1. How the exam is structured
Exam #1 will be given M Nov 6 in class.
The exam will include:
- short questions to test your knowledge of facts, terms, and concepts
- These could be short explanations, multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, true/false, etc.
- problem-solving questions to test your ability to apply those concepts
The exam is closed-book, closed-notes.
You may be asked to apply what you know to a new or unfamiliar situation.
No question on the exam will assume that you can make native-speaker grammaticality judgments for English, but some questions will require that you know the meanings of common English words (for morphological analysis).
2. Course content covered by the exam
The following are suggested review topics to help you organize your studying and preparation. You may wish to review lecture outline slides and recitation activities, your own notes, assigned readings, and past assignments and their feedback.
(1) Morphology
- Finding morphemes in a data set from an unfamiliar language
- Finding morphemes in a data set from English
- Identifying the word categories involved when a morpheme is added
- Determining whether two words share a morpheme in common
- Tree diagrams for morphological structure
- Classifying morphemes and morphological structures:
- free/bound
- root/base/affix
- prefix/suffix
- inflectional/derivational
- How our model of mental grammar treats:
- Unpredictable information about a specific morpheme or word
- Predictable/systematic information about how words are formed
(2) Syntax
- Understand the difference between being grammatical and concepts
like 'being true' or 'making sense'
- Be able to identify the categories of the words in a phrase or sentence
- Remember that we have tests we can use to confirm that something is a N, V, or A
- Be able to use the basic X'-schema to draw tree structures for phrases and sentences, including embedded sentences
- Understand what is meant by complement options, and understand why this is a necessary part of our model of mental grammar
- Be able to expand the X'-schema when appropriate:
- Modifier structure
- VP double-complement structure
- Understand constituent structure in the data and the model
- Know the three constituency tests that we have used, and how to apply them to a sentence
- Determine what predictions a tree makes about constituents
- Be able to relate the multiple structures of an ambiguous sentence to its multiple meanings using constituents
- Be able to apply the Inversion, Wh Movement, Do Insertion, and Verb Raising rules
to a deep structure in order to produce the appropriate surface structure, where applicable
- Be able to discuss, systematically, differences between English and other languages with respect to:
- Differences in the X' schema
- Differences in the way that languages apply syntactic rules
(3) First-language acquisition of morphology and syntax
- Be able to recognize and analyze L1 acquisition-related phenomena such as:
- morphological overgeneralization
- systematic generalizations about syntactic development, especially when particular classes of morphemes are missing from syntactic structures, or when non-adult-like syntactic rules are being applied
3. Some further resources
- Tips and Tools for learning, studying, and exams, from the Learning Center at UNC-CH