ling midterm 2

Question 1

Sociolinguistics & Language and gender

Register

Answer 1

• language also varies according to its context of use
• analysis of usage patters, e.g., “situation-dependent vs. elaborated reference,” “overt expression of argumentation,” “abstract vs. concrete style”

Question 2

Sociolinguistics & Language and gender

Terminology: sex vs. gender

Answer 2

sex is genetics and physiology (e.g. larynx, brain?), whille gender is culture and identity (social norm, stereotype, etc.)

Question 3

Sociolinguistics & Language and gender

Adults human males have significantly higher or lower voices than females do?

Answer 3

They have lower voices

Question 4

Sociolinguistics & Language and gender

The pitch different difference between females and males reflects not only the difference in? ….
* vocal cord length
* vocal cord mass
* socially-conditioned factos
* all of the above

Answer 4

all of the above

Question 5

Brain and language

What’s the aphasia that also called fluent sensory or sensory aphasia?

Answer 5

wernicke’s aphasia

Question 6

Brain and language

What’s the aphasia that also called disfluent aphasia or agrammatic aphasia?

Answer 6

broca’s aphasia

Question 7

Brain and language

What’s mind/brain dichotomy?

Answer 7

• mind: the mental processes of producing, perceiving and learning language; brain: the localization of different linguistic abilities in different regions of the brain, and also about how neural computation works in general. However, it’s still challenging for researchers to integrate the results of these two different kinds of investigation
• Examples: word frequency and recency
• word frequency effects and recency effects (mind)
• localizzation of langugae processing and memory (brain)
• but how are word frequency and recency effect actually implemented in the brain?

Question 8

Linguistic form in art, ritual and play

Metric foot patterns

Answer 8

iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl,

Question 9

Linguistic form in art, ritual and play

Iambic pentameter

Answer 9

its defintion and how to decide - scansion

Question 10

Linguistic form in art, ritual and play

Which of these are (or could be) iambic pentameter?
* Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
* The winter! the brightness that blinds you
* And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same

Answer 10

Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill

Question 11

Language Production & Perception

Syntactic category rule

slips of the tongue and pen

Answer 11

the target (i.e. the world replaced) and the substiuting word are almost always of the same syntactic catergory

Question 12

Language Production & Perception

What is “Freduian Slip?” Give an example of this phenomenon

Answer 12

• The speaker or writer may be unaware of the error that is contrary to the conscious wishes of the person speaking or writing. It is believed by Freud that such “slips” come from repressed, unconscious desires.
• I wanted to read my grandmother to the letter.” “I want to readed the letter to my grandmother

Question 13

Language Production & Perception

What is a reasonable average word recognition time?
* 20ms
* 200 ms
* 2 s
* 20s

Answer 13

200 ms

Question 14

Computational Linguistics

Answer 14

universal computing model - neural networks

Question 15

Reading & writing

Reading & writing

Answer 15

• writing is not language; wiriting is a way of using “visible marks” to point ot pieces of real or hypothetical spoken language
• type of writing: all documented writing systems are a mixture of two or (usually) more of these categories, and all include a significant phonological aspect
• origin of writing

Question 16

Reading & writing

Among the types of writing, which one best describes the English writing system? Which one best describes Chinese writing system?

Answer 16

• English: alphabetic
• Chinese: logrographic, and also (morpho-)syllabic

Question 17

Reading & writing

What is Rebus Principle?

Answer 17

Rebus Principle: if you can’t make a picture of something, use a picture of something with the same sound

Question 18

Reading & writing

Disucss why pictographic/ideographic writing not practical

Answer 18

• It is hard to design a universal pictographic/ideographic writing
  system, and it’s also extremely hard for everyone to develop and
  learn such a system
• Since everyone already knows at least one ordinary spoken language,
  practical people will always tend to give up on the ideographic
  system and start using a written form of their speech

Question 19

Children language acquisition

Children language acquisition

Answer 19

• milestones: babbling (canoncial, variegated), one word (holophrastic) stage, Two-word stage, telegraphic stage, later multiword stage
• Vocalizations in the first year of life; the tip of the velum reaches or overalps with the tip of the epiglottis
• the emergence of syntax

Question 20

Children language acquisition

what is “vocal play?’ when do we observe it in babies?

Answer 20

• Manipulating pitch (to produce “squeals” and “growls”), loudness
  (producing “yells”), and also manipulating tract closures to produce
  friction noises, nasal murmurs, “raspberries” and “snorts”
• During the period from 4-7 months

Question 21

Children language acquisition

When does “canonical babbling” typically occur?
* 2-4 months
* 6-8 months
* 12-18 months
* 18-24 months

Answer 21

6-8 months

Question 22

Language change

Language change

Answer 22

• Causations for language change: Language learning, Language contact, Social
  differentiation, Natural processes in usage
• Conditioned vs. unconditioned sound change
• Great Vowel Shift
• Historical Reconstruction
• Cognates: words in two or more daughter languages that derive from the same word
  in the ancestral language
• Lexicostatistics

Question 23

Language change

Briefly described the difference between conditioned vs. unconditioned
sound change

Answer 23

• Conditioned sound change refers to systematic sound change that
  applies in certain kinds of environments and not in others. These
  changes are tied to certain linguistic conditions.
• Unconditioned sound change, on the other hand, involves alterations
  in speech sounds that occur without a specific linguistic cause or
  contextual influence. These changes don’t follow a predictable
  pattern tied to linguistic conditions.

Question 24

Language change

Is Great Vowel Shift a conditioned or unconditioned sound change?

Answer 24

Unconditioned

Question 25

Languages of the world

Languages of the world

Answer 25

• Language families
• “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”; Whether a variety is a language or a dialect, is determined by social-
  political reasons, rather than linguistic reasons
• Typology

Question 26

Languages of the world

How many languages are spoken in the world today?
* 600+
* 6000+
* 60000+

Answer 26

• 6000+

Question 27

Languages of the world

What proportion of living languages that have more than 1,000,000
speakers?
* ~30
* ~ 100
* ~ 300
* ~ 1000

Answer 27

• ~300

Question 28

Sign Language

Sign Language

Answer 28

• Sign languages are languages
• Arbitrariness vs. iconicity; Limits of iconicity, Loss of iconicity
• Phonological parameters of sign languages: Handshape, Location,
  Movement, Orientation, Non-manual features

Question 29

Sign Language

Evaluate each of the following statements to determine whether it’s
correct

• The sign language reflects the appearance of things, so sign
  language is an iconic language.
• French speaker and Chinese speaker don’t understand each other,
  but French Sign Language and Chinese Sign Language are more
  similar — it illustrates the existence of a universal sign language.
• Many of us know some American Sign Language, for example,
  fingerspelled English.

Answer 29

All of them are wrong

Question 30

reading and writing

types of writing

Answer 30

• Pictographic: Elements are pictures, combined in graphically interpretable patterns (e.g. temporal sequence or spatial relationship)
• Ideographic: Elements denote ideas, combined in a logical fashion
• Logographic: Elements denote words or morphemes, combined morphosyntactically
• Syllabic: Elements denote syllables, combined phonologically
• Moraic: Like syllabic elements, but units are a bit smaller (see discussion of Japanese kana below)
• Alphabetic: Elements denote phonemes (more or less), combined phonologically
• Featural: Elements denote distinctive features of phonemes (such as voicins or place of articulation), combined phonologically