Linguistics 1 Final Exam

The relationship between speech sounds and the meanings they represent, is, for the most part, arbitrary - T/F
True False

Although sounds and meanings of most words are arbitrarily related and must be learned, there are some communication systems in which the signs unambiguously reveal their meanings. These signs, where the form looks like what it represents, are called iconic. Of the signs shown below, which is/are ICONIC (a.k.a. NOT arbitrary? meaning not randomly correlated - looks like exactly what it means)

The animal uses a sort of "waggle dance" to communicate.

Primate studies have proved unambiguously that primates are able to learn and use human language -- T/F
True False

There are an infinite number of possible sentences -- T/F
True False

Three important features of human language are discreteness, creativity, and _______.

Descriptive grammar tells us how a speaker SHOULD speak -- T/F
True False

Experiments have shown that Russian speakers are better at discriminating light blue and dark blue objects than English speakers. Why might this be?

What is the scientific study of human language?

What is the difference between discreteness and displacement?

What involves the knowledge speakers have about the units and rules of their language?

What type of grammar attempts to prescribe what rues of language people SHOULD use to speak "properly"?

What hypothesis involves the theory that the structure of a language influences how its speakers PERCEIVE the world around them?

What weaker form of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis claims that different languages encode diff categories which can influence a speaker's perception of the world?

Which word is monomorphemic: singer or finger?

What is the study of internal word structure?

Why are content words referred to as open class words?

A morpheme is the most elemental unit of grammatical form -- T/F
True False

BOUND morphemes

4 Types of affixes

How many morphemes are in the word close in "Close the door"?

How many morphemes are in the word closing as in "We're closing at 8"?

How many morphemes are in the word disappearances?

Inflectional morphemes are used to mark tense, number, person, and other grammatical properties -- T/F
True False

What are the 8 Bound Inflectional Affixes and their properties?

In English, inflectional morphemes are only suffixes -- T/F
True False

Derivational morphemes, unlike inflectional morphemes, change the meaning or the part of speech of the affected word. Which of the following is NOT a derivational morphemes?

What is the root of the word "unlovable"?

What are the bound roots in word "unhappiness"?

What kind of words describe objects, action, attributes, and ideas?

What kind of words include "and, or, but", "in, of", "the,a/an", and "it"?

What is the difference between Inflectional and Derivational words?

Lexical Morphemes are similar to what kind of words?

Grammatical Morphemes are similar to what kind of words?

What is the study of sentence structure?

Any speaker of any human language can produce and understand an infinite number of possible sentences -- T/F
True False

Phrase Structure Rules

We learn and store every possible sentence in our brains -- T/F
True False

In order for a sentence to be grammatical, it must be true. -- T/F
True False

English is a subject-verb-object (SVO) word order language --  T/F
True False

The natural groupings or parts of a sentence are called what?

A sentence is ambiguous if it has two or more meanings -- T/F
True False

Syntactic Phrasal Categories

Less Familiar Syntactic Categories

What kind of phrases are the following:
"Books"
"a big deal"
"the craziest thing you've ever heard"
"the doctor"

The phrase "afraid of snakes" is a verb phrase -- T/F
True False

What kind of phrase is "ate the cake"?

How many verb phrases are in the sentence "The child found a puppy"?

The phrasal category that may occur next to a head and ELABORATES on the meaning of the head is a what?

The core of every phrase is its what?

Words like that which introduce clauses are called _______

Specifiers are obligatory components of the phrase structure (In other words, every sentence must have a specifier.--determiner/possessive)

According to the x-bar theory of syntax, all languages have phrases that consist of heads, specifiers, and complements -- T/F
True False

TP stands for ______ phrase

What types of phrases are in the sentence "The house collapsed in the earth quake"?

The x-bar schema can only be used to analyze English sentences -- T/F
True False

Which of the following verbs has an obligatory complements?

Phrase Structures

Rules in which a phrasal category can contain itself

Universal Grammar provides the basic design for all languages, and each langauge has hits own _________, or variations on the basic plan

A direct object/other constituents such as temporal adverb can be moved to the beginning of the sentence describes what? (Hint: ASL Syntax)

Study of linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, & sentences

Formulating semantic rules that build the meaning of a sentence based on the meaning of the words and how they combine

The study of the meaning of phrases and sentences

The study of the meaning of words

Knowing the meaning of a sentence means knowing under what conditions it would be true or false -- T/F
True False

A sentence that is true regardless of its circumstances is a _______

Study of how context affects meaning

The sentence "Jack swims beautifully" entails "Jack swims." Does "Jack swims" also entail "Jack swims beautifully"?

Violation of semantic rules resulting in expressions that seem nonsensical

The sentence below contains semantic violations, in other words, it is semantically ________
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

These are technically anomalous, but their nature of anomaly creates noticeable meanings; may also have literal meaning ("The door has fallen", "Time marches on", "Walls have ears", "Time is money")

An expression whose meaning may be unrelated to the meaning of its parts ("kick the bucket", "snap out of it", "give a piece of your mind")

Idioms do not obey the usual rules of combining meanings [compositionality] -- T/F
True False

Idioms are always directly translatable from one language to another -- T/F
True False

This asserts that the meaning of an expression is composed of the meaning of its parts and how the parts are combined structurally

The real-world object designated by a word ("Jack, the happy swimmer, my friend, that guy, no baby, no one")

These have the same reference but different senses ("Barack Obama, The 44th U.S. President, Michelle Obama's husband") -- T/F
True False

An element of meaning separate from reference and more enduring; the manner in which an expression presents the reference

Words/expressions whose reference relies on context & orientation of speaker in space & time; includes Pronouns (she, it, I), Demonstratives(this, that), Adverbs (here, now, today), Prepositions, & Complex Expressions (those towers over there)

Which of the following is NOT a deictic term?

Identify the antecedent in the following sentence:
"Alice looked at herself in the mirror."

Identify the reflexive pronoun in the following sentence: "Alice looked at herself in the mirror."

In the conversation below, which conversational maxim is violated?
A: What grade did you get in calculus?
B: It's raining outside

Performative Verbs for Speech Acts

Concerned with our understanding of language in context; comes as result of how a speaker uses literal meaning in conversation/discourse (also called "extra-truth-conditional")

2 Types of Context Relevant for Resolution of a Pronoun

Inferences that may be drawn from an utterance based on context
(Ex: SUE - Does Mary have a boyfriend?
BILL - She's been driving to San Diego every weekend.)

4 Maxims of Conversation

A language's orthography (a.k.a. spelling) always represents that language's sound in a consistent way -- T/F
True False

What is the tubular part of the throat above the larynx?

The soft palate of roof of mouth; terminates in uvula; moveable

What is the opening between the vocal cords called?

Another name for the larynx is what?

The difference between the word pairs robe/rope, fine/vine, and seal/zeal have to do with _______

Identify the Alveolar Fricatives

Study of Speech Sounds

Which of the following words begins with a bilabial sound?

Identify the approximants

Consonants are classified based in part on where in the vocal tract the airflow is being restricted which is known as the ________

The term for the way the airstream is affected as it flows from the lungs and out of the nose and mouth is ________

What is a continuant?

Which of the following words begins with a stop consonant?

A sequence of two vowel sounds "squashed" together is called what?

What are simple vowels called?

What is the difference between Acoustic, Auditory, and Articulatory Phonetics?

In 1888, the _________ _______ ________ was invented in order to have a system in which there was a one-to-one correspondence between each sound in language & each phonetic symbol

The Major Places of Articulation

2 Voiceless Categories

What is the difference between voiceless and voiced sounds?

Sounds produced w/ velum raised to prevent air from escaping out the nose

Sounds produced with velum lowered to allow air to escape out the nose

What are the 3 ways of classifying sounds based on phonetic features?

What is the difference between a stop and a fricative?

_______ features: length, pitch, & stress ("accent"); over & above segmental values such as place/manner of articulation

What does this example represent: "In Thai, the string of sounds [na:] can be said with 5 different pitches, thus can have 5 different meanings "(nickname, face, thick, etc.)

______ may affect the meaning of a whole sentence; varied pitch contour across an utterance, but pitch is not used to distinguish words

Sign Language signs are formed by what 3 major features/parameters?

Knowledge of phonology determines how we pronounce words and morphemes -- T/F
True False

Study of how speech sounds form patterns

How many possible variations (or allomorphs) are there for the English plural morpheme?

Which words below take the [(∋)z] pronunciation of the plural morpheme?

How many possible variations (or allomorphs) are there for the English Regular Past Tenses?

If a verb ends in a [t] or a [d] sound, the past tense morpheme is pronounced [(e)d] -- T/F
True False

Which of the following verbs take the [t] allomorph for the past tense?

English is the only language with morphophonemic variation -- T/F
True False

In English, the phoneme /p/ is pronounced with the aspirated allophone [ph] in which word below?

Which of the following is a minimal pair? Meaning which pair of words is identical except for one sound segment that occurs in same place in each word?

______ are the basic unit of sound & are sensed in your mind rather than spoken or heard, and each has one or more sounds called ________ which represent the actual (noticeable) sound being produced in various environments (Ex: /p/ -- [p^h][p])

Consonants also have allophones -- T/F
True False

When ________ become mutually unintelligible, then they become separate languages

A variety of language/mutually intelligible (comprehensible) forms of a language that differ in systematic ways from other varieties is called a _______

What is the difference between a idiolect and a dialect?

Dialects are inferior or degraded forms of a language -- T/F
True False

The dominant, or prestige dialect of a language, is often called this kind of dialect

Which one of the following is not considered a dialect of English?

Dialects can differ in their lexicon, phonology (a.k.a. pronunciation), as well as syntax -- T/F
True False

Which of the following is NOT a feature of African American Vernacular English (AAVE)?

What is the English dialect spoken by many Americans of Mexican descent?

Studies show that women always talk more than men in mixed-gender conversations -- T/F
True False

Dialects merge into each other, forming a _________ _________

This refers to movement toward greater uniformity and less variation among dilects

African American English (AAE) is a dialect based on genetics, not social groups -- T/F
True False

AAE Consonant Cluster Reduction

All of the phonological features of AAE are systematic, rule-governed, and similar to phonological variations found in languages all over the world -- T/F
True False

What does this example represent: they can use either ChE (or AAE) or SAE

Sever linguistic features that were used by women more than men, for example: Hedges (maybes), Tag questions ("don't you think?"), Politeness words, or Intensifiers ("so"; "very"), are all examples of what?

In some serious studies of mixed-sex conversations, it shows that in a # of different contexts, men dominate talking -- T/F
True False

A lingua franca is a language common to speakers of diverse languages that can be used for communication and commerce -- T/F
True False

One language often used by common agreement; social/commercial communication; can be any language; English can be called the ______ ______ of the world, standardly used at international business meetings & acad. conferences

Language(s) that can contribute to lexicon/grammar, but in less obvious way (Ex: like 4 languages that contributed to Hawaiin Pidgin English)

What are the 4 languages that contributed to Hawaiian Pidgin English?

Whereas pidginization involves the SIMPLIFICATION of languages, creolization involves _______ of the lexicon and grammar

Pidgins (simplified languages) arose through contact between speakers of colonial Euro languages; some through slaves/slave owners, colonization, immigration; strictly contact language -- T/F
True False

The effort to teach deaf Nicaraguan children an existing Sign Languages was hugely successful

English is designated as the national language of the U.S. in the Constitution -- T/F
True False

The sentence below is an example of codeswitching: "I like pizza" -- T/F
True False

Which variety of English is literacy instruction based on in the U.S.?

A single person may speak multiple styles or registers of a language -- T/F
True False

Most of the vocabulary of a pidgin comes from the dominant language (superstrate/lexifier language) -- T/F
True False

If children begin to learn stabilized pidgin as a native language, then it becomes a _______

The ability for an individual speaker to speak 2 or more languages with native or near native proficiency

Codeswitching constitutes as "broken" English and is a language disability in which bilinguals try to cope with incomplete mastery of either language -- T/F
True False

Styles, or ______, are different ways of speaking based on the context, Ex: people speaking differently with friends than they do in a job interview

Essentially, epithets are nicknames added to names of individuals and becomes part of their common usage -- T/F
True False

About how many languages are there in the world?

A protolanguage is the ancestral language from which related languages have developed -- T/F
True False

The great vowel shift took place between 1400 & _____

The who/whom distinction in English reflects which cases?

The Norman Conquest took place in what year?

Words that are borrowed from other languages are called _____ words

Etymology is the study of the history of words -- T/F
True False

The words "opera" and "influenza" come from what language?

What were the former meanings of these words ("meaning shift"):
--youth
--foolish
--ignorant
--food
--dog

Sound changes that occur irrespective of phonetic context are referred to as _______

Select the Germanic languages below

Language isolates have no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other living languages -- T/F
True False

Synthetic languages are languages with only one morpheme per word -- T/F
True False

Analogic change is a generalization of rules that reduces the number of exceptional or irregular morphemes -- T/F
True False

According to John McWhorter, texting is undermining language -- T/F
True False

The study of how languages change, what kinds of changes occur, and why they occur

In the Great Vowel Shift, the _____ _____ ____ of Middle English shifted so that each sound underwent an increase in tongue height and
the highest sounds
[i:] ("tie" = tee) and [u:] ("house" = hoos) became the diphthongs
[aI] ("bite") and [au] ("about")

Latin had case endings, suffixes on each noun that marked the thematic role or grammatical relationship to the verb (6 kinds):

What is an example(s) of a auxiliary?

What is an example of an Eponym?

______ are produced by combining 2 words such that parts of the combined words are deleted (Ex: "smog" is combo of "smoke & fog")

The meaning of a word that gets broader, to incorporate more referents (Ex: "dogge" used to refer to a specific breed of dog, but now refers to all dogs)

The meaning of a term narrows to have fewer possible referents (Ex: "meat" used to mean "food"; now it is a certain kind of food)

Cognates are words in related languages that developed from the same ancestral root. What is an example of that?

Some languages do not seem to be related to any other living language (Ex: Basque & Ainu). What are these called?

Linguistic input to a child learning language is said to be impoverished, meaning it does not contain all the abstract rules and structures the child eventually learns -- T/F
True False

Both English and Japanese are SVO word order languages -- T/F
True False

During which stage do children speak in utterances consisting of only one word appearing to convey the meaning of an entire sentence?

_______ occurs when children treat irregular verbs and nouns as if they were regular

In their earliest multiword utterances, children are perfectly consistent in their use of function words -- T/F
True False

An adults repetition of a child's utterance is called what?

Additional names for child-directed speech include:

When a child learns two languages at the same time, it is referred to as _______ bilingualism

All typically developing children learn whatever language or languages they are exposed to -- T/F
True False

L2 (or second-language learner) errors may fossilize so that no amount of teaching or correction can undo them -- T/F
True False

It takes children a relatively long time to learn deictic words because their interpretation requires contextual information and their meaning changes depending on the circumstances of the utterance. Here is a list of deictic words

Children often overgeneralize rules, like the plural and past tense rules in English. Match the words below with the form a child would use if overgeneralizing

Trochaic stress: stress falls on 1st or 2nd syllable?

Iambic stress: stress falls on 1st or 2nd syllable?

The ______ connects the two hemispheres of the brain

The left hemisphere of the brain controls the right side of the body -- T/F
True False

Language appears to be lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain -- T/F
True False

Broca's aphasia is characterized bo labored speech and word-finding difficulties, whereas _____ aphasia is characterized by grammatical fluency and semantic incoherence

A patient with aphasia may accidentally switch one word for another (for example: saying "dog" when they mean "cat"). What is the term for these substitutions?

Broca's Area is believed to be responsible for the following:

Brain areas that control movement are connected to language as well -- T/F
True False

Approximately 10,000 people in the U.S. have aphasia -- T/F
True False

When aphasia is caused by stroke or injury, langauge improvement can be achieved through speech therapy -- T/F
True False

Split-brain surgery is sometimes done to help patients with what disorder?

The patient in the split brain film, Joe, can only repeat words that are flashed on which side of the computer screen?

Of the tasks below, what is the right side of the brain best suited to?

Lateralization of language to the left hemisphere of the brain begins even before language actively develops
True False

Infants as young as one week show a greater electrical response in the left hemisphere to langauge and in the right hemisphere to _______

Under certain circumstances, the right hemisphere can take over many of the language functions that would normally be found in the left -- T/F
True False

The plasticity of the brain increases with age -- T/F
True False

The critical age hypothesis asserts that language is biologically based and that the ability to learn a native language develops within a fixed period, from birth to _______

What were Victor and Genie unable to acquire even after they were found and exposed to language?

What did Genie's utterances lack?

Genie could not form questions - T/F
True False

Tests showed that Genie's language was lateralized to the left hemisphere -- T/F
True False

Unlike Genie, Victor eventually fully acquired langauge -- T/F
True False