This review guide is intended to help you organize your studying and preparation for the midterm. Use lecture outline slides and data sets, your own notes, assigned readings (including handouts), and past assignments and their feedback.
You may be asked to apply what you know to a new or unfamiliar situation.
1. What to expect / how to prepare
- The exam is in class, on paper, closed-book
- Expect mostly application and problem-solving questions; for example:
- Distinguish between two groups of speech sounds
- Provide the "next step" in an analysis that is started for you
- Analyze morpheme alternations in a (small) data set
- Justify a choice between alternative analyses or approaches
- Explain how to test the predictions of a (new) model or proposal against data
- There may be a (brief) essay question on a topic such as:
- When scientists build models of the phenomena they are studying, what does this allow them to do?
- Why is it important to understand what a model predicts, even when you are pretty sure that the model is wrong?
- 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 this list of features
- 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
- 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: Units 1 and 2
- Basic analysis of sound patterns
- Know the basic phonetic properties of all consonants and vowels assigned for the phonetics review quiz
- Be able to identify the crucial difference(s) between classes of sounds, as when specifying the target or environment of a phonological rule
- Our feature model
- Know what broad sound classes each feature value distinguishes between
- Be able to use feature notation to describe specific sound classes
- Be able to use feature notation to describe the differences between sounds or sound classes
- Morphological alternation
- Separate words into morphemes in a data set
- Identify alternating morphemes and characterize their crucial environments
- Choose the best analysis (UR+rule(s) combination) of the alternation
- 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
- Be able to state a rule that produces appropriate allophones in the relevant environments
- General concepts relating to rules
- Use features insightfully to state the target, change, and environment for a rule
- When applicable, make generalizations across individual cases to state a single general rule
- Syllable structure
- Know the parts of the syllable
- Know which aspects of syllabification are universal vs. language-particular
- 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
- Models in scientific investigation
- Be able to apply the tools of a model to the analysis of a phonological data set
- Be able to understand and test the predictions of a model