What’s on the exams?

• The Midterm (if given) will cover all material presented before the midterm.

• The Final will cover everything, but with weighting towards the second half of the course.

• You should also be comfortable with the material from the book, as the book went into further depth than the lectures had time to.

  • You will not be tested on ideas presented solely in the book.

• The midterm exam will be multiple-choice (looking a great deal like what you saw on the first part of the homeworks), with a phonological data analysis problem.

• The final exam will include up to 100 multiple-choice questions, with a combination of multiple choice, true-false, and data analysis.

• Be prepared to do phonological data analysis (like you saw in homeworks and sections) on the Midterm, as well as both that and making syntactic trees on the final.

How should I study for a LIGN 101 Exam?

• Go back through and re-read the chapters, making notes of any areas which are unclear

• Go back through the slides (posted here), making use of the podcast if you don’t remember the accompanying points made.

• Look through your homeworks, and focus on the questions you got wrong, making sure you know how to get them right in case they come up again.

• Look over this study guide, and make sure you can answer all of these questions and define all of the terms. I will not cover all of them, but if you can answer these things, particularly the larger conceptual questions, you’re going to rock this exam.

• Answer the questions and define the terms aloud, teaching the information. It’s easy to look at an item and think “Oh, I know that one, I’m good.” But explaining the answer, in detail, as if you were talking to somebody else, can reveal gaps in your knowledge. Seriously, answer the question or define the term aloud to your bae/cat/plant/fellow bus passengers, and you’ll be much more prepared to do well on the test.

Introductory Topics

Questions to understand

• What is Linguistics?
• What differentiates Language from other communicative systems?
• What are the three major properties of Language discussed in class?
• What is the difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammaticality?
• What does it mean to have an arbitrary relationship between the sign and the signified?
• What is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?
• Why would somebody make the claim that Language is fractal?
• What do Linguists mean when they put a * in front of a sentence or word?

Terms to Define

• Language
• Dialect
• Sociolect
• Idiolect
• Universal Grammar
• Descriptive Grammar
• Prescriptive Grammar
• Grammaticality Judgements
• Iconic Signs
• Arbitrary Signs
• Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
• Onomatopoeia
• Productivity (as a property of Language)

Phonetics

Note: You will be given a complete, non-English IPA chart for the exam.

Questions to understand

• What is phonetics?
• What is the IPA?
• Why would we use or need the IPA?
• What is the role of the lungs during speech?
• What is the role of the tongue during speech?
• What does raising and lowering the velum do during speech?
• What makes consonants different from vowels?
• Is the English writing system similar to spoken English?
• In terms of what properties are consonants described by linguists?
• In terms of what properties are vowels described by linguists?
• What is voicing? Where does it come from?
• What is the role of the velum in speech production?
• What is the difference between a monophthong and a diphthong?
• Do the majority of African languages use click sounds?
• What is the difference between Schwa (ə) and Wedge (ʌ)? Between /ɜ˞/ and /ə˞/? (see this post for more details)
• Do people from different regions or races have genetic and anatomical differences which prevent or allow them to make certain speech sounds?

Terms to define

• Phone
• Place of articulation
  • Bilabial
  • Labiodental
  • Interdental
  • Alveolar
  • Postalveolar
  • Velar
  • Glottal
  • It may help to memorize a few sounds or words representing each place of articulation
• Manner of articulation
  • Stop/Plosive
  • Tap
  • Fricative
  • Affricate
  • Nasal
  • Approximant
  • Lateral
  • It may help to memorize a few sounds or words representing each manner of articulation
• Voicing
  • Voiced
  • Voiceless
  • It may help to memorize a few sounds or words representing both voiced and voiceless
• Vowel Properties
  • High vs. Mid vs. Low
  • Back vs. Front
  • Rounded vs. Unrounded
  • It may help to memorize a few sounds or words representing each English vowel
• Monophthong
• Diphthong
• Speech Perception

Phonology

Questions to answer

• What is phonology?
• How does phonology differ from phonetics?
• How do you determine if two sounds are in a complimentary or contrastive distibution?
• How do you determine if two sounds are two phonemes or two allophones of the same phone?
• How do you determine the environment that triggers an alternation?
• What is a minimal pair and how do you find one?
• What does a phonological rule describe?
• What kind of thing can be shared between sounds in a natural class?
• Explain the difference between a phonological rule and a phonotactic constraint

Terms to understand

• Phonology
• Phoneme
• Allophone
• Complimentary Distribution
• Contrastive Distribution
• Phonological rule
• Natural Class
• Minimal Pair
• Insertion/Epenthesis
• Deletion
• Phonotactic Constraint
• Syllable
  • Onset
  • Coda
  • Nucleus
  • Rhyme/Rime

Morphology

Questions to answer

• What is a morpheme?
• What distinguishes a bound vs. free morpheme?
• How can you determine what part of speech a morpheme is?
• What’s the difference between derivational and inflectional morphology?
• What’s the difference between an isolating and a synthetic language? How can you tell which is which?
• What’s the difference between a content/lexical word and a function/grammatical word?

Terms to understand

• Morpheme
• Bound Morpheme
• Free Morpheme
• Affix
  • Prefix
  • Suffix
  • Infix
• Open Class
• Closed Class
• Content word
• Function word
• ‘Parts of speech’ or Lexical Categories
  • Noun
  • Verb
  • Adjective
  • Adverb
  • Preposition, Postposition
  • Pronoun
  • Conjunction
  • Determiner
• Compound word
• Blend word
• Borrowed word
• Clipped Word
• Acronym/Initialism
• Inflectional vs. Derivational Morphology
• Isolating vs. Synthetic morphology

Syntax

Note: You will be given a set of phrase structure rules on the exam. Do not spend time memorizing them.

Questions to Answer

• What is constituency and why is it important in syntax?
• How do you test for constituency?
  • Be able to use all three tests we discussed in class (Substitution, Standalone Answers, Moving items)
• Why do we represent sentences with hierarchy (e.g. trees) rather than as flat strings?
• How is recursion implemented and visible in phrase structure rules?
• Give a sentence which is a good argument for including N’ alongside NP and N in our phrase structure schema, and explain why? (hint: the little cute tiny black stray cat)
• How can we distinguish different ‘readings’ of a structurally ambiguous sentence from the tree alone (e.g. “I saw the [Queen of England’s] Hat” vs. “I saw the Queen [of England’s Hat]”)?
• Be able to match a sentence to a pre-constructed tree, using your phrase structure rules.
• Be able to identify an incorrectly diagrammed sentence using your phrase structure rules.

Terms to Define

• Grammatical Relations
• Syntactic Hierarchy
• Noun Phrase, Verb Phrase, Prepositional Phrase
• Constituency
• Constituency Testing
• Phrase Structure Rules
• Garden Path Sentence
• Recursion
• Complimentizer
• Syntactic Ambiguity

Semantics

Questions to answer

• What is semantic entailment?
  • How can it be tested?
  • How is it different from pragmatic implicature?
• What is the difference between the three types of ambiguity we discussed in class?
• What does it mean to discuss a word’s ‘sense’?
• What’s the difference between a word’s connotation and denotation?
• What’s a semantic prototype, and how does it explain, for instance, the intuition that an ostrich isn’t a particularly normal ‘bird’.
• What is the nature of an ‘argument’ in Lexical semantics?
• Give an example of metonymy
• Give an example of polysemy
• What’s the difference between homonymy and homophony? Give an example of a word pair representing each.

Terms to understand

• “True” and “False” in a syntactic sense
  • Tautology
  • Contradiction
  • Meaningless sentences
  • Non-Statements
• Entailment
• Ambiguity
  • Lexical vs. Syntactic/Structural vs. Semantic
• Connotaton vs Denotation
• Semantic Prototype
• Relations among words
  • Synonym/Antonym
  • Hyponym/Hypernym
  • Homonymy
  • Homophony
  • Metonymy
• Polysemy
  • Word sense
• Lexical Semantics
  • Arguments
  • ‘Frame’ for a verb or action

Pragmatics

Questions to answer

• What’s the difference between Semantics and Pragmatics?
• What is the cooperative principle of language?
• What’s the difference between semantic entailment and pragmatic implicature?
• What are the four Gricean maxims, and what do they do in conversation?
  • Quality, Quantity, Manner, Relevance
• What’s the difference between flouting a maxim and violating it?
• What are some situations in which we might flout a Gricean maxim?
• Give an example of a conversational implicature
• Give an example of a presupposition
• How are entailment, implicature, and presupposition different from each other?
• What’s the difference between a conventional sentence and a performative one?
• What’s the difference between a deictic word and a non-deictic word?

Terms to define

• Cooperative Principle
• Gricean maxims of…
  • Quality
  • Quantity
  • Manner
  • Relevance
• To ‘flout’ a maxim
• To violate a maxim
• Presupposition
• Speech act (or performative sentence)
• Conversational Implicature
  • “Drawing” an implicature
• Deixis

Language Families and Relationships

Questions to answer

• How do we know that two languages are related to one another?
• Are all languages related to another language?
• How can we reconstruct earlier versions of a language?

Terms to define

• Mutual Intelligibility
• Dialect Continuum
• Language family
• Linguistic Isolate
• Language Reconstruction
• Indo-European
• Cognates