Ling 001     Study Guide

This page is intended to help you learn the material in Ling 001 so that you perform at your best on the exams. It contains the following elements:

• A guide to studying the material during the semester.
• Key topics for each week; many of the topics are discussed in the web lecture notes, but some are only in your readings.
• Sample questions for the tests.

Click to return to the syllabus, schedule, or readings.

Readings

It's generally best to do the assigned readings in the textbook and online before class. That way you'll be better prepared to follow the lectures. Alternatively, if you do the reading after the lecture, you might find the reading a bit easier. Either way, it's best to do one soon after the other. You should read Pinker first for an overview and more conceptual background, and the supplementary readings for related or more detailed discussion.

Lecture notes

Don't assume that you can get everything you need to know from the online lecture notes! Not only is some material that you will be responsible for possibly not included in the online notes, but reading similar material in the various sources will make it much easier for you to master the concepts and terminology. It works far better than trying to cram at the last minute.

You may have wondered about how to take notes in class, given that the web pages contain much of the lecture content. Here's what I recommend.

• The lecture notes are posted the night before class. Many students have found it useful to take down additional notes on the print-out.
• During class, you shouldn't waste time taking down all the details that are on the screen, since you can view them later on the web. Instead, try to identify:
  • what seems most important;
  • what you're not sure about and would like to review or ask about; and
  • any significant additional material that's not on the screen.
• After class — ideally, later the same day — you should re-read the lecture notes while you review your own notes. If anything seems unclear, send email and ask for clarification, or bring it up in recitation. At this point you might make further notes about the main ideas, and then use these when you review for the exams.

Week 1

• Subdisciplines of linguistics
• Varying notions of "language" and "dialect"
  • Equal linguistic complexity and logic
• Prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar
  • Valid differences of opinion vs. plain falsehoods
  • Prestige dialect as socially determined, linguistically arbitrary choice
• "Correctness" in perspective
  • language as fashion:
    • arbitrary nature of linguistic judgments at various time periods
  • example of singular "they/their"

Week 2

• Basic forms of evidence of language as an "instinct"
  • Creolization and child creativity
  • Localization of language function in the brain (aphasia, imaging)
  • Independence of language from spoken modality
• Independence of language and intelligence
  • Williams Syndrome
  • Specific Language Impairment
• Nicaraguan Sign Language
• Sign language
  • ASL ≠ English; distinct from manually coded spoken language
  • basic language vs. fingerspelling
• Iconicity and arbitrary convention
• Parallel structures between spoken and signed language
• Analysis of signs
  • handshape
  • location
  • orientation
  • movement
• Classifiers

Week 3

• Basic parts of the vocal tract
  • terms in the black and white diagram on the web page
• Articulatory sources of sound used in language
  • voicing, frication, stop release
• Phonetic terms and symbols for English sounds
  • place and manner of articulation
• Natural classes
• Syllables and their parts
• Role of foot structure in Rhythm Rule and Expletive Infixation
• Phoneme and allophone
• Contextual determination of sound alternation
  • English aspiration, flapping, diphthong raising

Week 4

• Priority of speech over writing
  • species and individual
• Basic types of writing
  • Ideographic, logographic, syllabic, alphabetic
• Phonetic nature of all true writing
  • Including morphosyllabic Chinese
  • Therefore in theory any system can write any language
• Digraphs
• Homographs and homophones
• Origins of writing in pictographic systems
  • Rebus principle
  • Charades principle
• Whole Language vs. Phonics
  • Visual vs. phonological decoding
• Phoneme awareness
  • Phonemes in all spoken languages
  • Gradual development of awareness from words to syllables to phonemes
  • Some phonological awareness in all writing systems
  • Coarticulation as complicating factor
  • Role in dyslexia

Week 5

• Language requires basic elements and means for arranging them
• Linear order
  • basic word order such as SVO
• Constituency
  • hierarchical and recursive
  • tests
    • movement
    • standing alone
    • pro-form substitution
    • cleft sentence
    • conjunction
• Ambiguity
  • lexical vs. structural
• Phrase structure rules
  • lexical categories (noun, adjective, verb, determiner, etc.)
  • rules for combining them in phrases
  • complement
  • adjunction
• Auxiliary verbs
• special properties
• special structure
• do-support
• Don't worry about Pinker's discussion of:
  • the intermediate "X-bar" constituent
  • "word-chain devices"

Week 6

• Morpheme, allomorph
• Stem, root
  • Bound vs. free
  • Content vs. function
  • Open- vs. closed-class
• Affix, prefix, suffix
  • Non-affixal morphology (internal changes)
• Phonological vs. syntactic word
• Hierarchical constituent structure
  • Affixation and compounding
• Inflection vs. derivation
  • word-form of "same" word (lexeme) vs. "new" word
  • paradigms of inflected forms vs. networks of related words
  • relation of inflection and syntax
• Regular and irregular forms
  • suppletion

Week 7

• Sentence semantics
  • gap and trace (Pinker)
• Saussurean sign
• Lexical semantics of May we come in?
  • How the various restrictions combine to select a single interpretation
• Homonymy vs. polysemy
  • cf. "different words" and "same word"
• Inclusion and exclusion
  • hyponym and superordinate: X is always Y
  • compatible terms: X is sometimes Y
  • incompatible terms: X is never Y
• Synonyms
  • denotation, connotation
  • truth conditions: diagnostic of synonymy
• Intersection of sets for adjective and noun
  • complications for some adjectives
• Metaphor
  • especially as a fundamental aspect of language use and cognition
• Metonymy
  • synecdoche as subtype
• Pragmatics vs. truth-conditional semantics
  • felicity vs. grammaticality
• Speech acts
  • direct and indirect
  • performatives
• Gricean maxims

Week 8

• Pinker's general arguments against Whorf
  • Some claims based on misunderstanding of language
  • Thought exists without language
  • Language is an inadequate medium for thought
• Cultural and arbitrary categories reflected in language
  • But unnamed concepts can still be imagined
  • Eskimo and English words for snow
• Experiments in color perception
  • Naming strategy can introduce effect of language
  • But when this strategy is prevented, no linguistic bias is found
• "Thinking for speaking"
  • categories of one's language affect what one chooses to express, but only tendency
• Germanic prepositions
  • Even closely related languages and cultures can have quite different means of categorizing the world
• Don't worry about Pinker's discussion of:
  • Turing machine

Week 9

• Linguistic diversity in the world
  • problem (again) of defining "language"
  • political and cultural aspects
• Relatedness of languages
  • possible explanations for similarities among languages
  • notion of cognate
• Systematic correspondences in cognates
  • example of Proto-Indo-European stop consonants (Grimm's Law)
• The comparative method (Ringe reading)
  • power to show relationship even for words that "look" dissimilar
  • also the disprove relationship of superficially similar words
  • limits of long-range comparison
• Sources of change
  • language acquisition, language use, language and identity
  • not equivalent to "degeneration"
• Sound change
  • conditioned
  • unconditioned

Week 10

• Variation according to class, region, ethnicity
• Regional variation in American English
  • pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax
  • vowel shifts
  • tense and lax /æ/
  • happening despite national media
• Rules for copula use in African American Vernacular English
  • similar constraints as for contraction of auxiliary in standard English
• Social judgments of dialect differences
  • prestige vs. vernacular
  • upper vs. lower class perceptions
  • "shibboleth"
• Language and gender
  • physical differences (sex)
  • cultural differences (gender)
  • conflation with politeness, power relations, etc.
• Case studies
  • g-dropping in Norwich and New York
    • history and persistence across centuries
  • r-fulness in New York

Week 11

• Untutored learning by children
  • critical period
  • evidence from isolated children
• Stages of acquisition
  • babbling, one-word, two-word, multi-word
  • content words before grammatical morphemes
• Phonological development
  • typical changes and simplifications
• Development of grammatical complexity
  • comprehension (perception) in advance of production
  • adult word order usually obeyed
  • overregularization of morphology
  • simple versus complex phrases, and their combination
• Over- and under-extension of meanings
  • found even for adults
• Constraints on meaning
  • whole object
  • taxonomy
  • contrast

Week 12

• Speech errors and what they reveal about language representations and processing
  • units and types of errors
  • malapropism (=word substitution)
  • spoonerism (=onset/phoneme exchange)
• Limited role of "repressed thoughts"
• Word recognition in natural language
  • Uniqueness point
  • Gating experiments
  • Top-down vs. bottom-up processing
• Brain basics
  • lateralization
  • basic functions of each hemisphere (esp. for language)
• Aphasias (three major types): characteristics, locations, associated areas
  • Broca's
  • Wernicke's
  • conduction
• Use of brain imaging
• Recall sign language localization (Hickok et al., week 2)
  • left vs. right hemisphere
  • compared to spoken language

Week 13

• Animal communication
  • range of functions and types of displays
  • instinct vs. learning
• Limitations of systems
  • small repertoire of displays
  • lack of new displays, or combinations
  • "grammar" of nonlinguistic behaviors
• Basic properties of human language absent from animal communication
  • Phonological principle, open lexicon, recursive syntactic structure, compositional semantics
  • more generally, combining smaller elements to make larger ones in a hierarchy
• Theory of mind
  • not strictly linguistic, but crucial to many uses of language
• Theories of language origin
  • for communication of practical information
  • for improved thinking
  • for social interaction
• Physical adaptations of hominids
  • descent of larynx
  • sexual dimorphism of larynx
  • brain size and organization
• Two social theories
  • gossip as grooming (Dunbar)
  • symbolic representation of interrelationships (Deacon)
• A non-adaptive alternative
  • language as a spandrel

Week 14

• The syllable as a pervasive linguistic category
  • throughout a single language
  • across all languages
• Analogies of the "language instinct" to other (potentially) innate abilities
  • the "standard social science model"
  • evolutionary psychology
  • universal vs. innate
• Evaluating popular statements about language
  • lying versus BS

Sample Questions

Why is the sentence I like animals except for bananas semantically strange?

1. Because banana is a hyponym of animal.
2. Because banana is not a hyponym of animal.
3. Because banana and animal stand in a metonymic relation.
4. Because everybody likes bananas.

Which one of these statments is not true of inflectional morphology?

1. It creates new forms of the same word.
2. It has the potential to change the part of speech.
3. It often expresses grammatical features and relations between words in a sentence.
4. It is expressed, in English, by means of suffixes only.

Circle the sound that does not belong to the same natural class as the others.

[ t s z l d m n ]     (all the other sounds are alveolars)

Give a minimal pair in English for the sounds /p/ and /b/.

pill and bill

According to research discussed in class and in the reading, what is the most common source of dyslexia?

Dyslexia is usually caused by problems in phonemic awareness, i.e. the ability to break a word down into its component phonemes or sounds. Skill at performing this task (with conscious awareness) is crucial to mastering an alphabetic writing system.

Match up each pair of words with the term that best describes the semantic relationship between the two words. (Write the letter on the appropriate line.) Each term applies to just one pair of words, i.e. use each letter exactly once.