Linguistics 001 -- Final Exam study guide

Here is a link to last year's final in html form, and one in pdf form. Some warnings: last year's final was not cumulative, while this year's is; the material covered last year was a little different; the formatting of the html version leaves a lot to be desired.

Because the final will be cumulative, you should look at the midterm study guide with respect to lectures 1 to 11.

We repeat for emphasis the advice given in the midterm study guide:

This document will give you some key terminology, topics and questions to help focus your review for the mid-term exam. You should not assume that this guide is exhaustive: in principle, anything in the assigned reading or covered in the course lectures is fair game. However, you can rely on this guide to give you a fair picture of the relative importance of various aspects of the course material as we see them.

The exam will not contain trick questions, nor will it require knowledge of unimportant details. For instance, p. 144 of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language tells you that Hermann von Helmholtz was born in 1821 and died in 1894. We are certainly not going to ask you for these dates. In fact, since Helmholtz was not covered in any of the lectures, and will not be mentioned in this study guide, you could reasonably conclude that he is quite unlikely to be mentioned on the exam.

Unlike the midterm, the final exam will include a choice of essay questions. This means that if you develop deeper knowledge of particular areas covered by the course, it is likely that you will be able to make use of this knowledge in an essay.

For material covered in the homework assignments, please refer to the assignments themselves.

This page covers lectures 12 to 25. We have included some things from the texts as well as the lectures.

  1. Semantics.Lexeme vs. word. Sense and reference. Compositionality. Syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic relationships. Homonymy, polysemy, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy.
  2. Pragmatics. Speech acts (direct and indirect). Performatives. Felicity conditions. Gricean maxims. Given vs. New.
  3. Sociolinguistics. Marking of region and class. Stigmatized features. Genre. Register, formality. Interaction of formality and (social) class. Matched guise experiments.
  4. Language and gender. Sex vs. gender. Biological sex differences related to language, including secondary sexual characteristics (larynx and pharynx), and suggested brain differences. Difference theories (e.g. the two-cultures theory) vs. dominance theories. The role of power.
  5. Song, verse, language games. Analysis of language games. Scansion of English accentual-syllabic verse. Relationship between poetic meter and music. Types of metrical feet.
  6. Reading and writing. History of writing. Types of writing systems: pictographic/ideographic/logographic/syllabic/phonemic. Graphemes vs. phonemes. Design of new writing systems. Literacy around the world. Reading disabilities.
  7. Production and perception. Types of speech errors. Freud's theories vs. more recent work. Time course of spoken word recognition, "uniqueness point."
  8. Child language acquisition Critical periods. Stages of development in various aspects of language and language use. Role of imitation, reinforcement, analogy. Role of experience vs. "instinct" vs. general cognitive development.
  9. Brain and language. Dominant and non-dominant hemispheres of the cerebral cortex, motor strip, auditory cortex, Broca's area, Wernicke's area, corpus callosum. Aphasia, agrammatism. Split brain patients. Localization and modularity.
  10. Survey of linguistics courses. Not relevant to the exam.
  11. Languages of the world. What is a language? Language families and family trees; reasons for tree-like structure. Names of the larger families, and family trees for important modern (and ancient) languages (surveyed in Crystal 294-329). Language typology, with the specific examples of syllable structure and relative order of Subject/Verb/Object.
  12. Language change. Varieties of language change. Sources of language change. Types of sound change: splits and mergers, assimilation, dissimilation, metathesis; syncope and apocope. Reconstruction of proto-languages. Nostratic.
  13. Signed and spoken language. Nature of sign languages. A.S.L. and "signed English." Oralist vs. manualist approaches. The experiment of Psammetichus and the development of sign languages. Writing systems for sign language. Cochlear implants.
  14. Human and non-human communication. Ethology. Types, functions and evolutionary origins of communicative displays. Instinctive vs. learned aspects. Comparison of human and non-human communicative systems.