ENGL 4360/5360
Graduate Project

The project for graduate students (those enrolled in ENGL 5360) will be something a bit more complex than a bibliography or even an annotated bibliography: it will be a bibliographical essay, a word study that examines a word in a variety of lights, presents well-documented findings, and offers further resources. A list of words is appended to this assignment sheet. It will be your responsibility to sign up for one of the words on the list; words will be available on a first-come, first-served basis, and you must have signed up no later than Monday, September 30. The completed project is due, as scheduled in the syllabus, on Monday, December 2.

Your assignment will be to investigate your chosen word in at least the following ways:

1. Etymology (Where did the word come from? How and when did it enter the English language? Do other languages have related words? If so, how are they related?)
2. Lexical contexts (What other English words are related to the words you are investigating? Are these words semantically related as well as lexically? How "derivationally versatile" is the word--i.e., does it lend itself to creation of other words by the addition of affixes or by other manipulation?)
3. Semantic field (What is the meaning of the word? Has it always had this meaning? If the entire semantic range of English is the semantic universe, what galaxy does this word exist in--i.e., what is its semantic context [see item 2]? What has been the word's semantic history? Has it always meant what it means today? If its meaning has changed, are these changes long past or recent? Are they apparently sudden or gradual? Again, if the word's meaning has changed, can you discover any reasons for that change? Are there any common misuses of this word? If so, what are they and how do you explain them?)
4. Resources/research (In addition to dictionaries, what studies of this word are available to someone interested in exploring this word? How did you go about identifying resources? How accessible are the resources you found? If resources are not conveniently accessible locally, how did you solve the problem of access to resources?)

You will want to document your investigation fully and in detail. Provide a complete bibliography as part of the essay's documentation. Follow MLA documentation and formatting guidelines in preparing your submission.

Select your word from the following list.

1. absolute
2. adventure
3. authority
4. conceit
5. conscience
6. fancy
7. forgive
8. harvest
9. imagination
10. invent
11. invest
12. mercurial
13. myth
14. nice
15. obligation
16. quality
17. sanction
18. sentimental
19. sorcery
20. thunder