here, your linguistic studies are directed to finding out more about English in use.

There are seven activities and each one is of a different type. Activities range from searching for grammatical information on the internet to testing a linguistic hypothesis. In one, you are required to compare the linguistic features of specific texts, and in another to investigate the features of spoken instructions, using an informant. In yet another, you consider your own usage of alternative grammatical forms and are invited to consider their use in a corpus.

We hope you enjoy these short samples of linguistic detective work.

This work is ‘open-ended’, meaning that like all real research we cannot accurately predict what your findings will be. For this reason there is no answer key. It will be interesting for you to compare your findings with what others have found where this is possible. Also, in future, watch out for published research articles on similar topics.