ULAB Undergraduate Essay Competition 2024
The information on this page will be finalised soon. Keep an eye out!
We are inviting undergraduate students to write us an essay in response to one of the four questions below. Essays should be a maximum of 2500 words long, and we recommend that you write at least 2000 words. You can reference a style of your choice. For each of the questions, we have also provided some reading suggestions to get you started, but you can use whatever sources you like.
There are 2 categories in which to submit:
We are inviting undergraduate students to write us an essay in response to one of the four questions below. Essays should be a maximum of 2500 words long, and we recommend that you write at least 2000 words. You can reference a style of your choice. For each of the questions, we have also provided some reading suggestions to get you started, but you can use whatever sources you like.
There are 2 categories in which to submit:
- Category 1: 1st and 2nd year undergraduates
- Category 2: 3rd (and 4th) year undergraduates
The questions are the same for both categories but they will be marked at different levels according to the applicants’ current year of study. Please indicate which category you belong to as well as providing us with your year of enrolment in university when you submit your essay.
Essays will be marked in accordance with criteria established internally to ULAB, but the best submissions will take a novel approach to a question, will think creatively to pose original challenges to existing literature, and, most importantly, will be exciting to read! We look forward to reading your entries - good luck!
Email us or message us on our Social Media/discord server if you have any questions!
Submission
The method of submission is TBC. The deadline is midday on the 1st December 2024. Submitted essays should be fully anonymised — please ensure that neither your name nor any other personal information is visible in the document.
Eligibility
All current undergraduate students, as well as students who graduated from an undergraduate degree in the calendar year 2024, across all disciplines and countries are welcome to submit! Students who graduated before this time are not able to submit. There is a ULAB sub-committee for administration of the essay competition, and all members of other ULAB committees not involved in this are able to submit, without having any advantage.
Prize
For each category there will be a winner and a runner-up.
Winners will receive tickets to the 2025 ULAB conference, and their essays will be published in an issue of U-Lingua. Winners and runners up will receive a cash-prize, TBC soon!
Winners will receive tickets to the 2025 ULAB conference, and their essays will be published in an issue of U-Lingua. Winners and runners up will receive a cash-prize, TBC soon!
Questions
1. Critically compare and contrast the corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches to the study of language.
Description - May be updated:
What are the key differences in their underlying assumptions, research methodologies, and contributions to linguistic theory and description? Discuss the relative strengths and weaknesses of each approach, providing specific examples to illustrate their advantages and limitations.
This question invites you to evaluate the corpus-based and corpus-driven methodologies, sometimes known as ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ approaches, respectively. You need to explain the theoretical underpinnings to both and discuss how they are put into practice in real academic papers, and how successfully the authors apply these methods. You can choose these papers yourself and you may keep the area of study broad or you might focus on a specific sub-field that interests you.
Reading Suggestions - May be updated:
- Biber, D. (2015). Corpus-based and corpus-driven analyses of language variation and use. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Reppen, R. (1994). Corpus-based approaches to issues in applied linguistics. Applied linguistics, 15(2), 169-189.
- Boulton, A., & Tyne, H. (2013). Corpus linguistics and data-driven learning: a critical overview. Bulletin suisse de Linguistique appliquée, 97, 97-118.
- Lu, R., Ali, A. M., & Ghani, C. A. A. (2021). A comparative study of corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches. Linguistics International Journal, 15(2), 119-132.
- McEnery, T., & Hardie, A. (2011). Corpus linguistics: method, theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Storjohann, P. (2005). Corpus-driven vs. corpus-based approach to the study of relational patterns. In Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference 2005, Birmingham. University of Birmingham.
2. Contend with the proposition that language not only influences, but fundamentally determines, human thought and perception.
Description - May be updated:
This question invites you to investigate how the structure of language might fundamentally shape or merely influence our perceptions of time, space, semantic structures, context, and/or social roles. Critically evaluate the extent to which language & cultural context, together, influence cognition and social behaviour. You are encouraged to engage with the theory of linguistic relativity (often associated with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) and consider perspectives in support and opposition to it.
This topic is quite general, and leaves room for you to target a small area of the theme, or cover a lot of ground, purely depending on what your interests are. Some example ideas include (but are not limited to): how knowing and using more than one language influences a person's thought process and identity; how a cultural communication style, such as high- and low-context communication, impacts thought processing and interaction; or, you could focus on the differences between determinism and relativity by drawing upon specific examples.
Reading Suggestions - May be updated:
- Casasanto, D. (2016). Linguistic relativity. in Riemer, N. (ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Semantics (pp. 158-174).
- Casasanto, D. (2008). Who's afraid of the big bad whorf? Crosslinguistic differences in temporal language and thought. Language Learning 58(s1), (63-79).
- Cardon, P. W. (2008). A Critique of Hall's Contexting Model. Journal of Business and Technical Communication 22(4), (399-428).
- Evans, V. (2006). Evolution of Semantics. in Brown, K. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2nd ed.), (pp. 345-353).
- Fromkin, V.; Rodman, R.; Hyams, N. (2019). Language and thought. An Introduction to Language (21-27). New York Anchor Press & Doubleday.
- Moore, C. C.; Romney, A. K.; Hisa, T.; Rusch, C. D. (1999). The Universality of the Semantic Structure of Emotion Terms: Methods for the Study of Inter- and Intra-Cultural Variability. American Anthropologist 101(3), (529-546).
- Sharifian, F. (2013). Globalisation and developing metacultural competence in learning English as an International Language. Multilingual Education 3(7).
- Tierry, G. (2016). Neurolinguistic Relativity: How Language Flexes Human Perception and Cognition. Language Learning 66(3), (690-713).
- Boroditsky, L. (2001). Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time. Cognitive Psychology 43(1).
- Davies, I. R. L.; Corbett, G. G. (1997). A cross-cultural study of colour grouping: Evidence for weak linguistic relativity. British Journal of Psychology 88(3), (493-517).
- *Krišelj, A. (2021). Linguistic Relativity and Grammatical Number: A Comparison between Native Slovenian and English Speakers. in Wiernik, L. (ed.). Proceedings of the Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Britain Conference 2021, (157-182).
- Regier, T.; Kay, P. (2009). Language, thought, and color: Whorf was half right. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13(10), (439-46).
- Verhoef, T.; Marghetis, T.; Walker, E.; Coulson, S. (2024). Brain responses to a lab-evolved artificial language with space-time metaphors. Cognition 246(1).
3. To what extent does relying on spoken language frameworks in linguistics hinder how we study sign language and, more broadly, how we understand language as a whole?
Description - May be updated:
Argue either in favour of or against the (re)application of pre-existing frameworks centred around speech and sound (i.e., phonology, the LSA describing linguistics as the study of speech).
Reading Suggestions - May be updated:
- Henner, J., & Robinson, O. (2023). Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: A Crip Linguistics Manifesto. Journal of Critical Study of Communication and Disability, 1(1), 7–37.
- Meir, I. (2002). A cross-modality perspective on verb agreement. Natural language and linguistic theory 20(2), 413–450.
- R. Pfau, M. Steinbach, and B. Woll (Eds.), Sign Language: An International Handbook. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
4. Evaluate the following statement: "All sound change is directional because of human physiology, whereas morphosyntactic change is random".
Description - May be updated:
This question invites you to think about language change and variation, and what might cause this. You can choose to focus on sound change or morphosyntactic change, or make a comparison between the two. You can look at theoretical approaches to language change and what predictions these make about likely and unlikely changes. You might also want to consider empirical data from languages you are interested in, including how language contact impacts change in minority languages.
Reading Suggestions - May be updated:
- Maps on WALS - while these show synchronic information you can look at the ‘randomness’ of patterns in different language families
- Biberauer, T. (2017). Factors 2 and 3: a principled approach. Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics 10. 38-65.
- Bybee, J. (2002). Word frequency and context of use in the lexical diffusion of phonetically conditioned sound change. Language variation and change, 14(3), 261-290.
- Culbertson, J., Schouwstra, M., & Kirby, S. (2020). From the world to word order: Deriving biases in noun phrase order from statistical properties of the world. Language, 96(3), 696-717.
- Jacobs, H. (1995). Optimality theory and sound change. Available FTP: Rutgers Optimality Archives (ROA-129).
- Kingston, J. (2007). The phonetics-phonology interface. In P. de Lacy (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of phonology. Cambridge University Press.