English 336
Study Guide for Final Exam in Linguistics
Spring 2007

Dr. Tina L. Hanlon

Linguistics Main Page

Exam Time: Friday, April, 27-10:30 a.m.

Exam Format:

Most of the exam will consist of matching and short-answer questions as on previous tests. You will write a few paragraphs and one essay, selecting from several possible topics that involve attitudes about language, language varieties, differences between speech and writing, or other general issues we have discussed.

Note: This study guide will be revised by Wed., Apr. 25, or Thurs. morning. I will not make further changes after that unless you find errors or problems that you let me know about ASAP.

1. General Review

Use the summary (especially the words in boldface) in chapter 1 (and other chapters) for review.

• Know different meanings of grammar and grammaticality; prescriptive vs. descriptive approaches; linguistic competence vs. performance; arbitrary relations between signs and meanings; standard vs. nonstandard English

• From Introduction and other chapters, know branches of linguistics: phonology, articulatory phonetics, morphology, syntax, lexicography, semantics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, dialectology, historical and comparative linguistics, language acquisition.

• Be familiar with language universals from list on pp. 28-29 and Daniels’ essay “Nine Ideas About Language” (in Daniels, not required to memorize Halliday’s seven functions of speech).

• What are some basic ideas about language revealed in the novel Frindle?

2. Review Material on Morphology and Syntax

• Know terms morpheme, roots and affixes, structural vs. lexical/semantic ambiguity.

• Ways of Forming Words: compounding, acronyms, blends, abbreviation or clipping, new words from names and brand names, expanding productivity of morphemes (more examples have appeared in chapters on slang, jargon, lang. variation and historical change)

• Be familiar with basic aims and differences of traditional, structural, and generative-transformational grammar (from class notes and excerpt from Weaver, Grammar for Teachers, chap. 6), including knowing what phrase-structure rules and transformations are.

3. Review Material on Phonetics and Phonology

Know terms orthography, articulatory phonetics, International Phonetic Alphabet, phonetic and phonemic transcription, diacritical marks, phoneme, minimal pairs or sets, place of articulation, manner of articulation.

4. Semantics: Chap. 5

• Understand terms: semantics, lexicon, sense vs. reference in semantics, homonyms, synonyms, polysemous words, semantic or lexical ambiguity, proper nouns, discourse analysis, speech act, performative verbs.

• Be able to identify semantic features of words (similar to exercise 1): nouns may be abstract/concrete, animate/inanimate, human/nonhuman, count/noncount (or mass), male/female.

• Be able to distinguish between or identify synonyms, antonyms, homographs, heteronyms, retronyms.

• Be able to explain examples of structural and semantic or lexical ambiguity, as in several exercises in chapters 4 and 5.

• Be able to identify or explain three ways we break semantic rules: anomalies, metaphor, idioms.

5. Language Acquisition: Chap. 8

• Use summary of chap. 8 for review. Details on sign language, second language learning, attempts to teach language to nonhuman primates are not required but you should be familiar with the critical age hypothesis and the basic idea that sign language learners and bilingual children go through same stages of acquisition in childhood as children learning to speak in just one language.

• See Idea 1 in essay “Nine Ideas About Language.”

• Be familiar with term child directed speech or baby talk or “caretaker speech” (language adults use with children; see reader, 534-37).

• Be familiar with basic stages of acquisition: prelinguistic stage of crying, reflexes, cooing, etc.; babbling (exploring sounds or signs that will be used in language); holophrastic (one-word) stage; two-word stage; telegraphic stage (sentences with few grammatical function words); development of complete grammar achieved by ages 5-7.

• Children undergeneralize (using “dog” only for one’s own family pet) and overgeneralize (using “daddy” for all men) while learning meanings of words (comparable to semantic broadening and narrowing in historical language development).

• Researchers disagree about the potentiality for teaching nonhuman animals language and about whether language is a difference in degree between humans and other primates, or whether the development of language is a larger species-specific “leap” that distinguishes humans, but most agree that human have unique ability to internalize linguistic rules and apply them spontaneously and creatively, to understand and utter new phrases and sentences at all times. All human children (unless physical or mental problems interfere) learn language through basically the same process regardless of race social background, etc. (just the timing of acquisition stages varies with each individual child).

6. Review Material on Language and Society: Chap. 10

• Use summary of chap. 10 for review.

• Be familiar with idiolect, dialect, DARE (Dictionary of American Regional English, 1985-), slang, jargon, taboo language, euphemism, sexist language, dialect atlases & maps, Ebonics or African American English, difficulty of conveying dialect differences in literary writing or film

• Linguistic variables: pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax

• Social variables (studied by sociolinguists in recent decades):

  • Region (context for social variables)
  • Social status
  • Style (formal and informal generally; slang, for example, is very informal; professional jargon can be part of a formal style)
  • Age (cf. exercise on slang changing—some slang of older generation disappears)
  • Gender (recent research in discourse analysis shows men and women have different conversational styles)
  • Ethnicity
    
• Know some examples of linguistic variables from text, reports, video American Tongues and class discussions, including examples of slang (see exercise 3); jargon; taboo language (words for private body parts, sex, bodily functions, death, etc. depending on cultural taboos); euphemisms (bathroom tissue, powder room, powder one’s nose, pass away for dying, sleeping together for sex)
  
• Be familiar with ways English language has indicated gender bias in society, through use of pronouns; marked and unmarked forms of words (actor/actress, poet/poetess); different vocabulary applied to men and women even when referring to the same qualities or actions or occupations, sometimes with very different connotations (bachelor vs. spinster or old maid); presence or absence of labels that apply to one gender but not the other (e.g., no male forms of address indicating marital status, as in Miss and Mrs., terms like policeman, mailman indicated men only in these occupations). Know some examples of ways language use has been changing in recent decades to reflect social changes, movement toward more equal treatment of males and females.

7. History of Language and Writing: Chaps. 11, 12

• Be familiar with the labels/dates for historical eras in history of the English language: Old English, Middle English, Modern English

• Be familiar with regularity of sound change (e.g., Great Vowel Shift, systematic change in seven long, or tense, vowels of English occurred 1400-1600; pronunciation differences in dialects occur in regular patterns).

• “Dead” languages are reconstructed by studying cognates, words in related languages that developed from the same word; they illustrate systematic sound correspondences and usually have the same meanings (see examples of /p/-/f/ correspondences in European languages—p. 464).

• Languages derived from common parent languages are genetically related. Nineteenth-century linguists and Charles Darwin influenced each other, but the similarities between evolution of languages and biological evolution are more limited than some linguists have theorized.

• Language changes gradually over many generations and we have no surviving speakers or recordings of earlier speech, so we must rely on historical evidence found in present dialect differences and written records to make assumptions about pronunciation, usage and grammaticality in older languages (using systematic similarities in spellings, misspellings that reveal pronunciation in personal letters, writings of prescriptive grammarians, puns and rhymes in literature). Using comparative methods is more difficult for languages with no written records.

• The world has 4000-8000 mutually unintelligible languages; most languages of the world have never had writing systems, and vast numbers of languages are dying out.

• A language dies when no more children speak it, usually because the speakers of the language are assimilated by another culture. Hebrew, the national language of modern Israel, is an example of a nearly extinct language brought back to life by deliberate revival efforts in the 20th century. Some Celtic (e.g., Welsh, Irish) and Native American languages are being revived in areas dominated by the English language for centuries.

• Know these items from the family tree of Indo-European languages on p. 489:

• Indo-European is ancestor of many modern language (used about 6000 years ago)
• English and German are sisters, daughters of fifth-century Germanic.
• Russian and Polish are among the Slavic languages.
• Sanskrit is a parent of Indian languages in the Indo-Iranian branch.
• Romance languages such as Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian are daughters of Latin on the Italic branch. (Latin was the official language of the Church, government, and scholarship/education into the Middle Ages throughout Europe.)
• Celtic languages spoken in Britain before the Anglo-Saxon invasion survive in Welsh, Irish, Scots Gaelic.
• Greek is a Hellenic language (big influence on English scholarly and technical language through classical Latin and French because of importance of ancient classical Greek learning).

• Be able to recognize some examples of changes in sounds, morphology, vocabulary/lexicon, semantics, syntax that have occurred in the English language:

Examples of Lexical Changes

• New words (see categories listed under morphology)
• Borrowing loan words and morphemes: English has borrowed extensively (about 3/5 of our words are not native Anglo-Saxon), especially in periods when influenced by another culture, such as Norman Conquest, Renaissance, settlement of North America and Australia
• Borrowings represent various types of cultural influences: in commerce, cooking (Italian, French, Chinese, Spanish, e.g.), arts (Italian in music and art), politics, religion (Latin, Hebrew), scholarship (Greek and Latin since Renaissance)
• Most common words in everyday life and most basic grammatical function words (conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, etc.) tend to be native words (Anglo-Saxon), and do not change for long periods of time.
• Loss of words: words sometimes disappear from usage, as reading older texts reveals (e.g., beseem, fain, wherefore).

Semantic Changes

• Semantic Broadening of meanings: dogge meant one breed of dog in Middle English, picture used to mean only painting, holiday originally meant holy day (now any special day off), Coke has been broadened to mean any soda pop, aunt used to mean just father’s sister
• Semantic Narrowing: meat used to mean any food; fowl used to mean any bird; disease used to mean any unfavorable condition, not just illness; liquor referred to liquids
• Meaning Shifts: lust meant pleasure of any kind; bead meant prayer (then associated with prayer beads); pretty meant tricky or sly, now means attractive; fond meant foolish
• Some meaning shifts give the word more positive or negative meanings or connotations, or weaker meanings: quell used to mean kill, murder, now means to pacify. Notorious means known for something bad (like crime), but some people today are using it to mean any kind of fame.
• See exercise 8, p. 541 on borrowings and loan words in English.

History of Writing

• Know terms pictogram (using pictures for words, which are nonarbitrary forms of language), alphabetic writing (developed by ancient Greeks, who adapted older systems and used symbols for individual sounds, generally one symbol per phoneme—despite many inconsistencies in English spelling), calligraphy (art of writing—different scripts and styles of writing, etc.), digraph (2 letters for one sound, as in English sh, ch, ea for [i], th)

• Sumerians developed writing about 4000 B. C. About 500 B. C. Romans adapted Greek alphabet; Latin alphabet was used in modern European languages, including English.

• Be able to discuss some differences between speech and writing, and learning to speak/write. Reading/writing have to be taught and studied by learners, while acquiring speech (or sign language) is a natural process in early childhood (except for children with diseases that inhibit language acquisition). Reading/writing can be learned at any age but speech cannot be acquired after puberty.

• A small percentage of the world's languages have a writing system. But literacy is so highly prized in our culture, and public education is so widely available now, that you have heard some discussion about the problem of illiteracy and attempts to improve the teaching of reading and writing in America.

History of Languages in America

• American English derived from various dialects of British English. American dialects reflect settlement and migration patterns of English-speaking peoples from 17th century on, including those from other parts of the world who willingly or under coercion learned varieties of English on this continent.

• Vocabulary differences in American English (compared with Britain and elsewhere) are most prominent because Americans had new environmental features to name, and different names have been developed for new products since 17th century (e.g., windshield vs. windscreen, or jumper is a sweater in England and a sleeveless garment going from neck to knees or below in U.S.).

• American English has borrowed from Native American Indian languages, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, etc. at various points in history as they came in contact with each other in North America or as Americans adopted food, customs, etc. of these cultures. Place names are based on Native American words/names, names brought from many other parts of the world or carried across the country, environmental features, famous events, prominent people, and many other concepts and influences. (e.g., Virginia, Carolina, Maryland and Georgia are named after English queens and kings, New Jersey/New York/New Hampshire after older English places, Pennsylvania and Washington after colonial "founding fathers"; Vermont = green mountain; many states have Indian or Spanish names.)

• The U. S. has no official language although some states have passed English-only laws and debates continue about making English an official language. Many immigrants speak other languages and may or may not learn English after moving here. Other non-English languages used in this country include many different Native American languages such as Cherokee (or Tsalagi) and American Sign Language .

• Many Native American languages have died out or have only a few speakers left. Cherokee is one that is being revived among Cherokee populations (as Welsh and Hebrew have been revived in other countries). Sequoyah was the only person who ever individually invented a writing system. He was not literate in any language but figured out how to develop a syllabary for writing Cherokee, partly in imitation of the English alphabet (except that characters represent syllables, not phonemes), and it has been used to write Cherokee since the mid-19th century.

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This page's last update: 04/23/2007 06:50:29 PM