LIGN101 Final

Question 1

Three important characteristics of language

Answer 1

1. Arbitrary relationships between signs and the signified
2. Fully productive and creative
3. Speakers have knowledge of grammar and the rules of language

Answer 2

1. Non arbitrary signs: smoke is a sign of fire
2. Iconic/ representational signs: emojis, some hand gestures
3. Arbitrary signs: non iconic gestures, most words

Answer 3

-Sociolects: dialect shared among members of a certain social group
-Idiolect: you use language in a certain way
-dialects: form of language used by a certain social or geographical group of people

Answer 4

Descriptive grammar: rule which describes how people ACTUALLY talk to write (what linguists care about)
Prescriptive grammar: made up or social rules that prescribe how people SHOULD talk or write

Question 5

Phonetics

Answer 5

-Study of speech process
-steps to describing consonants:
1. Place:
-biolabial
-labiodental
-interdental
-alveolar (t)
-postalveolar (j)
-velar (c, g)
-glottal (uh oh)
2. Manner:
-stops (c, d, t)
-taps: (t, dd, nn)
-fricatives (f, sh, s, v)
-nasals (ng, m, n)
- affricates:fricative + stop (j, dg, ch, ts)
3. Voiced vs voiceless

Question 6

Vowels

Answer 6

-always voiced
- 17 vowels in mainstream English (12 monophthongs, 5 diphthongs)
-describing vowels:
-high, low or mid
-front, central, or back
-lips rounded or not

Question 7

Phonology

Answer 7

-Phonology: study of how sounds pattern in language and languages
-phonemic analysis: what sounds differentiate words
-natural classes: how do speakers tend to group sounds together
-phonotactics: what combinations are legal or preferred in the language
- syllable structure: how are syllabus formed and what kinds are legal
-metrical phonology: how do we assign stress, pitch, emphasis

Question 8

Phonemic analysis

Answer 8

-determining which sound changes affect the meaning of a word in a language: phonemic sounds
-which sound changes are predictable and don’t change word meanings: allophonic sounds
-which sound variation are completely unpredictable and meaningless: free variation

-two different phonemes: contrastive distribution
-allophones of the same phoneme: complementary distribution
-allomorphs: different versions of morphemes which are swapped predictably based on the sound environment (ex many plurals of English)

Question 9

Phonological processes

Answer 9

1. Assimilation
2. Dissimulation
3. Insertion/ epenthesis
4. Deletion/ elision

Question 10

Syllabus

Answer 10

Onset, rime (nucleus, coda)

Question 11

Morphology

Answer 11

-study of the shape and formation of words
-morphemes: smallest piece of a word which expresses a meaning or function (bound and free morphemes)
-lexical categories: parts of speech
-adverbs: temporal, locative, sentence, manner, linking, degree
-function words (closed class) vs. content words (open class)
-isolating: words with few morphemes
-synthetic: words with many morphemes
-derivational morphology: attaching affixes that change the part of speech of the root
-inflectional morphology: changes the meaning of the word in a sentence but doesn’t change the part of speech (plural marker or past tense marker)
-verb particle construction: when a verb has a different meaning when coupled with a preposition or particle (ex. Cut in vs cut out)

Question 12

Syntax

Answer 12

-Grammatical relations: who did what to whom
-syntactic constituency tests:
1. Substitution
2. Standalone answers
3. Movement
-syntax trees
-phrase structure rules

Answer 13

-Comparative illusions: something that seem grammatical which actually isn’t
-intransitive verbs: verbs that only take a single argument, the subject
-transitive verbs: verbs that can take two arguments, a subject and an object
-ditransitive verbs: verbs that take a subject and two objects

Answer 14

-computational linguistics: theoretical
-natural language processing: practical, probability

Answer 15

-semantics: study of meaning in language
-pragmatics: study of meaning in conversational context
-tautology, contradictions, meaningless sentences, non statement sentences, speech acts
-3 kinds of ambiguity:
1. Syntactic/ structural (sentence)
2. Lexical (word sense)
3. Semantic (multiple readings)
-entailment vs. implicature
-connotation vs denotation (dictionary definition)
-euphemism: pretty way to refer to something unpleasant
-semantic prototype theory

Answer 16

-synonym
-antonym
-hyponym/ hypernym
-metonymy ( when word X is related to word Y, X is used to rep the same meaning as Y).
-homonym (same spelling)
-homophone (spelled different)
-polysemy: same word with different meanings
-word sense: specific meaning of a word being used in a given situation
-diff verb senses demand diff arguments (frame)
-semantic roles: specific terms for different roles in the sentence

Question 17

Pragmatics

Answer 17

-Maxims of quality, quantity, relation, and manner
-presupposition: things which are implicitly assumed about the discourse, participants, and world. Aren’t definitionally true. Survives negation
-implicature: implied
-speech acts: depends on context
-deixis: “meet me here tomorrow at this time”
-deictic words: words whose meaning depends on the conversational context

Question 18

Language change

Answer 18

Periphrasis: add words to reinforce the strength of meaning (ex he does like to swim)