LING 001: Intro to
Linguistics
Midterm.
This is an open book, open notes, take-home exam. You may consult any of the course materials (and other outside materials if you wish, though they will probably not be as much help) in figuring out the answers to the questions. However, you may NOT discuss the exam with ANYONE, whether they are taking the class or not. If you have any questions, direct them to me, either in my office hours, or by e-mail. I will not answer questions that are too specific and would give you an unfair advantage in taking the exam, but will be happy to give clarification on what is meant by a question. If you are at all uncertain about what sort of answer I am looking for, think you've found an error or typo, please ask me about it.
Exams should be typed (exceptions: you may write in phonological transcriptions by hand, if IPA symbols are a problem; you may draw syntactic trees by hand, if drawing is a problem) and are due at the beginning of class on Tuesday, June 15th. If you do not turn in your exam at this time, you will lose 10% for each day it is late. If for some reason you must miss class, you can leave the exam in my mailbox in the linguistics department, 619 Williams Hall, or you can submit the exam electronically. Send it to me as an e-mail attachment in .pdf format, NOT WORD FORMAT. If you don't know how to create a .pdf file using your word processor, ask me about it! It's easier than you think.
When you finish the exam, indicate somewhere at the top approximately how long it took you to complete it. This will have no effect on your grade. It is just to help me gauge things for future exams.
Again, if you have any questions or are uncertain about any of this, talk to me or e-mail me. Good luck!
Prescriptive vs Descriptive
Grammar
1. Consider the following list of rules for
American English. For each, provide an example that violates the rule, and
indicate whether it would be part of a prescriptive grammar or a descriptive
grammar (that is, is the example just dispreferred by those who write style
manuals, or is it actually ungrammatical in the sense we've discussed in class)?
a) Do not dangle modifiers - a
participle-based modifier phrase occurring in the beginning of a sentence, like
“Walking down
b) In a double-object construction, like “I
gave Mary the book”, do not put any adverbs in between the two objects.
c) Do not use passive voice when a
corresponding active sentence exists.
d) When forming present perfect, use the
past participle form of the verb with have or has, as
appropriate.
f) In an answer to the question “Who is it?”
(e.g. It’s John), use the nominative form of the
pronouns (i.e., I, he,
she).
Language Instinct.
2. In your own words explain the role of
Universal Grammar (UG) in first language acquisition. What role does UG play in
constraining crosslinguistic variation?
3. Name two arguments that suggest that
Behaviorism falls short of providing an explanation for the human linguistic
ability
Subfield
recognition
4. Below is a series of invented titles of
papers on some linguistic subject. What subfield of linguistics is each paper
about? (Hint: there's one each of syntax, morphology, phonology, phonetics,
semantics, and pragmatics.) Don't worry about whether you would understand the
paper, just think about what subfield is (most) concerned with the terms and
concepts that are mentioned in the title.
a) The compositional meanings of Dutch
prepositional phrases.
b) On word order and problems of
constituency in VSO languages.
d) An examination of allophonic variation in
the Choctaw stop system.
e) On the relative merits of
articulation-based and perception-based descriptions of voicing and aspiration.
f) Derivation versus inflection in the
formation of Ancient Greek tense stems.
g) Teasing apart the effects of definiteness
and the old/new distinction on Finnish word order.
Phonetics
5. To articulate one
class of speech sounds, the tongue tip makes contact with:
a.
Uvula.
b.
Teeth.
c.
Larynx.
d. Epiglottis
6. Name all the features that make the following pairs of vowels
distinct:
a.
[a]
[i]
b.
[u]
[i ]
c.
[i]
[o]
d.
[ o ] [ u ]
e.
[o]
[a]
7.
State the narrowest possible natural class that the following sounds belong
to:
a.
[n], [m], [ŋ] , [j], [w], [l], [r]
b.
[i], [u], [I]
c.
[s],
[z], [š], [ž], [č], [ĵ]
d.
[ε], [e], [ə] [Ù]
e.
[u]
Phonology
8.
Consider the following pairs of words (horizontally) [fI t]
[fIn]
[fæ t]
[k æ t]
Explain using the syllable structure diagram
why native speakers perceive the first pair as not rhyming and the second as
rhyming.
9. Transcribe and syllabify the following
words
Fragmentation
Phenomenology
10. Why
does the word bottle have two syllables? Why does bolt have just
one? Use diagrams as necessary.
11.
Consider the following data from a made-up
language X.
[sig] – leaf
[kef] – lamp
[makasg] – he
hates
[sin]
– large
[panog] – song
[naska] – apple
[fafna] – flute
[kaska] – house
[sotang] – she loves
a. Describe the
environments in which the sounds [g], [k] and [n] occur. (for each sound, list the environments, e.g. “before a
stressed vowel, after an obstruent, and at the beginning of a
word”
b. Can the change from
[k] to [g] induce a meaning difference? What about change from [k] to
[n]?
c.
What do we call the
distribution of [k] and [g]? Are they different phonemes or allophones of the
same phoneme? If they are allophones of the same phoneme,
which is the phoneme /k/ or /g/?
d. What do distribuion
of [k] and [n]? Are they allophones
of different phonemes or allophones of the same phoneme? If
they are allophones of the same phoneme, which is the phoneme /k/ or
/n/?
Morphology
12. In
the following short passage, find two examples of each of the following
categories of morpheme.
a. bound function morpheme
b. bound content morpheme
c. free content
morpheme
d. free function morpheme
The
management of hearer's (reader's) attention is an integral part
of
cooperative communication in any
language. Discourse is thus
structured in
a way that
allows the hearer to focus his attention on various entities evoked in the
discourse (topic-structure), and to ensure that information about them is
entered into his knowledge-store in a coherent way (information
packaging)..
13.
Consider the following words: “unbelievable” “undoable”.
Using tree structures explain why one of them is ambiguous and the other is not.
State which one is ambiguous
14. The
compound Argentine tango dancer is ambiguous. Identify one of the
interpretations (by paraphrasing its meaning) and draw the corresponding
constituent structure (using parentheses or trees).
15.
antidisestablishmentarianism
The word given in the heading above has
frequently been reported as the longest word in the English language. (If you've
read your Pinker, you know that this is a meaningless claim.) It means something
like "an ideology which is against the view that certain institutions should
have their authority removed". Split this word up into the morphemes it is made
out of, and give a step-by-step description of how these morphemes are put
together, noting the part of speech of each intermediate word.
The order in which you put the pieces
together should reflect the meaning of the word. Recall, for example, that
unlockable has two meanings, "able to be unlocked", if we first combine
lock with un- but "not lockable" if we first combine lock
with -able.
Syntax
16. State the rule for
forming a yes/no question from a sentence that has an auxiliary (a form of be, can, will, etc.) in the main
clause.
That is, what is the
rule for going from “This dog is
named Rex” to “Is this dog named
Rex?”, and
from “The girl who is wearing the red dress can dance” to “Can the girl who is
wearing the red dress dance?”
Please
use syntactic
notions like “constituent” or “movement”.
17. Which of the
following sentences does not help to test the constituency of eat the
apples in the sentence John could eat
the apples?
a.
What could John do?
Eat the apples!
b. John could eat
them
c. John could do
it
d. Eat the apples John
certainly could!
18.
X-language phrase structure
A made-up language differs from English in
the usual order of its words in the sentence. Thus while English is generally
SVO, X is generally VOS. Consider the following "X-language" sentences. (The
sentences have X-language syntax, but they use English words so that they are
easier to understand. Beside each is a translation with normal English syntax.)
a) Ate pizza John = "John ate pizza"
b)
Biked to school Mary. = "Mary biked to school."
c)
Danced yesterday that man. = "That man danced yesterday."
d) Read that book
often Peter. = "Peter often read that book."
Draw the syntactic tree for each of
the "X-language" sentences (that is, the sentences on the left, with X-language
word order). Then, write a set of phrase structure rules that can derive
all of these "X-language" sentences. Try to do so with the smallest number of
rules possible, and do not give me a separate list of rules for each sentence.
Rather, give me one set of rules to apply to all four sentences. For example,
you only have to write the rule S --> NP VP one time, even though it is
needed for every sentence (remember, you are trying to come up with a single
grammar that can derive all four sentences, not a separate grammar for each
sentence). Make sure that you give me both trees and rules, and
make sure that your rules derive the X-language word orders, not
the English ones. Treat yesterday and often as adverbs, and that as a determiner.
Semantics and
Pragmatics
19. Speaker
meaning
Consider the following made-up exchange
between two people at a bus stop
A. Do you
have the time?
B. Yes.
A. (pause) What’s wrong with you?!
B has answered the question, yet A perceives
that something is wrong. Discuss how this situation demonstrates the difference
between semantics and pragmatics, and explain what are A’s expectation from the
exchange and how does A arrive to the conclusion that something is wrong with B.
Please refer to A’s use of his implicit knowledge of Gricean Conversational
Maxims.
20.
Match up each sentence with the term that best describes the phenomenon
illustrated by the sentence.
All
cats are mammals.
She
likes dogs and other
pets.
Sophia
is parked on
I met
her a grief ago.
The
I
scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!
John
is the most creative creature in creation.
Since
Mary was following John, naturally, he preceded her.
a. compatible
terms
b. metonymy
c. converse
terms
d. derivational
morphology
e. metaphor
f. gradable
opposition
h. homophony
i. hyponymy
j.
implicature
21. Consider the following sentences. Does A entail B? As a test, think about the truth conditions for the sentences: A entail B only if every situation in which A is true also makes B true. If not, give an example where A is true and B is false.
(a) A: John is a dog.
B: John is a
spaniel.
(b) A: Homer has 3
children
B: Homer has 2
children
(c) A:
You get five dollars if you clean my garage
B:
If you don’t clean my garage, you will not get 5 dollars
(d) A: You get 5 dollars if you clean my
garage
B: If you didn’t
get 5 dollars, you hadn’t cleaned my garage
(e) A: I took my suit to the
cleaners.
B: My suit was
dirty.
22. Using Centering Theory, explain why
speakers prefer to interpret the pronoun in the last sentence as “Susan” rather
than “Mary” in the following discourse. Please reason using the notions of
Susan loves John. She talks about it with every girl in her class, especially with Mary. John writes her letters.
THE
END.