Study guides
1st semester:
Mid-term study guide: p.1
Final exam study guide: p. 2
2nd semester
Mid term study guide: p.3
Final exam study guide: p.4
Chapter 1: What is language?
What does linguistic knowledge consist of?
What does the creative aspect of linguistic knowledge mean?
Why is the relationship between speech sounds and meanings said to be arbitrary?
How are linguistic knowledge/linguistic competence different from linguistic performance?
How is a descriptive grammar different from a prescriptive grammar?
What is U(niversal) G(rammar)?
What is mental grammar?
What is ASL ?
What are the difference between human languages and animal languages?
Chapter 2: Brain and language
What does the human brain compose of?
How does aphasia happen?
What is Broca’s area? characteristics?(agrammatic?)
What is Wernicke’s area? characteristics?
What does contralateral control of functions mean?
What are the different functions of the left brain and the right brain?
The significance of dichotic listening and split brain experiments
The theory of localization/ lateralization and what evidences support the lateralization of language
What does savant suggest about the autonomy of language?
The theory of localization p.37 or lateralization p.38 or modularity about brain p.40
Dyslexics
What is the critical period hypothesis?p.53
Chapter 3: Morphology
Lexicography
Open/closed class
What is a mprphome?
**Morpheme identification: identify the component morpheme(s) of each word
Identify prefix, suffix, root, and stem.
What are the examples of content words?
How about function words?
**How is a free morpheme different from a bound morpheme?
**What is an inflectional morpheme? How is it different from a derivational morpheme?
What does word coinage (eponyms, back-formations, compounds, and blends) mean?
What is the difference between clipping and acronyms?
**Morphological analysis: problem-solving questions
Final exam
Chapter4: Syntax
Grammatical and ungrammatical sentences
Syntactic categories
What do “nodes”, “heads”, “constituents” , “complements” and complementizers mean?
C-selection: transitive verb and intransitive verb
What is meant by structural ambiguity?
What are phrase structure rules and phrase structure trees? (tree diagram rules)
Embedded sentences
Transformational rules (deep structures)---how to move aux(modal), passive….
s-structure
UG principles and parameters
Chapter 5: The Meanings of Language
Lexical Semantics (Word Meanings)
truth-conditional semantics
Truth value
Compositional semantics
tautology
contradictions/paradoxes
synonymous/paragraphrases
Principle of Compositionality
non compositionality:
Anomaly/metaphor/ idioms,
theories of word meaning:
sense and reference
Homonyms/heteronym
Synonyms
Gradable antonyms, non-gradable, antonyms, relational opposites
Hyponyms
Metonyms
Retromyms
Thematic Roles
Pragmatics:
Speech acts (performative sentences)
Presuppositions/entailment
Maxims of Conversation
Deixis
2nd semester Mid term
Chapter 8: Language Acquisition
How do children acquire their language? Through imitation, reinforcement, analogy,
structured input?
What is the Innateness Hypothesis? How is the hypothesis related to UG, parameters of UG? Does it receive strongest support from the poverty of stimulus argument?
Do children acquire their language through stages? Explain the stages.
How do children acquire the phonological system of their language? How do they acquire word meaning, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics?
The teaching methods and approaches in second language acquisition ( check for web readings)
Some issues discussed in second language acquisition such as fossilization, critical period, silent period, accent, negative transfer….
Chapter 10: Language in Society
How do people speaking diverse languages communicate when they are in
contact? Do they use a lingua franca or a pidgin? How is a pidgin different from a
creole? What is creolized?
What is meant by "situation dialects"?
How is an informal style distinguished from a formal style?
What is meant by slang, jargon, taboo and euphemism? racial epithets (slurs)?
Second language teaching methods .
top down and bottom up approaches
synthetic approach and analytic approach
code switching
bilingualism/second language acquisition
parameters
Is L2 acquisition the same as L1 acquisition?
Final exam
Chapter 10
The difference between British English and American English see my website
Dialect leveling
The r-dropping rule
What is meant by an idiolect and a dialect?
In what ways do dialects of a language differ from one another?
What does it mean when a person is said to have a Boston accent or a southern
accent?
What is SAE? Is there a SAE? Who are language purists?
Chapter 11 Language Change
History of English
Discovery of language families/Protolanguage
Phonological change
What are sound correspondences?
Great Vowel Shift and its impact on modern English
http://facweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/seehear.htm
Syntactic change
Lexical change
Addition of new words
Borrowings or loan words
Addition of new words( clippings, word coinage, acronyms, blends, backformations)
Grimm’s Law
The notion of cognate
Languages of the World
Why does language change?
Chapter 9 Language and computer
What does Psycholinguistics study?
Speech recognition and speech synthesis
The cocktail party effect
Corpus, concordance and collocation
Practice in the computer room
Computer Syntax ELIZA:
A. Try to figure out some of the strategies ELIZA uses to formulate replies to your input. What information does ELIZA have to extract from your input to do this? What parts can ELIZA just copy verbatim?
B. Sometimes ELIZA’s strategies don’t work. For instance on strategy for replying to a question is simply to say Does that question interest you? Thus sometimes you will find that ELIZA’s responses are not appropriate. Find other examples of inappropriate responses and try to explain how ELIZA’s strategy fails.
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