(i) Write up and turn in exercise 8.6 (pages 231-232) from A linguistics workbook.
(ii) If you are a native speaker of English, write up and turn in exercise 9.1 (pages 255-257) from A linguistics workbook. Otherwise: Give an example, in your native language, of each of the six kinds of errors illustrated in (4) on page 421 of our textbook (exchange errors, anticipation errors, perseveration errors, blends, shifts, and substitutions) and identify the linguistic constituents involved in each case.
(iii) Exchange errors at the phonological level occur more often in stressed syllables than in unstressed ones and involve the movement of syllable onsets more often than syllable nuclei or syllable codas. What, if anything, do these observations show about the process of linguistic production?
(i) Write up and turn in exercise 8.12 (pages 249-251) from A linguistics workbook.
(ii) People sometimes speak when they are alone and do not expect anyone else to hear what they say. What purposes might speakers have in such cases? Are there any distinctive characteristics of the phonetics, phonology, morphology, or syntax of such utterances?
(iii) Are there any acts that can only be performed by means of spoken language, never in written language, or vice versa?
This exercise was distributed as a handout in class on November 17. Write it up and turn it in. (I am indebted for the exercise to William O'Grady, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, and Janie Rees-Muller, the authors of Contemporary Linguistics, fifth edition. I discovered the exercise at the Web site for that book.)
(i) Write up and turn in exercise 6.1 (pages 199-200) from A linguistics workbook.
(ii) In some ways, broadcast television and radio tend to standardize language, reducing or obscuring regional and class variations. On the other hand, the same media sometimes serve as platforms for the development and popularization of new linguistic styles or registers. Our textbook mentions play-by-play sports reporting as an example (in exercise 5 on page 309); talk-radio political commentary is another. Identify another linguistic style found primarily in broadcast media and describe some of its distinctive markers (in phonology, morphology, syntax, or semantics)
(i) Find and cite three cases in which speakers or writers have used semantically anomalous phrases (in real-world utterances, not artificially constructed examples). In each case, explain the nature of the anomaly, state whether the phrase is self-contradictory, and suggest what, if anything, the speaker or writer may have intended to communicate by means of the semantic anomaly.
(ii) English often has separate words for adult male, adult female, and pre-adult forms of some species of animals (e.g., bull, cow, calf; stag, hind, fawn). Find other examples of this pattern of lexicalization. If you know another language well, try to find similar examples in that other language and draw a tentative conclusion about the relative prevalance of this pattern.
(iii) The lexicalization pattern described in the preceding exercise is declining in English; for many species, the sex-specific or age-specific words are very rare and strike many native speakers as obsolete (e.g., leveret (pre-adult hare), drake (adult male duck), and the pattern isn't used for newly encountered animals. Suggest an explanation for this decline.
(iv) Write up and turn in exercise 5.6 (pages 193-195) from A linguistics workbook.
(i) Write up and turn in exercise 4.10 (pages 119-121) from A linguistics workbook.
(ii) Write up and turn in exercise 4.14 (pages 137-139) from A linguistics workbook.
(iii) Write up and turn in exercise 8 (page 220) from chapter 5 of our textbook. Then answer the questions posed in that exercise for each of the following sentences:
What do these examples show about this method of determining the subject of a sentence?
(i) Write up and turn in exercise 3.3 (pages 57 and 58) from A linguistics workbook.
(ii) Propose a tree diagram for each of the following English sentences:
(iii) Write up and turn in exercise 4.6 (pages 103-105) from A linguistics workbook.
(i) Write up and turn in exercise 2.2 (page 35) from A linguistics workbook.
(ii) Read this question aloud and transcribe your own speech.
(iii) Write up and turn in exercise 2.3 (pages 37-38) from A linguistics workbook.
(i) Write up and turn in exercise 1.5 (pages 19-20) from A linguistics workbook.
(ii) Write up and turn in exercise 1.7 (pages 23-24) from A linguistics workbook.
(iii) In some compound words (which are called endocentric compounds), the meaning of the compound is a subconcept or specialization of the meaning of its head element. For example, fruitcake is endocentric, since a fruitcake is a kind of cake. Other compounds are exocentric; for example, a cheesehead is a fan of the Green Bay Packers, not a kind of head. Classify the following compounds as endocentric or exocentric: scarecrow, horseshoe, flash memory, apple core, search engine, foghorn, saber-tooth.
(iv) Our textbook describes exocentric compounds as headless, because the supposed head element "does not contribute its semantic and grammatical properties to the meaning of the compound." (For example, if foot were the head of the exocentric compound bigfoot, one would expect to find the plural bigfeet; instead, or at least in addition, one finds that it is bigfoots.) Find one or more other examples, not mentioned in our textbook, of exocentric compounds formed from nouns with irregular plurals. Is it true that the plurals of such compounds are regular?
Write up and turn in exercise 1.6 from A linguistics workbook (pages 21-22).
The Tohono O'odham word at'ol means "gravy." How would one say "our gravy"? How would one say "her gravy"?
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created July 30, 2008
last revised December 1, 2008