Finding a supervisor
Find a member of academic staff to supervise your project.
General process
Once you've browsed the web pages of academic staff in language and linguistics to find out more about what they work on, you can contact the faculty members whose work interests you most via email. Be explicit about whether you have a general area, a specific question, or both a specific question and a dataset (more on this below). You can contact more than one staff member if a few of them seem interesting.
Note that not every staff member is available for supervision in a given semester. The ultimate decision about who will supervise your project is a complicated one; it is obviously guided by issues like your interest and the staff members' expertise, but also other factors. Staff members might have an exceptionally busy year and not be able to take on many students, have lots of students interested in working with them at once, or be on research leave. There is no formal rule about how supervisions are allocated, but in general, earlier contact with a supervisor means you are more likely to be paired with them. Supervisory pairings will ultimately come down to the module leader in your independent project module (either SEL3329 for the dissertation, or SEL3326/27 for extended study).
Make sure to look at the faculty members' work before you make contact. This isn't very hard for you to do and it saves a lot of faculty time. If you have a general interest that isn't covered by someone in language and linguistics, either in LEAD, Language Variation and Change, or Theoretical Linguistics, you will need to be flexible. It may be that you are going to need to accept some direction in terms of looking at an adjacent area that dovetails more reasonably with the work going on at Newcastle (for more on this, see Issues and Limitations).
First Contact
It isn't your supervisor's job to come up with a specific question and approach that satisfies your interests.
If you can't articulate your specific question and approach from your general interest, your supervisor will help you to generate a question in the first few weeks of your project. However, in this case, it is more likely to be directed by their interests. This isn't ideal because you will spend valuable time you could use doing work for the project trying to figure out what it should be. This is part of why you should find a supervisor whose stated interests catch your eye and contact them early on - you'll be able to collaborate to find someone more quickly.
Your first email contact with an academic staff member might take place in early September if your project is set to begin in semester 1, and early December if it is set to begin in semester 2. This contact is just to gauge whether a supervisor thinks your interests are viable for an independent project, and should look something like this:
This will give the staff member enough information that if there is a better faculty member for you to approach, they can redirect you immediately rather than having an unproductive meeting. After your first meeting (or even just brief discussion via email) you should come away with a specific Research Question: Evidence Source provisional title for your dissertation (if you haven't come to the meeting with this already). Don't worry very much about whether this title is the one you'll end up with - you can always change it later, but it provides an important starting point.
If you're doing a dissertation, the Research Question: Evidence Source title format should form the core of the "brief description" you are required to hand in for SEL3329 at the end of Week 3 in Semester 1
Getting Started
A research question or approach may shift a bit over time, but you need one to get started. From this point, there is still a lot to do before you really get started, and nothing is set in stone (your topic might shift). Your question will guide your background research and the dataset/methodological approach you use.
For any topic, you need to start by finding out what has already been done. You develop your research question before tackling this in detail so that it is less overwhelming. For example, if you enter "How does language interact with perception" into Google Scholar, there are over 2.7 million results. In contrast, if you enter a specific research question like "colour perception and the evolution of linguistic colour terms" there are just over 200k. This is a lot more manageable (not all of the results are relevant in any case, but sorting through most relevant results of the latter search is much more doable).
What if you find someone has addressed almost your exact research question in almost exactly the same way you were planning to? This might feel a bit disheartening at first, but it's actually great news. This means that a) there is already interest in this topic, and b) someone might have already published detailed methods and analyses that you can work with.
Depending on the kind of data you choose to use, even after you have a good idea of how your study will be situated in the literature, there are a lot of questions you need to answer before getting started. Choose a tab to see the kinds of things you need to consider for each kind of data source.
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