1. How the exam is structured
- The final exam will be much like the midterms, but a little longer.
- The exam will be written to take about 1.5-2 hours for most people. You may use all 3 hours if you need to.
- Because we have to maintain exam security, anyone who arrives after 8:30 will have 15 points deducted from their score; this becomes 30 points after 9:00. (For ARS exam students, this applies at 30 minutes and 60 minutes after your scheduled start time.)
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. Remember that lecture outlines and homework assignments are a very good reminder of which topics, concepts, and key terms we have focused on the most in our course. Try doing homework problems again without looking at your old answers!
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
You may be asked to apply what you know to a new or unfamiliar situation. For some exam questions, you may need to pull together ideas from different course topics!
The final exam is cumulative, so it will include material from the entire course. At least half of the exam will focus on the material covered after Exam #2, but much of the last third of the course actually depends on being able to apply the skills and knowledge that you developed during the first two thirds. So reviewing material (and instructor feedback) from the midterm exams will be helpful in reviewing for the final exam.
Material from the first part of the course
- Review guide for Exam #1
- Review guide for Exam #2
- Schedule of topics (with links to lecture outlines for each topic)
(1) First and second language acquisition
(Some of this material was covered in the phonology, morphology, and syntax sections of the course, but this list brings all the acquisiiton-related topics together.)
- Be able to use your general knowledge of linguistics and mental grammar
to analyze phenomena seen in
- Child language (first language, L1) acquisition
- Second language (L2) acquisition
- Remember that
the normally developing child's process of acquiring a native language
is different from learning a skill
- Be able to discuss the role (or lack thereof) of imitation and caregiver feedback in L1 acquisition
- Be able to discuss the potential role (or lack thereof) of caregiver (infant-directed) speech and general cognitive development in L1 acquisition
- Understand the importance of the question of whether there is a critical period for language development, and be able to discuss and evaluate evidence concerning this question
- Be able to describe pros and cons of the naturalistic
and experimental methods of investigating child language acquisition
- Be able to recognize and analyze L1 acquisition-related phenomena such as:
- child-specific phonological rules
- 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
- Be familiar with some key concepts in L2 acquisition:
- interlanguage
- transfer
(2) Semantics
- Word and morpheme meaning
- Understand extension and intension, and how they relate to meaning
- Sentence meaning and truth conditions
- Know how to find the extension and intension of a sentence
- Be able to make a case for whether one sentence entails another
- Be able to determine when we have cases of paraphrase or contradiction
- Understand how the meaning of a (declarative) sentence relates to the meanings of the subject and predicate
- Meaning in context (pragmatics)
- Be able to determine whether one sentence presupposes another
- Be able to use the Cooperative Principle and the conversational maxims to discuss cases of indirect communication (you will be given the names of the four maxims)
(3) Sociolinguistics/Language variation
- Be able to use your general knowledge of linguistics and mental grammar
to
- Analyze language varieties
- Describe differences between varieties
- Understand and be able to use the terms language, dialect,
variety
- Know some of the factors that distinguish one variety of a language from another, including regional, generational, and social factors
(4) Historical linguistics
- Be able to use your general knowledge of linguistics and mental grammar
to
- Analyze changes in a language over time — including phonetics/phonology, morphology, and syntax
- Understand and be able to discuss some of the factors responsible for
language change, especially with respect to language acquisition and
language variation:
- systematic sound change
- analogy
- reanalysis
- Understand the basic concept of applying comparative reconstruction in order to
reconstruct words or sounds in an ancestor language
- Be able to identify and describe sound correspondences in words/morphemes from genetically related languages
- Be able to state (using phonetic properties and natural classes) what sound changes have applied in each descendant language
- Understand some of the potential dangers in using "similar" words in two languages as a basis for claiming that those languages are genetically related