Using constructed languages to introduce and teach linguistics

Appendix 1: Conlang criteria and resources

The criteria and resources provided to the students are as follows:

Your poster must include the following:

1. Names of the authors

2. Statement of author contribution: For each member of the group you should state what they helped with. This could be something like “Abe helped with the phonology of the language; Bob helped with creating the syntax; …” All members should have contributed to the linguistic aspects of language creation to some degree.

Linguistically, your conlang must satisfy the following criteria:

1. General criteria (Hockett design features)

   1. Have duality of patterning

   2. Have arbitrariness

   3. Have discreteness

   4. Have semanticity

2. Phonetic criteria

   1. Create a chart or list sounds/forms (consonants and vowels) of the language

   2. Which places and manners of articulation does your consonant inventory use?

   3. Are consonant pairs asymmetrical in voicing? (only voiced or voiceless)

   4. Phonological criteria

   5. Follow the sonority hierarchy or develop such a hierarchy for syllables

   6. Have at least one phonological rule and its environment

   7. Have at least one example of allophonic variation

   8. Have at least one phonotactic constraint

   9. Have a list of allowed syllable structures

   10. Have at least one meaningful suprasegmental feature

   11. For example, is the language tonal? Does it distinguish consonant and/or vowel length?

3. Morphological criteria

   1. Decide whether the language is agglutinative, polysynthetic, fusional, isolating, …

   2. Have at least three inflectional and derivational morphemes (if not isolating)

   3. Do nouns inflect for plural and/or possession?

   4. Do verbs inflect for tense? (see agreement in syntactic criteria)

   5. Decide on the order of morphemes, if there is more than one attached to the root

4. Syntactic criteria

   1. Have at least one intransitive, one transitive, and one ditransitive sentence

   2. Distinguish arguments of the verbs

   3. Free/fixed word order? Case marking? Agreement (number, person, gender, etc.)?

   4. Have the context-free phrase-structure grammar of the language

   5. Have an example tree of one sentence

5. Semantic and pragmatic criteria

   1. Differentiating the speech acts of questions, statements, and commands

   2. Have at least one proper name

   3. Have at least one common noun

   4. Have at least one utterance with truth conditions

   5. Have the ability to communicate tense: past, present, future

   6. Have the ability to talk about a definite or indefinite entity

6. Sociolinguistic criteria

   1. Name and describe at least two dialects/varieties of the language and explain at least two linguistic features which distinguish them from each other. When/where are these varieties used? Who speaks them in which contexts?

   2. Explain how at least two demographic/identity factors (gender, region, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, age, etc.) are tied to variation in linguistic performance (phonological, morphosyntactic, lexical variables)

7. Minimum sentences to translate

   1. ‘The sun is rising.’

   2. ‘Eat the bread!’

   3. ‘Give her the ball!’

   4. ‘She threw the stick at me.’

   5. ‘The dogs slept.’

   6. ‘I will drink some water.’

   7. ‘Is he swimming?’

   8. ‘Get up!’

   9. ‘The dog barked at me.’

   10. ‘The dog bit the man.’

   11. ‘The man bit the dog.’

   12. ‘The boy was given a gift.’

   13. ‘He made me eat the cake.’

   14. ‘Please help me with the bags.’

   15. ‘Where is she going?’

   16. ‘She threw the ball to me in the park.’

External resources:

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/

2. https://www.zompist.com/kit.html

3. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-917-conlangs-how-to-construct-a-language-fall-2018/lecture-notes/

4. https://sites.google.com/view/conlangs-university/

5. Peterson Google Talk “Create a language in 1 h”: https://youtu.be/StcSHmBZj2k

6. https://fiatlingua.org/

7. https://sites.google.com/view/thepit/home

Appendix 2: Conlang poster rubric

The rubric used to grade each poster presentation given to the students is as follows: