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.
The midterm will cover the contents of lectures 1 through 11, the associated readings, and perhaps the homework assignments. Below we've given in outline form a reminder of the key ideas, topics and terms for this material. Where several lectures cover the same topic, only a single outline point is given (so there are 7 rather than 11 outline points).
Here is a link to a copy of last year's midterm. Since the translation to HTML is imperfect, you may prefer to read this .pdf version. Note that the material covered by last year's exam included two lectures on sociolinguistics, which obviously will not be covered on this year's midterm, since they will not occur until later on. Note also that the morphological exercises done by last year's class were a somewhat different from those you will have done by the time of this year's midterm. For all these reasons, you should only rely on last year's exam as an indication of the kind of thing we are likely to ask about.
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