Sociolinguistics

1. "g-dropping"

b) Why is "g-dropping" actually a misnomer?

Historical Linguistics

2. 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?

	white	weiss		pan	Pfanne		ten	zehn
	hope	hoffen		help	helfen		grunt	grunzen
	warp	werfen		ape	Affe		heart	Herz
	path	Pfad		to	zu		tongue	Zunge
	hate	hassen		pepper	Pfeffer		open	offen
	vat	Fass		smelt	schmelzen		cramp	Krampf

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 Evolution

3. 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 Acquisition

4. 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 [twk] for truck we could say something like "replace all liquids (l,r) with the glide [w]". Come up with rules to describe the replacements and deletions of sounds in the following examples. That is, for each word, state the changes that are made to convert an adult pronunciation into this child's form; then summarize the general changes based on all the words. Remember that phonological rules usually don't refer to specific sounds like [p], but to natural classes like "voiceless stops". Thus the general rules you give at the end should also be stated in terms of natural classes rather than specific sounds wherever possible.

	a.	Smith	[mIt]
	b.	skin	[kIn]
	c.	play	[pe]
	d.	zoo	[du]
	e.	John	[dan]
	f.	bath	[bæt]
	g.	tent	[tt]
	h.	teddy	[tdi]
	i.	crush	[kt]
	j.	bump	[bp]

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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Lecture 7
Lecture 8
Lecture 9