Students who are planning to write a paper for a 680 Seminar in Linguistics or a thesis for a 690 Master's Thesis must first contact a faculty member to serve as their advisor and discuss with that faculty member the topic they intend to investigate. Once students have received preliminary approval from the faculty member to proceed, a second faculty member to serve as a second reader will be appointed by the Department. The primary faculty member will meet with the student on a regular basis and monitor the student's progress. The second reader is expected to approve the proposal, a preliminary draft, and the final document. The next step is to submit a formal proposal to the two faculty members. The formal 680/690 proposal should include the following:

1. A clear and succinct statement of objectives including the hypotheses that will be investigated.
2. A tentative table of contents.
3. A brief discussion of the topics to be covered, including methodology.
4. A summary of the literature to be reviewed and an annotated bibliography.
5. A description of any experimental design and the statistical analysis to be used, when relevant.
6. A statement of the kinds of results that are anticipated.

After receiving written approval from both faculty members, students may proceed with their projects.

The 680 paper should be a minimum of 30 pages in length. The 690 thesis should be a minimum of 60 pages. Both the 680 paper and the 690 thesis must contain an original contribution from the student. This contribution may involve a new analysis of data focusing on a particular grammatical issue, a reassessment of some linguistics controversy, a series of experiments with subjects (children or adults), and so on. The topic may involve English or some other language, synchronically or diachronically. Both the 680 paper and the 690 thesis must follow the Linguistics Department Style Sheet. (To download a .pdf version of the Style Sheet, click here.) The 690 thesis must conform to university standards (see the links relevant to the thesis format appointment for details).

A temporary grade of "P" (Progress) may be given for either LIN 680 or LIN 690.