Honors Major Thesis

To earn an Honors degree students must meet the CLA standards for Graduation with Honors. A thesis is required of all candidates for the degree summa cum laude. which must be read by three evaluators. One of the readers must be from a program other than Linguistics. The thesis should involve original research and is completed by registering for the two-semester sequence LING 3051H-3052V. These courses must be taken on an A-F grade basis. The first semester is conducted as an independent study under the supervision of a professor with expertise in the subject of the dissertation, and usually consists of background reading, data gathering and other research and should culminate in completion of an initial draft of the research. The final writing of the thesis is done in the second semester, LING 3052V, which will meet concurrently with LING 4901W. This is a seminar devoted to the writing and structure of linguistics papers, as represented by models to be examined and discussed in class. It will include peer review and commentary on successive drafts, along with discussion of the linguistic issues appropriate to the topics students are writing about in each seminar. The final thesis usually is between 30 and 50 pages, although actual length may vary according to the topic.

Honors theses are subject to the Guidelines for Major Projects which can be found in the Senior Project section. Summa theses are expected to be of particularly high quality from the point of view of both content and form/mechanics.

For further information on the Honors Thesis, and guidance in choosing a topic and an advisor for the first semester's research, contact the Honors Advisor in Linguistics, Nancy Stenson prior to registering for the course.

Sample Thesis Titles

The following are some of the Honors theses written by Linguistics graduates in recent years:

• Use of adjectives by Wernicke's aphasia patients
• Subject Pronouns in the Japanese of English Learners
• 'Then I said ... and then he said ...': An exploratory study of quotatives in Latvian interlanguage.
• Borrowed Scripts, Unique Identities: Writing Systems of the Uighirs and Japanese
• A preliminary investigation of the use of space in ASL to describe three-dimensional entities
• Keeping the Silent Silenced: the Greco-Latinate Lexicon's reification of the Hegemonic
• Elements in our College Educational System
• Tongues at War: Language and Politics in Yugoslavia
• Henrik Ibsen's Terje Vigen: translation and discussion of syntactic structures
• Ojibwe language revitalization from a language planning perspective
• Diglossia among university and upper secondary school students in greater Rabat, Morocco
• Gender differences in preschoolers' use of questions
• Portuñol: Nos nao falemos un dialeto! Turner Award Winner
• Tomadoi: Embarassment and Pragmatic Variation in American English Language death and Lakota: Revitalization of Native American Languages
• Unraveling the mysteries of schwa: an optimal prosodic approach to Saami epenthesis
• Monogenesis: a critique of theory and practice
• Phonological structures in glossolalia
• Structures of Double Complement Verb Phrases in American English
• Analysis of the anthropological, historical, and linguisic factors of language obsolescence, endangerment, and attrition in Mexico  Turner Award Nominee
• Laughing till it’s Over: Laughter as a Topic Closure Initiator
• Investigation of typicality shift of dab in White Hmong Christian discourse Turner Award Winner