This review guide is intended to help you organize your studying and preparation for Quiz #1 (phonetics/phonology). Use lecture outline slides and data sets, your own notes, assigned readings and handouts, and past prep questions and their feedback.
You are responsible for the general concepts in the required reading assignments (not the optional ones). However, the quiz 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 quiz is in class, on paper, closed-book except for your notes page (see below)
- Types of questions to expect:
- Short-answer questions drawing on 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 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 quiz (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 quiz: Morphology
Many, though not necessarily all, of the following topics will be included on the quiz.
***(We can now answer most of the questions on the handout Context: Phonetics and phonology!)
- 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 |
*** PQ?? 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?