I need to write a paper on the how major oil companies, specifically Chevron and ExxonMobil, utilize language and media to shape public perceptions of their environmental policies.
What semantic strategies and pragmatic devices do Chevron and ExxonMobil employ in their public communications to frame their involvement in climate change initiatives
Here are the guidelines:
Overview: Your term paper should use a data set (whether from English or some other language) to address a specific question that linguists have asked (or could ask), or use one or more of the analytic tools described in class to describe general properties of a particular data set. Good data sources (that have been used previously for term papers in this class) include:
Data retrieved from a corpus/database (e.g., Framenet, COCA, Sketch Engine, multi-lingual corpora with aligned translations)
Presidential debate and TV news interview transcripts
Social media postings from a certain period
Advertisements from a set of magazines targeting some demographic
Spanish- and English-language versions of a particular young adult novel
A week’s worth of news stories describing a particular event in 2-3 distinct news organs
Data from a published linguistics paper
Fieldwork data that you or someone else has collected
Data that you have introspected based on your intuitions about usage as a native or fluent speaker (e.g., examples of a particular metaphorical mapping in a language)
Examples of analytic tools include: Lakoff’s theory of metaphorical mapping, Croft and Cruse’s theory of ambiguity and sub-sense units, Bickel’s selection-based model of aspect, Grice’s theory of conversational inference, Goldberg’s theory of argument structure, Lambrecht’s theory of information structure, Lakoff’s theory of metaphorical mapping, Grice’s theory of conversational inference, Michaelis’s theory of the interaction of grammatical and lexical aspect.
Format and length: The paper must be no more than 4500 words long, inclusive of linguistic data, footnotes and tables. This count does not include your references (bibliography). Figures, figure captions, and any appendices do not count toward the word total. It should be in (a readable) 12- font. The paper should contain consecutively numbered subsections, starting with the introductory section, Section 1. Number all linguistic examples and refer to them by number in the body of the text. All non-English examples should contain an English translation immediately below, with narrow glosses (as well as broad glosses) provided for examples with complex morphology.
Adhering to the length limit: The length limit is a strict limit. Place your total word count right under the title of your paper. This count includes bibliography entries and footnotes, if any, and excludes any figures and appendices (e.g., a survey form that you used to collect data about semantic judgments).
The introduction: Your introduction is your contract with the reader. That’s why the introduction is an exceedingly important section of your paper. The introduction should clearly state the question you are addressing, why the question is important and the method you’re going to use to explore the question. The introduction should cite something that other thinkers have said that relates to the question. It should (and must) be brief and clear. Be sure it provides a clear example illustrating the linguistic phenomenon you’re going to discuss. At the end of the introduction section (which should be numbered 1), lay out the ‘road map’ for the paper, telling briefly what you will do in each section of the paper. The conventional formula is The remainder of this paper will be structured as follows.
See the sample term paper under Course Information on the course site for an example of a brief introduction containing a ‘road map’.
Citing prior works: Your paper should contain at least four bibliographic citations, which should be listed in a separate References section, using the bibliographic style of a published work in linguistics. Remember that any inline citation must refer to a bibliographic citation in the References section.
I recommend using the citation/bibliography style of the journal Language, found in sections 11-12 of this style sheetLinks to an external site..
Use footnotes or endnotes only for additional information, not for bibliographic references. Bibliographic citations should be given for all direct quotes and concepts that you use from another author. Citations should be given by last name and date in the body of the paper, as in the following example:
This appears to be a case in which “the discourse-functional properties of a complex structure are determined by the functional and semantic properties of its component parts” (Birner, Kaplan and Ward 2007: 319, fn. 1).
Structure: You term paper should contain an introductory section in which you describe the linguistic question you intend to address, explain briefly what data and conceptual tools you will use to address this problem, say briefly what your findings are, and explain what you will do in the body of the paper (by section). The paper should contain a brief concluding section, a references section (as described in citing prior works above) and an appendix describing the linguistic data that you’ve considered if that’s appropriate.
Under final revised proposal you can get a better idea of the angle I wish to take and an outline that you may use as you wish. I have included some research papers to use as well as info for when discussing previous research in the paper
