The exam will include:
- discussion questions to test your knowledge of facts, terms, and concepts
- problem-solving questions (based on data sets) to test your ability to apply those concepts
You are more likely to be asked to apply what you know to a new data set than to discuss specific data sets you have already seen -- but practicing analysis strategies on data sets from class is a good way to prepare.
The following are suggested review topics to help you organize your studying, but be sure to review class notes, lecture outlines, assigned readings, and past homework assignments as well.
LING 101 background knowledge that we have reviewed
- Phonetics and phonology
- The assigned phonetic symbols and their properties (based on the sounds of English, with a few extra vowels)
- The difference between sounds that are allophones of a single phoneme and sounds that belong to separate phonemes
- How to describe a class of sounds based on their shared properties, or explain which properties are affected when one sound changes into another
- Morphology
- How to find the morphemes in a data set
- Basic morphology terminology (as reviewed in class)
- How to describe a morphological process based on a data set (example: how is the noun plural formed in English?)
- Inflectional vs. derivational morphology
- Syntax
- The basic X-bar structure of a phrase: head, complement, specifier
- How to draw a tree structure for a verb (V) and its object, or an adposition (P) and its object
- The IP and CP structures of a sentence
- Movement rules: V to I, and I to C (as covered in class)
Basic concepts about language and language change
- What is the arbritrariness of the sign? What are some exceptions to this general principle? How are these questions relevant for the study of historical linguistics?
- What is the difference between synchronic and diachronic analysis in linguistics?
- What are some of the linguistic factors and some of the social factors involved in the initiation and propagation of language change?
- What does it mean for languages to be classified...
- genetically?
- typologically?
- What is a protolanguage? How do we indicate that a linguistic form (sound, morpheme, word, sentence) is a hypothesized reconstructed form?
- What are some reasons why languages might have words/morphemes (sound-meaning correspondences) that look very similar?
- Be able to evaluate the pros and cons of "simplification" as an explanation for language change
- A very important point: Understand the role of factors such as ambiguity, reanalysis, and analogy as they apply to sound change, morphological change, and syntactic change
Sound change
- What does it mean to say that sound change is typically systematic?
- Know the designated types of sound change; be able to identify them from examples or describe them
- Be able to write a sound-change rule using notation such as '>', '/', '__'
- Be able to compare two stages of a language and say what sound changes have occurred
- Where the relevant information is available, be able to determine whether there has been...
- phonetic change
- phonemic change
- phonological grammar change
- Be able to identify and distinguish shifts, mergers, and splits
- Be able to tell when two sound changes that have applied to a language must be ordered
- What factors in language acquisition (transmission between generations) can give rise to sound change? What is the relationship between the study of phonetics and our understanding of what kinds of sound change are common?
Morphological change
- Be able to identify allomorphic change and boundary shift
- What is analogical change?
- Be able give an explicit characterization of an analogical change as seen in a data set
- Be able to identify and distinguish leveling and extension
- How is morphological change different from sound change?
- Be able to compare two stages of a language and say what morphological changes have occurred
Syntactic change
- What are the basic constituents of a sentence?
- What are the two most common basic constituent orders?
- How do we account for basic constituent order in the X-bar model syntax?
- What relationship do we predict between basic constituent order and the order of adpositions vs. their objects? Why do we make this prediction?
- What are the three main morphological types? What is the 'cycle of change' in morphological typology? What are some of the types of language change responsible for 'driving' that cycle?
- What is grammaticalization?
- How does grammaticalization relate to morphological typology and the 'cycle of change'?
- How can thinking about grammaticalization provide potential evidence for earlier stages of the syntax of a language?
- Be able to compare two stages of a language and say what syntactic changes have occurred