Independent Studies
Reasoning. The goal of the MA-Linguistics is to offer a qualification for research in linguistics. An important skill in research is the ability to acquire and apply theories and methods independently, without the close supervision of a teacher. Already during your MA thesis, you may need tools that were not been introduced in courses. In a PhD position, you will be expected to acquire methods used in a research paradigm - possibly without access to a specialized instructor. In a job interview for a research project, you may be asked if you can design and organize a project, if you enjoy collaborating with a team or if you have experience in organizing a workshop.
This is the role of the Independent Studies Component: it offers you the opportunity to add relevant skills to your profile by seeking advice from experienced experts but taking responsibility for your project and its content.
Size. The Independent Studies component is available in all profile-building modules for students who have chosen MA-Linguistics as mono-master (78C): M.Ling.211/221, M.Ling.311/321, M.Ling.411/421, M.Ling.511/521. In each module, the Independent Studies component comprises 3C, which corresponds to a workload of 90 hours.
Topics. The contents and the deliverables of the activity must be agreed with the lecturers offering the relevant courses to which the Independent Study Component is attached. They may be tightly related to the contents of the course (e.g., training in tools that are relevant for the course contents) or broadly related to the goals of the module and relevant for your individual interests. The following examples offer ideas based on our experience in various modules.
Tools for Linguists
There are various tools for linguists, e.g., used in corpus creation, building experiments, analyzing dialects, or also in the transcription/annotation/processing of spoken data. They are probably mentioned in courses, but they are normally not part of the linguistic curricula. Since new tools arrange all over the time and the available tools change permanently, the crucial skill is the ability to learn a tool by your own means – either by reading the documentation or by visiting a quick online tutorial.
You can use the Independent Studies to get a training in ELAN, which is used in corpus creation with multimodal data (Sign and Spoken languages), or create a small database of an endangered language in FLEx for semi-automatic morphological transcriptions, or visit a tutorial a PRAAT which is the basic tool for phonetic transcriptions. Some fancy options may be exciting: AI-powered tools for automatic transcription of spoken data.
Videos on linguistic Tools (by students)Programming skills
Programming skills can be very useful for getting a position in a research project and will open you many possibilities to manage and process linguistic data. Programming languages are widely used in different empirical disciplines, from dialectometry and phylogenetic research to phycholinguistics and experimental linguistics in general.
The Independent Studies component may be a good opportunity to visit an online tutorial on R (for statistics and data processing in general) or Python (for natural language processing).
Typological questionnaires
Questionnaires are often used in cross-linguistic studies: the core challenge in the design of a questionnaire is to find the minimal set of maximally relevant questions for understanding linguistic diversity in a certain phenomenon.
Various courses can be well accompanied with a questionnaire study in which each participant collects a pre-determined dataset in a language that she speaks or studies. This can be a questionnaire designed for the purposes of the course or a questionnaire provided by a research project. This is a very good exercise to practice the standards for the representation of linguistic data in publications (see Leipzig Glossing Rules) and it may be a good opportunity for networking with project teams.
Visit a repository of QuestionnairesReading Groups
Science is a social activity. A basic part of the scientific activities is communication: in scientific events, in fora, in linguistic journals. Many important scientific achievements were only made possible through the collaboration of people with different expertise.
Within Independent Studies you can create a group that shares an interest about a field of linguistics and work together for a common goal: to understand a Theory, e.g., Harmonic Grammars, or to learn more about a field of linguistics, e.g., Pidgin and Creole Languages, or discuss various readings about a method (e.g., Reconstruction of Proto-Languages). This can be a good way to build a background for issues that will be relevant for your MA thesis in a pleasant atmosphere.
Student Workshops
really cool to organize a student workshop with your own initiatives! You can create a group of people sharing a common interest, ask a PhD student to prepare a keynote speech and a professor to be there for comments!
You can visit LinG Conversations for ideas and create an interesting intellectual event within this framework.
Visit LinG ConversationsInternships
The modules that contain an Independent Studies component offer also the possibility of an Internship as an alternative. The duration of these internships is defined by the 3C, i.e., 90h in total.
We do not maintain a database for internship options, but any time that we hear of related possibilities we send an announcement through the list of the MA Linguistics. If you are interested for an internship you can look at the research projects of the groups at LinG or you can also look for interesting possibilities in research institutes or other organizations outside the University of Göttingen.