This review guide is intended to help you organize your studying and preparation for Quiz #3 (sociolinguistics). Use lecture outline slides and data sets, your own notes, assigned readings and handouts, and past prep questions and their feedback.
The quiz will focus on topics that were discussed in class.
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 prep questions or in class
- Questions providing results from a dictionary or corpus search 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
- You may write notes on both sides of the paper
- 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: Sociolinguistics
Many, though not necessarily all, of the following topics will be included on the quiz.
- Distinguish between prescriptive and descriptive discussions of language structure, and identify circumstances in which each type is useful
- Define sociolinguistics and give examples of social factors that differentiate language communities
- Discuss some of the complications or factors we need to take into account when we want to study the effects of speaker gender on language use
- Know the following personal pronouns, and the standard (prescriptive)
expectations for how they code the gender of the speaker and the formality of the situation
- 1st person: ore, boku, atasi, watasi, watakusi
- 2nd person: omae, kimi, anta, anata, (name/title instead of pronoun)
- Explain the social factors involved in choosing formal or informal forms in Japanese
- Identify formal / informal forms based on their morphology
- Explain the term SSS and how it relates to social hierarchy
- Explain the in-group/out-group distinction, and identify situational factors that determine when someone must be or cannot be in the speaker's in-group
- Express the participant structure of events/states with respect to:
- Meaning: The thematic roles agent, recipient, theme
- Sentence structure: Case (-ga, -o, other)
- Identify 'give' vs. 'receive' verbs based on how thematic roles correspond to case
- Discuss interactions among horizontal distance,
vertical position (social hierarchy), and in-group/out-group, and
how they determine options for "polite" language in Japanese, especially for:
- Verbs meaning 'go': ik-, mair-, irassyar-
- Verbs meaning 'give' or 'receive': age-, moraw-, kure-, sasiage-, kudasar-, itadak-