• Companion Web site for Contemporary Linguistics
• The IPA in Unicode (data-entry tool)
• WordNet
The front-door page for the course contains a list of review questions for chapters 1 through 8 of the textbook. Devise a similar list of review questions for chapters 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, and 18.
1. List the words that WordNet classifies as hyponyms of acquaintance, in the sense of "a person whom one knows but who is not a particularly close friend." How accurate is this list? Can you think of any hyponyms of acquaintance that WordNet does not mention?
2. How might one use a database of synonyms (such as WordNet) to improve the accuracy of a search engine (such as Google)?
3. What features of a text might make it easier for a machine translation system to translate accurately? What common genres or forms of English prose have these features?
1. Each the sound spectrograms in Figure 18.1 shows four formants, each covering a band of frequencies. For example, in the first spectrogram (the one showing the phoneme /i/), the formants are centered approximately around the frequencies of 300 hertz, 2000 hertz, 2600 hertz, and 3200 hertz. (The number of hertz is the number of cycles per second -- in this case, the number of repetitions of the pattern of relatively high and relatively low air pressure reaching the recording device in each second.) Formants are usually enumerated in order of increasing frequency, so the 300-hertz formant is called the "first formant," the 2000-hertz one the "second formant," and so on.
Note that the frequency of the second formant varies considerably among these eight spectrograms. What feature of the phonemes that the spectrograms represent is correlated with this variation?
2. Figure 18.1 doesn't include a spectrogram for the phoneme /ʌ/. Based on your answer to the preceding question, at what frequency would you expect to find the second formant in that spectrogram?
3. Two-level systems for morphological analysis are usually non-deterministic (in the sense that the authors introduce on page 599). Why?
1. What values and institutions within a social or cultural group indicate whether its members will be more or less favorably disposed towards spelling reforms and other "top-down" restrictions on language?
2. Like English, French orthography is intricate and in many ways non-phonemic. Modern French has an unusually large number of words spelled with silent letters. Suggest an explanation for this feature of the language.
3. Unicode associates each of the glyphs that it represents with a "code point" -- a kind of serial number that computer programmers can use to designate that glyph. With what code point does Unicode associate the schwa character used in the International Phonetic Alphabet?
1. What is a phonetic determinative? What role does it play in the Chinese writing system?
2. What are the advantages of using a mixed writing system like the one used for Japanese, in which any word can, if necessary, be rendered in more than one way?
3. Unlike Chinese, Korean has many suffixes. Why did this make it more difficult to adapt the Chinese writing system to Korean?
1. Why is a syllabic writing system better suited to Japanese or Hawaiian than to English or Russian?
2. When and where was the first alphabetic writing system used? What was the source of its symbols?
3. Russian and several other languages use an alphabetic writing system called Cyrillic. The textbook does not discuss the history of the Cyrillic alphabet. How did it originate? What was the source of its symbols, and how were they adapted and extended for use with Russian?
1. Explain why mapping dialect variations and drawing isoglosses is easier and more instructive in regions where the population's average length of residence is greater (i.e., where people tend to live at the same address for many years).
2. What is the difference between a pidgin language and a creole?
3. Give some examples of non-standard morphology and syntax associated with text messaging. What do your examples indicate about the cultural status -- age, class, gender, ethnicity, etc. -- of the community?
1. Explain the difference between a style and a register, illustrating each with an example. Make your example of a register one that is not mentioned in the textbook.
2. Give an example of a kind of adjacency pair -- again, one that is not mentioned in the textbook.
3. In class, I made the commonplace observation that a social community is defined not only by the values, institutions, and customs that its members share, but also by those that its members reject and exclude. Look up the etymology of the word shibboleth and explain what it demonstrates about the role of phonology in the constitution of a community.
1. As I mentioned in class on November 13, some slips of the tongue are blends -- the utterance actually produced fuses elements of two different words or constructions. (I gave two examples of blends: moinly for "mostly"/"mainly", and impostinator for "impostor"/"impersonator".) Do production errors of this kind constitute evidence for dual-route models of speech, or can blends be explained adequately in single-route models? Briefly justify your answer.
2. Syllepsis is a figure of speech in which a single word modifies or takes as complements two different expressions connected by a conjunction, but carries different meanings, or at least different nuances, with respect to those expressions. A typical example is this line from Alanis Morisette's song "Head over feet": "You held your breath and the door for me." (Several other examples can be found in section 6 of the Wikipedia article on zeugma.)
Would you expect syllepses to cause processing difficulties similar to those created by garden-path sentences? How are they related?
3. How do production errors in writing differ from production errors in speech? In what ways might a psycholinguistic model of the process of writing differ from the models of speech discussed in chapter 13 of our textbook?
1. Psychologists have found experimentally that it is more difficult to identify a spoken word if a segment in the middle of it has been spliced out and replaced with silence than if the same segment has been spliced out at replaced with a coughing noise. Suggest an explanation and describe its implications for the role of top-down processing in word identification task.
2. Give an example that has the same structure as the "barking / dog / tree" example that provides the basis for the experiment described in the section on morpheme activation (pages 448-450): a compound priming stimulus in which one of the component morphemes has two meanings, only one of which is active in the compound, and two target stimuli, one semantically related to the meaning that is active in the compound and the other semantically related to the non-active meaning. What would you expect to observe if the account presented in the textbook is correct?
3. For each of the following garden-path sentences, describe how the structure that the syntactic parser anticipates must be revised when the final words of the sentence arrive, and explain how the principles of minimal attachment and late closure account for the hearer's difficulty.
1. Give an example of a perseveration error involving a word.
2. Have someone read a text aloud to you until he or she commits a "slip of the tongue." Write a description of the mistake and classify it, describing both the nature of the mistake (transposition, anticipation, perseveration, transfer, etc.) and the level of the linguistic unit that was misrendered (phoneme, onset, morpheme, word, etc.).
3. In a lexical decision experiment, would you expect an English-speaking subject to take a longer or a shorter time to classify fnark as a non-word than to classify crant as a non-word? Why?
1. The authors of our textbook suggest that recasting (as described on pages 388 and 389) is at least as effective as explicit correction in promoting first-language acquisition, and perhaps more effective. Is this equally true in second-language acquisition, or is there a reason why explicit correction might be more effective in second-language acquisition?
2. What educational and social goals might lead a public-school administrator in a district evenly divided between English-speaking students and Spanish-speaking students to choose a two-way immersion program for bilingual enducation?
3. Answer the questions presented in exercise 8 at the end of chapter twelve of our textbook (page 434), supporting your answer with particulars from the second-language courses that you have taken.
1. In teaching French to English speakers, instructors often warn about "faux amis" ("false friends") -- French words that closely resemble English ones, and indeed are often cognate to them, but have different meanings. A typical example is attend which is cognate to the English word attend, but means "wait for." Why might such words be more difficult for English-speaking adults to learn than most French words?
2. The Hawaiian language includes an immense number of English loan-words that have been recast to conform to the Hawaiian phonemic system, which includes only eight consonants: /Ɂ/, /h/, /k/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /p/, and /w/. Here are a few examples:
Is the presence of such loan-words a greater advantage to native English speakers learning Hawaiian, or to native Hawaiian speakers learning English? Why?
3. On pages 419 and 420, the authors compare two possible hypotheses, the "impaired representation hypothesis" and the "missing surface inflection hypothesis," offered to account for the observed absence of past-tense inflections in the English utterances of a Chinese speaker who learned English as an adult. They cite her use of the nominative case on pronominal subjects in subordinate clauses as evidence refuting the impaired representation hypothesis. What kinds of utterances would the authors have expected to find instead if the impaired representation hypotheses were the correct one? Give an example.
1. Identify three or more ways in which the process of learning one's native language as a young child differs from the process of learning a second language by taking college courses as a nineteen-year-old. How would these differences affect the methods that one would adopt in learning the second language?
2. In section 1.4 of chapter twelve, the authors of our textbook observe that "one of the characteristics of the output of second language learners is that it is quite variable" (page 404): Sometimes the learner follows the same linguistic patterns that native speakers do and sometimes she does not, so that her overall linguistic performance seems inconsistent. Explain why this variability is seen more often in second-language acquisition than in first-language acquisition.
3. In the authors' discussion of textual competence (page 403), they contrast two texts that have similar content but use linking words differently. Can one make any inferences about the utterers of these two texts, their personalities, or their knowledge of English? What would justify such conclusions?
1. What evidence refutes the popular view that children acquire their native languages by imitating the speech of adults?
2. Explain why recasting (as in display 21 on page 388 of our textbook) might promote a child's linguistic development more than patient correction (as in display 20 on the same page).
3. If you know a language other than English that has special reflexive third-person pronouns, provide evidence for or against the claim that Principle A (in display 24 on page 391) is a linguistic universal. (If you know no other language that has reflexive pronouns, give three syntactically diverse examples illustrating Principle A in English.)
1. The textbook cites such utterances as "What I did yesterday?" in the speech of three-year-olds as evidence that English-speaking children learn the Wh Movement transformation earlier than the Inversion transformation. What would one expect this utterance to look like if the reverse were true -- that is, if the child uttering it had learned the Inversion transformation but not the Wh Movement transformation?
2. Considering the six "determining factors" listed on page 377 of the textbook, would you expect English-speaking children to learn the superlative inflection -est for adjectives early or late in the developmental sequence? Justify your answer.
3. From table 11.19, choose one utterance from each age group and construct a tree diagram of its surface structure. Do the results tend to confirm or refute the authors' claim that language development during the period sampled in the table is very rapid and leads up to "a broad range of syntactically intricate sentence types that include affixes and nonlexical categories"?
1. Explain the difference between longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of first-language acquisition.
2. If a three-year-old is growing up in an English-speaking household with three dogs named Flash, Tubby, and Pete, which dog's name is she most likely to have trouble pronouncing?
3. In your own words, explain the point of the experimental example illustrated in Figure 11.2 of the textbook (page 374) and described in the surrounding passage.
1. Do exercise 1 from chapter 8 of the textbook (pages 322 and 323).
2. Why is so much more known about the genetic classification of Indo-European languages than about indigenous Australian or South American languages?
3. What is the difference between a linguistic isolate, such as Basque, and a language family that has only one member, such as Albanian?
1. Why is mutual intelligibility an inadequate criterion for determining whether two individuals speak the same language?
2. What is the difference between marked and unmarked linguistic features?
3. There are languages in which all of the obstruent phonemes are voiceless, but there are no languages in which all of the obstruent phonemes are voiced. Suggest a reason for this asymmetry.
1. When the authors of our textbook illustrate linguistic reconstruction by inferring the form of some words of Proto-Romance, they imply that, in the history of French, the changes in the consonants (voicing and frication) preceded the changes in the vowels (reduction and apocope). For instance, Table 7.56 on page 277 shows the changes occurring successively and in the specified order. Do any of the other facts presented in that section (from French or other Romance languages) justify this implication?
2. Here are the Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin stems for a few parts of the human body. Use Grimm's law to identify the cognate English words.
3. Table 7.46 on pages 273 of our textbook lists several words that are quite similar in several languages of the Germanic family, including the word for summer. Here are the words for the other three seasons in the same languages:
What conclusion would you draw from this evidence about the vocabulary for seasons in proto-Germanic?
1. Why is simple conversion -- for instance, using a noun as an adjective or as a verb without changing its form -- more common as a way of adding new words to modern English than it was in Old English?
2. Of the words deer and venison, which is more likely to have entered English as a borrowing from French? Why?
3. The Old English word meaning "man" (not "human being," but specifically adult males) was wer. What word that survived into modern English was originally formed as a compound of wer?
1. The English word female entered the language through borrowing; it comes from a medieval French word for a young woman, femelle, which is a diminutive form derived from the Latin word femina, "woman." Other words borrowed from French words with the same diminutive ending -- chapel (from Old French chapele), novel (from nouvelle), pimpernel (from pimpernele), and so on -- have retained the vowel [ɛ], reduced it to a schwa, or absorbed it into a syllabic l. However, in the second syllable of female, it has been replaced instead by [ej]. Suggest a mechanism that would account for this exceptional change.
2. Many English nouns that end in unvoiced fricatives have plurals in which the fricative is voiced. For example, the plural of house /haws/ is houses /hawzəz/, the plural of half /hæf/ is halves /hævz/, and the plural of bath /bæθ/ is baths /bæðz/. However, some words that formerly exhibited this pattern now allow plurals in which the fricative is unvoiced. For instance, the plural of hoof /hʊf/, formerly hooves /hʊvz/, is now often hoofs /hʊfs/, and the plural of dwarf /dwɔɹf/, formerly dwarves /dwɔɹvz/, is now often dwarfs /dwɔɹfs/. Describe the mechanism that is producing this effect.
3. Look up the derivation of the English word hangnail and describe how folk etymology has influenced its form and meaning.
1. Identify three frequent causes of language change.
2. Read some of William Shakespeare's sonnets and identify at least three pairs of words that Shakespeare used as rhymes, but that do not rhyme in modern English.
3. Currently, speakers of American English are in frequent and intensive "language contact" with speakers of Spanish, particularly in the Southwestern United States (California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas). In what ways would a historical linguist expect American English to change as a result? Is there any evidence of such changes?
1. Can a command, expressed in an imperative sentence, have a presupposition? What happens if the presupposition is false?
2. When two similar things are topics in a discussion in English, a speaker will sometimes use the pronouns former and latter to refer to them and to distinguish them. Describe the pragmatic pattern that the hearer follows to identify the referents. Are these pronouns deictic?
3. Suppose someone proposed an additional conversational maxim, the Maxim of Interest: Try to make your contribution one that other participants in the conversation will find interesting or useful. What evidence might one use to establish or refute the existence of this maxim?
1. Figure 6.5 on page 220 of the textbook illustrates structural ambiguity by showing two tree structures for the same sequence of words. Identify a phrase that is a constituent of the sentence as diagrammed in part a. of the figure but is not a constitudent of the sentence as diagrammed in part b. Apply at least one of the constituency tests from section 1.4 of chapter five to confirm your answer.
2. Using Principles A and B from section 3.4 of chapter six of our textbook, explain why the pronoun himself in the sentence
(i) That boy's teacher encourages his students and admires himself.
must refer to the teacher, while the same pronoun in the sentence
(ii) That boy's teacher encourages his students, and he admires himself.
might refer either to the teacher or to the boy.
3. Identify the thematic role of each noun phrase in the ergative sentences
(i) The window will shatter.
(ii) Her purse dropped into the well.
Justify your answers.
1. When the meanings of words are closely related, but one word is more general than the other, the more general word is called a hypernym of the less general one (which, conversely, is called a hyponym of the other). Thus, for instance, red is a hypernym of scarlet, and color is a hypernym of red. Give two additional examples of hypernym-hyponym pairs from your native language.
2. What is the relation between the extension of a hypernym and the extension of its hyponym?
3. English has an unusually extensive selection of words for identifying natural or convenient units of kinds of stuff -- an ear of corn, a stalk of celery, a stick of gum, a ream of paper, a bolt of cloth, and so on. Do these examples, and others that you may be able to suggest, illustrate some conflation pattern? If so, what other concept is being integrated with the "natural or convenient unit" concept?
1. Diagram the deep structure that the authors of our textbook would propose for the sentence Which shirt did you tell me the size of?.
2. In section 4.1 of chapter 5, the authors suggest that verb raising in English applies "only to the non-modal auxiliaries have and be." Both of these words can also be used as nonauxiliary verbs. Give a short example of the use of each one as a main verb. Does verb raising apply to such uses of have and be? Justify your answer.
3. The NP Movement rule (page 187) in English operates not only in the production of passive sentences, but also in ergative sentences such as
(i) The window will shatter.
(ii) Her purse dropped into the well.
The deep structures of ergative sentences are similar to the structures of such analogous sentences as
(i') The impact of the baseball will shatter the window.
(ii') Eleanor dropped her purse into the well.
except that in (i) and (ii) the subject is missing -- there is an NP node with nothing beneath it, just as in the deep structure of a passive sentence.
Diagram the structures of sentences (i) and (ii) before and after the application of the NP Movement transformation.
1. Form a yes-or-no question from the sentence The train left at dawn. Diagram the deep structure that the authors would propose for this sentence. Show, using additional diagrams, the effects of the do-insertion and inversion transformations.
2. Diagram the deep structure that the authors would propose for the sentence Why should she go to Philadelphia?.
3. In the sentence Her mother and father went out for dinner, what elements are coordinated by the conjunction and? Justify your answer. Diagram the noun phrase that serves as the subject of the sentence.
1. For each of the following English verbs, describe the complements it can take and determine which ones must be present and which ones are optional: surprise, bore, infer, adapt.
2. Write a noun phrase in which the complement of the noun is a complementizer phrase (CP).
3. Are complementizers a lexical category or a functional category in English?
1. For each of the following English words, identify the syntactic category to which it belongs and provide a short justification for your classification, citing either inflectional or distributional evidence (or both): pumpkin, with, vague, any, Iowa, reduce.
2. Propose a phrase structure for each of the following English phrases: this course, very improbable, never leave, a visit to Florida, often plays the flute.
3. Propose a phrase structure for the English sentence Any friend of the trustees can attend the meeting on Wednesday.
1. One common process of word formation that the textbook does not discuss is borrowing, that is, taking a word from another language, often with substantial changes in its pronunciation, morphology, and meaning. Give three examples of words that have entered your native language in this way.
2. Sometimes the process by which acronyms are formed is reversed: The coiner decides on the acronym first and then contrives the full phrase or title by expanding each letter of the acronym into an appropriate word. For example, the acronymic name USA PATRIOT Act preceded the full title of the law ("the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001"). Such words are called contrived acronyms or backronyms. Give another example of a word or name formed in this way.
3. By which of the processes described in section 5 of chapter 4 of our textbook was the word backronym formed?
1. A few compound words in English seem to exhibit a pattern of construction that differs markedly from the ones described in the textbook: attorney general, knight-errant, prince regent, passer-by, sister-in-law. Identify the head of each of these compounds. How would you form the plurals of these nouns? What are their possessive inflections?
2. Give three examples of exocentric compounds in English, different from those presented in the textbook.
3. Give three examples of suppletion, either in English or in some other language that you know, different from those presented in the textbook.
1. Choose an English noun, verb, or adjective that consists of a single morpheme. Then add affixes to it one at a time until either you can add no more or you begin repeating yourself. Is there a maximum number of affixes that can occur in a single English word?
2. Construct tree diagrams, similar to those introduced in Figures 4.1 and 4.2, to show the morphological structure of the English words preview, unfairness, replayed, and imperceptibly.
3. Are there any constraints on the agentive -er suffix that the authors describe in the first paragraph of section 2 of chapter four (page 118)? Can you think of any English verbs to which this cannot be appended?
1. In exercise 1 of chapter 3 of the textbook (page 101), the authors use the IPA symbol [q] in their transcriptions of some of the Inuktitut words. This symbol was introduced very briefly and incidentally in chapter 2, but not emphasized, perhaps because the sound it denotes is not used in English. If you don't remember it, how would you find out what sound the symbol denotes in the IPA? What about a completely unanticipated IPA symbol ([ɓ], for instance)?
2. In exercise 3 of chapter 3 of the textbook (page 102), go through the list of fourteen Mokilese words and, for each occurrence of a vowel, specify the consonant that precedes it and the consonant that follows it, placing each such context record in one of two columns, depending on whether the vowel is voiced or voiceless. Explain why recording the contexts of the voiced vowels is useful in solving this problem, even though it appears on the surface to concern only the voiceless vowels.
3. Do part (c) of exercise 13 of chapter 3 of the textbook (page 106).
1. Phonemically transcribe the English words peremptory, lengthwise, aerial, and rebroadcast and construct a nucleation diagram (as in section 5.4 of the text) for each one.
2. If you know at least one language other than English, identify either an onset that can occur in that language but not in English, or an onset that can occur in English but not in that language. (If you know only English, identify an English loan-word that has never been completely naturalized because it has an onset that is normally impossible in English.)
3. Which of the phonological rules mentioned in chapter 3 accounts for the fact that, in exercise 1, many students in the class transcribed the word leg as [lejɡ]?
1. What sounds are in the class described by the matrix [−sonorant, +voice, +continuant]?
2. What matrix describes the class {j, w, ʍ}?
3. In section 2.3 of chapter three (p. 65), the authors call our attention to the fact that, in English, liquids and glides have voiceless allophones when they follow voiceless stops. Specify the class of sounds that become voiceless when following voiceless stops, using a feature matrix. Specify the class of voiceless stops using a feature matrix.
1. In some languages, the sounds represented in the IPA as [s] and [ʃ] are allophones of a single phoneme. Give a minimal pair that shows that this is not true in English.
2. Some dialects of American English lack the sound represented in the IPA as [ð], substituting [d] for it everywhere. Suggests two words that would constitute a minimal pair in most dialects of American English, but would be indistinguishable in those that lack [ð].
3. The past tense of most English verbs, including most newly invented ones, can be formed by appending either the sound [d], or the sound [t], or the sequence [əd] (in some dialects, [ɨd]). Form the past tense of each of the verbs listed at the end of this question and determine which of the three terminations it takes (in speech -- note that, in this question, we're not considering how the past tense is spelled when it is written). Then state the pattern that characterizes the verbs that form past tenses with [d], the pattern that characterizes the verbs that form past tenses with [t], and the pattern that characterizes the verbs that form past tenses with [əd].
The verbs: bang, elapse, fax, gab, lean, lift, log, mend, net, nip, pick, pit, plan, raid, ram, soar, soothe, and wheeze.
1. One widely recognized example of dialectal variation in American English appears at the end of words such as four, there, and fewer. Try to find on-line audio featuring politicians from various parts of the country uttering words in this category and transcribe their utterances narrowly.
2. Give an example of epenthesis in your native language.
3. Give an example of metathesis in your native language.
1. Ask a friend to read the words kangaroo, whistle, chocolate, and correction to you. Transcribe your friend's pronunciations of these words, using the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
2. What is the difference between tone and intonation, as linguists use those terms?
3. The authors of our textbook sometimes use features of the IPA that they don't fully explain. What is indicated when a tilde is placed over a vowel, as in õ? What is indicated when a small, lowered circle, ˳, is placed under another character?
1. In what ways have the organs that human beings use for the production of speech become more specialized and better adapted to this purpose during the evolution of our species?
2. Table 2.12 on page 31 of our textbook indicates that English has no interdental stops. Is it physiologically possible to produce such a consonant, or is it just an accident of linguistic history that English speakers don't use them?
3. What distinguishes affricates from fricatives?
1. Why do scholars who want to study language scientifically avoid prescriptive judgements about vocabulary, rules of grammar and punctuation, and so on?
2. Give an example -- not any of the ones that the textbook gives -- describing a change that has occurred in your native language over time.
3. What evidence could one give for or against the claim that a child learns his native language by trial and error, being rewarded for correct speech and punished for errors?
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created July 30, 2008
last revised December 9, 2009