I work on endangered language revitalization and documentation, with further research on the pf interface. Ib and linguistics all things linguistic has a post about trying to incorporate linguistics into the international baccalaurate extended essay. For those unfamiliar with the program, the extended essay is the capstone project for the ib program as a whole, which takes the form of a self directed research project.

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It's ostensibly pretty open ended, but in practice the necessity of finding qualified graders tends to limit the sorts of subjects a student can write on. As a former ib kid and a high school protolinguist myself, i thought i should share my story about trying to do a linguistics focused ee. I started to get into linguistics around the age of 13, and by the time i entered high school already knew that this is what i wanted to do with my life. By the time my ee rolled around, i'd already made several attempts at incorporating linguistics into my ib experience: my tok presentation was focused on cross linguistic differences in things like tense and evidentiality, and i'd managed to find an english teacher thanks, ken ralston! who had majored in linguistics in undergrad and who helped me a lot with understanding the linguistics texts i was reading. My higher levels were chinese b1, math, english because of california state requirements, my school taught everyone the english hl curriculum regardless what you were officially registered for, so nearly everyone just used it towards their ib requirements. I wasn't keen on writing my ee in chinese ndash i didn't quite have the level of fluency required to write something interesting, and i'm no good at writing essays i'm not interested in. In retrospect, i really should have done either some aspect of mathematical linguistics or worked with my english teacher who, as mentioned, had a ba in linguistics to come up with something instead, i went for the crazier option and tried to write a linguistics ee in music.

At the time, this felt like a pretty reasonable choice: i had recently come across lerdahl and jackendoff's generative theory of tonal music gttm , which was a mid 80s attempt to apply generative linguistics to the theory of western classical music. It's a good book, and well worth a read, though the theoretical content from both the linguistics and the music side! is pretty dated. Throughout the text, a significant portion of their formalization is couched in the notion of preference rules ndash rules that were not absolute, but rather ranked in some fashion lerdahl and jackendoff don't actually rank them, stating that they consider that an empirical problem for future research.

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If you've had any formal phonological theory, this should be sounding a lot like optimality theory ot. I had encountered ot early in high school it was actually my first brush with actual theoretical linguistics , and i was really enthusiastic about it. But ot was only really introduced around 1993 ndash 10 years after gttm was published! lerdahl and jackendoff seemed, to me, to be so clearly building up an ot account of musical phenomena, but they just didn't have the right tools, yet! when i realized this, i realized that there was an opportunity for me to do something new and interesting ndash and so, my music amp linguistics ee was born.

What i handed in was basically a translation of the metrical structure chapter of gttm into ot language. Here's the problem with this: my ee did not wind up qualifying as a music extended essay! this is the downside of being an extremely self motivated high schooler: i went ahead and wrote almost my entire ee without once talking it through with my advisor the music teacher thanks, david williamson. As the deadline neared, my advisor did eventually drag me in for a meeting and look over the monstrosity i was writing, whereupon he noticed that it a didn't analyze any one piece of music in depth, and b didn't have a music historical component, two essential aspects of a music ee. I made a last ditch attempt to incorporate analyses of particular pieces, but the problem was that the kind of analysis my essay lent itself to is not the kind the ib music program wants: the only tools my paper had at its disposal were basically tools for analyzing the rhythmic structure of single line melodies, but the ib wanted a deeper look at the structural, harmonic, and emotional content of a significant piece. That's about all that can be said for it ndash i got no points beyond those award for completion. Do i regret doing a linguistics ee? no, not really: i learned a lot in the process, and having a significant piece of linguistics related writing i think served me well in the college application process. My overall grades were good enough that i could afford the hit in points i took on my ee, and, well, here's the thing about high school grades: as soon as you're into college, they don't matter a whit.

If you're an ib protolinguist looking to do an ee in linguistics, here would be my recommendations: find the right advisor. Try to find an advisor who is sympathetic to your interests in linguistics, and talk to them early and often about how to make your essay work. I recognize this won't be possible for many people, but seriously: if you're lucky enough to have a sympathetic teacher, don't waste that opportunity like i did! pick the right subject. Of the core ib subjects, i think your best bets are a1 language for a topic on pragmatics, phonology e.g.

Of the rarer courses, your best bets are probably psychology for experimental work and computer science for computational ling. Before you even start to brainstorm, make sure you know what a normal, non linguistics ee would be in that subject. Either way, you're going to turn out fine: you've still got many, many years of linguisticking ahead of you.

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My research question is how do japanese students remain flexible with their native tongue in various listening conditions, but become inflexible when listening to non native languages. My rq has been approved by my supervisor, but as i went online to look for example ees, all the english essays i could find were about literature. It's my school's first year to do the ib, so i try to do my own research for all the assignments and not rely on the teachers too much. I have done my preliminary research and it seemed like my rq was okay and i was confident with it, but i am starting to doubt that it isn't relevant to english a lang/lit. I would like to know if my rq is okay and if it's worth pursuing or not as i would like to change my rq to a literature related topic like a comparison of an english novel and a translated work bell jar by sylvia plath and no longer human by osamu dazai asap. Thank you! edited by akiko hasassah, feb 20, 2016 0.

like this unlike linguistics ee will be accepted by the ib.

I know that in group 3 you can study languages and i am focusing it on spanish since i am doing my ee in spanish. I want to do it as an experiment so i will be using tables and graphs at the very end so that i can prove my point with statistics. Does the ib accept tables and graphs in group 1? my mother tongue is greek and spanish, so no problem there. Can anyone show me a sample of a linguistics ee so that i can use that structure for my own. You can: write a full report just with linguistic symbols and the examiner would have to know how to interpret those symbols or i could explain their meaning as a guide in a separate chapter. For example instead of writing: philosophy derives from philos and sophia you would write philosophy gt philos+sophia you can write it with sentences which is longer and you would have to analyse less words and there would be no need for linguistic symbols.

What did you write yours on? do you have any tips or recommendations? rdquo oh man, it rsquo s been a while. I wrote my ib extended essay on the problem of translation, comparing four different english translations of a particular latin passage in st. It was more along the lines of philology/philosophy of language than linguistics, but i rsquo d been studying latin so at least i got to use that, and i didn rsquo t know as much about linguistics at the time, plus it was the closest topic that any of my teachers could advise me on. My advisor was an english teacher who also had a background in classics/theology. My advisor and i had several discussions about whether we should register it in english or philosophy: i rsquo m pretty sure we ended up going with english, but it probably should have been philosophy in the end.