classlang

Sorry to take so long in replying to inquiries about the conlang my
students and I are creating in our Language and the Mind class.  I
was for some reason unable to send messages from my account at home,
but I think that problem has been fixed, so I'm re-forwarding the
messages that bounced.  More on the class conlang coming up...

Matt.


>Patrick Dunn wrote:
>
>>I"m curious.  Is the rest of the language going to procede randomly, or
>>are you going to give some free reign to creativity?
>
>Random wheel spins will be used to determine the grammatical features
>of the language - e.g. basic word order, syllable structure, what kinds
>of features will be marked by morphemes and whether those morphemes
>will be prefixes or suffixes, what kind of pronoun system the language
>will have, what kinds of regular phonological rules it will have,
>etc. etc..  Students will have a chance to exercise their creativity
>in the arena of vocabulary construction.  (I'm really curious to see
>what kinds of words they come up with...)
>
>Also, at the end of the course, students will be required to write
>a term paper, and one of the topics they can choose to work on is
>expanding on some aspect of the conlang or conculture in more detail.
>For example, when this course was taught in a previous year, one
>student chose to compose a series of magazine advertisements in the
>conlang (which involved developing a series of slogans).  Another
>student wrote a poem in the conlang and did a mock-scholarly analysis
>of it.  I'm hoping the students can exercise their imaginations once
>the basic parameters of the language have been established.
>
>Matt.
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Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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