1. How the exam is structured
- Availability, deadline, and time limit
- The exam will be available on Sakai at 12:00 noon EDT on Tu Oct 6 and must be completed by 11:55pm EDT on Th Oct 8
- 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
- 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
- Some questions may require you to upload a file in Sakai T&Q
- Acceptable use of resources during the exam
- All class materials are open-"book" for this exam
- You may use the textbook, lecture outline slides & self-paced learning slides, past assignments and their feedback, your notes
- You may use web pages linked from course materials (such as videos)
- 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 during the period when the exam is open
(Tu Oct 6 at noon – Th Oct 8 at 11:55pm)
- Studying and reviewing with classmates before the exam opens is encouraged!
- 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
- Collaboration with any other people is not allowed during the period when the exam is open
(Tu Oct 6 at noon – Th Oct 8 at 11:55pm)
- You will be asked to attest to the Honor Pledge on the exam
- All class materials are open-"book" for this exam
- How to get help during the exam period if you have clarification questions
- On approximately M Oct 5, we will post a schedule of time blocks (linked from right here)
during which each instructor is available to answer questions by email
- During these time blocks, the instructor you contact will do their best to respond within about one hour after the email is received
- Outside these time blocks, we may not receive a message from you in time to respond during your three-hour exam window, so please take this into consideration as you make plans for when to start the exam
- You may email any instructor if you have questions, not just your own TA
- On approximately M Oct 5, we will post a schedule of time blocks (linked from right here)
during which each instructor is available to answer questions by email
2. Course content covered by the exam
The following are suggested review topics to help you organize your studying and preparation. You may wish to review class notes, lecture outline slides and self-paced learning slides and videos, assigned readings, and past assignments and their feedback.
The exam will include:
- short questions to test your knowledge of facts, terms, and concepts
- These could be short explanations, multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, true/false, etc.
- problem-solving questions to test your ability to apply those concepts
You may be asked to apply what you know to a new or unfamiliar situation.
(1) The study of linguistics
- Prescriptive grammar, descriptive grammar, and mental grammar
(2) Phonetics
- American English consonants (Table 2.12 on p 38 of CL, but not [ʍ])
- Know what sound each of these IPA symbols stands for
- Be able to describe each of these consonants in terms of the crucial four (or five) properties laid out in the slides
- American English vowels (Figure 2.11 on p 42 of CL)
- Know what sound each of these IPA symbols stands for
- Be able to describe each of these consonants in terms of the crucial four properties laid out in the slides
- Given a familiar word in English spelling, be able to:
- Match it to a phonetic transcription
- Find and correct a major error in a phonetic transcription
(3) Phonology
- Using the properties of segments (phones, speech sounds),
describe a group of segments as a natural class
- Reminder: In the context of phonetics, we want to describe sounds in as much detail as possible to understand how they are produced. But when we are working with phonology (mental grammar of sound patterns), we want our natural classes, rules, etc. to be as general and simple as possible. So, when you are describing a natural class or stating a rule, use as few properties as you can (while making sure that your claim isn't so general that it's inaccurate).
- The properties to know:
- The consonant and vowel properties as noted in (2) above
- Some useful additional sound properties newly introduced in the phonology unit (Ch 3): strident (=sibilant), obstruent, sonorant, consonant, vowel
- Analyzing the distribution of two sounds to determine
whether they belong to two separate phonemes or are allophones of
the same phoneme
- What steps do we follow in our analysis procedure?
- Stating a phonological rule using sound properties/natural classes and rule notation
(4) Morphology
- Finding morphemes in a data set from an unfamiliar language
- Finding morphemes in a data set from English
- Identifying the word categories involved when a morpheme is added
- Determining whether two words share a morpheme in common
- Tree diagrams for morphological structure
- Classifying morphemes and morphological structures: free/bound,
root/base/affix, prefix/suffix/infix, inflectional/derivational, compound
- See especially the tables of English derivational and inflectional morphemes in CL Ch 4
- Headed (endocentric) and headless (exocentric) compounds
- Word-formation rules (WFRs) for affixes
- How our model of mental grammar treats:
- Unpredictable information about a specific morpheme or word
- Predictable/systematic information about how words are formed
(5) Syntax
- Understand the difference between grammaticality and concepts
like 'being true' or 'making sense'
- Be able to identify the categories of the words in a phrase or sentence
- Remember that we have tests we can use to confirm that a word belongs to particular categories (for some of the categories)
- Be able to use the basic X'-schema to draw tree structures for phrases and sentences, including embedded sentences
- Understand what is meant by complement options,
and understand why this is a necessary part of our model of mental grammar
- Be able to expand the X'-schema with the modifier structure and the
VP double-complement structure when appropriate
- Understand how trees represent the constituent structure of sentences
- Know the three constituency tests that we have used, and how to apply them
- Be able to relate the multiple structures of an ambiguous sentence to its multiple meanings using evidence about constituents
- Be able to apply the Inversion, Wh Movement, and Do Insertion rules to a deep structure in order to produce the appropriate surface structure, where applicable