Information and review guide for midterm exam

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 (especially handouts), and past assignments and their feedback.

You are responsible for the general concepts in the required reading assignments (not the optional ones). However, the exam will focus on topics that were discussed in class. Also, you do not need to memorize particular Japanese words, from the readings or otherwise.

Some questions may ask you to think about how a rule or pattern is similar to or different from a rule or pattern that we have seen in class or in a handout. Some questions may involve data from non-standard dialects of Japanese, and you may be asked to apply and compare or modify the analysis for standard Japanese (as covered in class) to make it fit the other dialect. More generally, 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 except for your notes page (see below)

• Types of questions to expect:
  • Short-answer questions covering basic concepts and definitions
  • Small or medium-sized data set-based questions, similar to those that we have worked through in homework assignments or in class
  • Questions providing results from OJAD or BCCWJ that ask you to interpret the results in the context of linguistic analysis

• 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 Phonetics: Reference charts
  • You may add notes on both sides of the paper
  • Other than the printed handout, 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)
  • You may collaborate with classmates to prepare your notes page, but the writing on your page must be your own

2. Content covered by the exam

Many, though not necessarily all, of the following topics will be included on the exam.

Phonetics and phonology

(We can now answer most of the questions on the handout Context: Phonetics and phonology!)

• Know the phonetic vowel and consonant categories of Japanese [handout] | [Tsujimura (2007) Ch 2 reading]
  • Be able to give the phonetic description for any symbol on the charts
  • Be able to give the phonetic symbol(s) from the charts to match a phonetic description

• Be able to give the romanization (spelling) for the assigned hiragana characters [handout — see (8) at end]

• Be able to carry out a segmental (phoneme/allophone) analysis [handout]
  • Understand complementary (predictable) and contrastive (unpredictable) distribution, and be able to make a case for either type
  • Be able to state rules to produce allophones in the appropriate environments
  • Be able to state rules in terms of phonetic properties and natural classes

• Know the major segmental rules of Japanese [handout — click through to Canvas]
  • Be able to take an underlying (phonemic) form and show what it would look like after the relevant rules have applied
  • Be able to take a surface form, with surface allophones, and state its underlying (phonemic) form

• Be aware that a phoneme or a rule might be restricted to a particular subpart of the lexicon (such as loanwords or non-loanwords)

• Use the concepts of moras and syllables in the context of Japanese [handout]
  • Be able to give arguments that support of the relevance of moras and syllables for Japanese phonology
  • Understand what constitutes a legal mora and a legal syllable in Japanese

• Know the basic definition of pitch accent, and which aspects of pitch accent phonology are specified in the lexicon versus which aspects can be handled by the grammar (an algorithm) [handout] | [Backhouse Ch 4 reading]
  • Know how to apply the tone assignment algorithm for Tokyo Japanese

Morphology

• Morpheme segmentation — given a set of morphologically complex forms, compare their segmental content and their meanings to identify the morphemes they contain [Data sets for practice: adjectives | verbs | HW #3]

• Know how to apply the basic classification terms for morphemes ([handout]), especially
  • free/bound
  • root/affix; prefix/suffix

• Know the word classes (syntactic categories, "parts of speech") used in Japanese, and some of the tests for determining word class [handout] | [ Distributional evidence for word class: Corpus data] | [Corpus data on N, AN] | [A/V inflection summary]
  • Focus on V, A, N, AN, VN
  • Given a word/root in several contexts, be able to recognize what word class it belongs to
  • Be able to suggest ways of determining whether some word/root belongs to word class "X" or "Y"

• Recognize the verb suffixes covered on class handouts [verb morphology data set] | [A/V inflection summary]
  • Know how the suffix forms differ for "vowel verbs" and "consonant verbs"
  • Be able to classify a given verb as vowel/consonant verb (or say when this is not possible), given inflected forms
  • Past tense:
    • Recognize that -ta (sometimes appearing as -da) is the verb past-tense suffix
    • Understand the relationship between the past-tense phonological changes in the consonant-verb roots, and the options for legal mora structure in Japanese
  • You do not need to memorize specific irregular verbs, but if you are given an irregular verb, be able to identify where its pattern differs from that of a regular verb

• About rendaku [examples]
  • Under what morphological and semantic conditions does this rule apply?
  • What is the phonological characterization of this rule? That is, what happens to a word when the rendaku rule applies to it?
  • What is the phonological context in which this rule is blocked?