Information and review guide for midterm exam

1. How the exam is structured

• Availability, deadline, and time limit
  • The exam will be available on Sakai at 10:00am EDT on Th Mar 18 and must be completed by 11:55pm EDT on F Mar 19
  • The exam is written to take about one hour to complete
  • Once you begin the exam, it will be available to you for three hours and then it will close
    • Note: Even if you save your work and close the T&Q tool, the three-hour clock is still going
  • If your work is "saved" but not "submitted" by the deadline, Sakai will auto-submit what you have completed
• Software and technical information
  • The exam will be given in the "Tests & Quizzes" tool on Sakai
  • You may wish to compose each answer on your own computer first and paste it into Sakai when you are finished
  • Do not open multiple Sakai tabs in your browser while working on a T&Q, or you may lose your work
    • If you need to use something else on Sakai while you are taking the exam, just save your work, exit from the T&Q tool, do what you need to do, and come back to T&Q when you are ready

• Acceptable use of resources during the exam
  • All class materials are open-"book" for this exam
    • You may use course readings — material from optional readings will not be needed for the exam, but it is not an Honor Code violation to access them
    • You may use course handouts, lecture slides, past assignments and their feedback, your notes
    • You may use web pages linked from course materials (such as dictionaries, corpora, and other resources)
  • Use of other resources is not permitted (unless an exam question specifically directs you to use something, of course)
    • Collaboration with any other people is not allowed
    • Use of any non-class resources (other than those directly linked from class outlines or web sites), including books, articles, web sites, videos, etc., is not allowed
    • Use of course reserve readings (if not also assigned as a course reading) is not allowed
  • You are welcome to work with other members of the class to create a joint study guide or review sheet before the exam begins
    • But do not update any shared documents once the exam opens on Th March 18 at 10:00am EDT
  • You will be asked to attest to the Honor Pledge on the exam

• How to reach me during the exam period if you have clarification questions or technical issues
  • I will be on Zoom during class time on Th March 18 to answer questions live (or by email)
  • Core email availability hours: I will check email at least once per hour between 10am and 5pm (EDT) on Th March 18 and F March 19, except as noted here:
    • Th 2-3 (research meeting), 3:30-4:45 (class)
    • F 11-12:30 (faculty meeting), 3:30-4:30 (Ling Friday Colloquium)
  • Outside my core email availability hours, I may not receive an email from you in time to respond during your three-hour exam window, so please take this into consideration when you decide when to start the exam

2. Content covered by the exam

A. 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
• Hands-on questions asking you to use OJAD, JDIC, or BCCWJ tools and interpret the results in the context of linguistic analysis

You are responsible for the general concepts in the required reading assignments (not the optional ones). However, most of the emphasis will be 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 reading. 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.

B. Topics covered on 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] | [Hayes reading]
  • Be able to fill in a blank version of the consonant and vowel charts (row and column labels would be provided)
  • 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 (10c) 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 Sakai]
  • 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)

• Be able to give arguments that support of the relevance of moras and syllables for Japanese phonology, and be able to apply the algorithms for assigning mora structure and syllable structure in the Tokyo dialect [Tsujimura reading] | [moras handout] [syllables handout]

• 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) [Backhouse Ch 4 reading] | [handout]
  • 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 #4]

• 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
    • Know the phonological changes that each category of /consonant verb + ta/ undergoes
  • 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?