Final exam information and review guide

This review guide is intended to help you organize your studying and preparation for the final. You are strongly encouraged to review lecture outline slides and data sets, your own notes, assigned readings (including handouts), and past assignments and their feedback.

On the exam, you may be asked to apply what you know to a new or unfamiliar situation.

Study strategies: Research shows that reading over materials and highlighting key terms is not necessarily the best way to study for an exam. Instead, strategies where you actively engage with the material — such as quizzing yourself, inventing (and answering) your own questions, organizing concepts into mindmaps, or re-doing practice problems or assignments without looking at your original answers — are found to be more effective. Preparing your notes sheet (see below) will also help you learn the material! (Here are more great exam study tips from UNC's Learning Center.)

1. What to expect / how to prepare

• The exam is in person, on paper, closed-book

• The exam is cumulative, but about 2/3 of the content will be from topics after the midterm

• Expect mostly application and problem-solving questions; for example:
  • Distinguish between two sets of segments (speech sounds)
  • Provide the "next step" in an analysis that is started for you
  • Analyze morpheme alternations, segment distribution, or syllable structure in a data set
  • Justify a choice between alternative analyses or approaches
  • Explain how to test the predictions of a (possibly new!) model or proposal against data

• There may be a (brief, big-ideas) essay question on a topic such as:
  • Models in scientific research
  • Scientific ethics

• You may prepare and bring one page of notes:
  • Letter-size paper (8.5 x 11 inches) or A4, or smaller
  • On one side, you may print out the handout "List of phonological features in our model"
  • You may add notes on both sides of the paper
  • Other than the list of features, your notes page must be handwritten — no screenshots or scans of pre-existing class materials
    • If you handwrite on your device and print the result, that's okay
  • Your notes page must be turned in with the exam (it won't be graded)

2. Topics covered since the midterm exam

See also: Midterm review guide

• Segment distribution
  • Determine whether the distribution of two sounds is unpredictable (contrastive) or predictable (complementary)
  • Determine which/how many phoneme categories to propose, and what their URs should be if we are working in a rule-based model
  • State a rule that produces appropriate allophones in the relevant environments

• Syllable structure
  • Know the parts of the syllable
  • Know which aspects of syllabification are universal vs. language-particular
  • Know how sonority might determine possible nuclei and possible clusters
  • Use phonological evidence to determine (and argue for) how a language assigns segments to syllables
  • Apply concepts from syllable structure to analyze a pattern involving morpheme alternations or allophone distribution

• Optimality Theory
  • Be able to recognize and explain the difference between a rule and a constraint

  • Be able to use the basics of the OT formalism insightfully and accurately (see also OT formalism quiz review guide)
    • Input and outputs
    • Constraints
      • Defining constraints and assessing violations
      • Distinguishing markedness and faithfulness constraints
    • Tableaus
    • Hasse diagrams

  • Be able to carry out an OT analysis
    • Finding informative losing candidates
    • Making valid ranking arguments
    • Ranking syllable-structure constraints to assign segments to syllable structure in a language
    • Ranking feature-related constraints to generate a complementary-distribution (allophone) pattern, or the other patterns in this factorial typology (contrast, neutralization, inventory gap)

  • Be able to generate the factorial typology of a set of constraints and determine the types of language that it will produce

• Models in scientific investigation
  • Apply the tools of a model to the analysis of a phonological data set
  • Explain and test the predictions of a model

• Scientific ethics in phonology and linguistics
  • Be able to discuss some reasons we might want to identify "native speakers" of a language, and some problems with the use of this term and concept
  • Be able to discuss some ethical considerations and potential problems related to collecting linguistic data from speakers or communities