Linguistics 001 Homework
4 Historical Linguistics, Sociolinguistics,
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Sociolinguistics1. "g-dropping"a) Discuss 3 factors which have been reported to affect how frequently a person will use the "g-dropping" pronunciation. Make sure to discuss how these factors are related to one another, e.g. are there parallels between the affects of one factor and the affects of another? b) Why is "g-dropping" actually a misnomer? Historical Linguistics2. In the lecture on language change we saw that there regular correspondances between certain initial consonants in English and German. Below is an expanded data set, again involving English [p] and [t], but this time in more than just initial position, revealing a more complicated - but still very regular - pattern of correspondence. On the basis of the data, formulate correspondence rules for these two sounds. I.e., what German sounds do they correspond to under what circumstances?
Remember that the letter z in German stands for [ts]. The digraphs ff and ss stand for the single sounds [f] and [s] respectively. Animal Communication and Language Evolution3. Give three reasons, either from Pinker or from the lecture notes, why we are generally skeptical of earlier claims that chimps and gorillas had successfully learned sign language. Language Acquisition4. In the notes from lecture 9, there is discussion of ways in
which children tend to simplify the pronunciation of certain adult sounds
at early stages of the language acquisition process. It is noted there
that children are generally quite consistent in their replacements and
substitutions at any given time, and that we can actually state
phonological rules to derive their pronunciation from the adult one. For
example, for the common child pronunciations [wUk] for look and
[tw
Based on this pattern, what is the expected pronunciation of the following words? Give your answer in phonetic transcription, and identify the changes that you predict.
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