Investigate the phenomenon of politeness (as it is understood in linguistics) in real-time, face-to-face conversations. You are free to choose the size and composition of the groups (in terms of social variables like gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, etc.).
Question 1.
Imagine that you’ll conduct the following research project. Write a research design in the table below. (This is a HYPOTHETICAL project, i.e. you are NOT going to actually carry out the project, just write about it AS IF you were going to carry it out.)
Research question and approach: Use Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine possible hidden ideologies around the topic of immigration in selected newspapers (these can be English-language newspapers or newspapers in other languages as well).
Method: You will use a corpus-linguistic approach to conduct your research. You are going to build a mini-corpus of online newspaper texts in order to answer your research questions. How do(es) the specific question(s) determine your choice of newspapers to sample? How about the specific texts in the newspapers? What other variables will you need to consider when trying to balance your corpus?
Can you imagine a different research question using the same (or similar) material and how would that question affect your choices? For example, say you wanted to examine some specific grammatical constructions or vocabulary choices – how would you choose your material with the aim of researching such questions?
Question 2.
Investigate the phenomenon of politeness (as it is understood in linguistics) in real-time, face-to-face conversations. You are free to choose the size and composition of the groups (in terms of social variables like gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, etc.). Decide what your specific aims will be, then fill in the table below:
| Aims |
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| Research questions |
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| Hypothesis
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| Theoretical tools/analysis
(what kinds of labels, conceptual units, etc. you will use to analyze the data)
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| Method (describe the details of your research method. For example, how will you collect your data?) |
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| Participants (describe the profiles of your participants, and how many people you need) |
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Question 3.
Answer the following questions regarding the research projects sketched out in Questions 1 and 2 above.
What exactly are you testing in each project? What kinds of evidence will show that you have found an effect and how would you present that evidence? If you were to actually carry out these studies, how would you insure (to the degree it is possible) reliability and validity? Discuss the studies above (and their variants when necessary) using the following terms empirical/theoretical; case study; observation study; dependent/independent variable; and qualitiative analysis/quantitative analysis.
