7. Referencing, Collaboration and Plagiarism
The University defines plagiarism as follows –
Plagiarism is the action or practice of taking and using as one’s own the thoughts or writings of another, without acknowledgment. The following practices constitute acts of plagiarism and are a major infringement of the University’s academic values:
• Where paragraphs, sentences, a single sentence or significant parts of a sentence are copied directly, and are not enclosed in quotation marks and appropriately footnoted.
• Where direct quotations are not used, but are paraphrased or summarised, and the source of the material is not acknowledged either by footnoting or other simple reference within the text of the paper; and
• Where an idea which appears elsewhere in printed, electronic, or audio-visual material is used or developed without reference being made to the author or the source of that material.
With regards to this course, you may wish to refer to other printed works in answering a question. Feel free to do so, but be sure to reference the original work appropriately. The standard referencing procedure in linguistics is the ‘Harvard’ method, where the author’s last name and year of publication (and page numbers where appropriate) are given in parentheses with either a direct quote or a paraphrase:
"Optimality Theory… is able to solve puzzles which have proven recalcitrant to analysis in terms of rule-ordering" (Pensalfini 1998: 175)
The apparent onsetlessness of Arrernte syllables arises from a constraint on morpheme structure and not from a violation of the CV universal (Pensalfini 1998).
The full reference to all works so cited is then given at the end of the assignment:
Laughren, M. 2000. Australian Aboriginal Languages: their contemporary status and functions. In Barry J. Blake and R.M.W. Dixon (eds). The Handbook of Australian Languages, volume 5:1-32. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Pensalfini, Rob. 1998. ‘The Development of (Apparently) Onsetless Syllabification: a constraint-based approach.’ Proceedings from the Panels of the Chicago Linguistic Society’s 34th Meeting, 167-177.
Collaboration between students in this course on weekly assignments is acceptable, and ‘jam-sessions’ on the problems involving a small group of students can be beneficial. In these sessions you will be able to practise articulating and evaluating competing analyses of the data, a valuable linguistic skill. While this kind of collaborative discussion is permitted, even encouraged, you are required to write up the answers to the assignments individually, and not to copy one another’s wording. That is, feel free to work together on solutions, but then go away and write up the solutions on your own, and in your own words. Failure to do so will constitute plagiarism.
You should always indicate on your assignment if your solution is based on collaborative work, and who your collaborators were.
Work proven to be plagiarised will be awarded a mark of ZERO.