1. Why does it take people longer to recognize that "obttle" is not a word than to recognize that "xnit" is not a word?
2. Construct the syntax tree for sentence (7) on page 433 and the partial syntax tree that someone who hears the beginning of that sentence and is misled by it might have in mind.
3. Summarize the concept theory of meaning and describe how it has been tested experimentally.
1. What kinds of evidence can a psychologist obtain to test her hypotheses and models of linguistic performance? In what ways are her sources of evidence limited?
2. The authors claim that many kinds of speech errors support the hypothesis that a speaker plans what he will say, at least partly, some considerable time before he says it. What's the evidence for this claim?
3. What kinds of errors do speakers of a language make in written utterances? What could a psychologist learn about linguistic performance by studying writing errors?
1. What distinguishes a locutionary ("utterance") act, an illocutionary act, and a perlocutionary act? Give examples of each. Which kind of act is making a motion in a parliamentary body or a committee meeting ("I move that we allocate five hundred dollars to GORP," say)? lisping? gloating? reciting a poem? pontificating? endorsing a candidate? astounding the hearer?
2. Consider the following talk-exchange:
Q. What time is it?
A. I don't have my watch.
What does A implicate? Which, if any, of Grice's conversational maxims underlies the implication?
3. In what way does the view that performative utterances are direct conflict with the principle of compositionality?
1. Are there conventional ways of initiating, concluding, or arranging the contributions of the participants in discourses other than conversations?
2. What is the point of example (20) on page 388 of the textbook?
3. Under what conditions does one speaker interrupt another? How do interruptions fit into the turn-taking protocols described on page 390 of the textbook? Are there any good reasons for interrupting?
1. Describe the "message" model of communication and summarize the objections that the authors of our textbook raise against it.
2. If the phrase that a speaker utters doesn't adequately specify its referent, what strategies might the hearer follow in order to infer it?
3. Give an example in which the hearer uses the conversational presumption of quality (p. 371) to infer the speaker's intentions.
1. Give three examples of actions that one can accomplish simply by uttering the appropriate words in the appropriate context. (Hint: Often the first two words are "I hereby ...".)
2. Give three examples of indexical words, words whose content or reference varies with the context in which they are used.
3. List some of the purposes, other than communication, for which we use language.
1. Some linguistic changes are extremely gradual. In English, for example, there are many words derived from Latin that once had identical noun and verb forms, both of which were stressed on the second syllable. (Typically the first syllable was a prefix in Latin.) For the last three hundred years, speakers of English have gradually moved the stress to the first syllable of many of the noun forms, thus distinguishing them from the verbs: record, affix, progress. However, not all of the nouns that otherwise fit this pattern have been affected (report, concern, attempt). A few others are still in transition and can be stressed on either syllable, depending on the age and dialect of the speaker (recess, impress). Find at least one additional example of each of these three kinds.
2. The word chance was borrowed from French. Was it borrowed early, shortly after the Norman conquest, or late? How can you tell? How about the words chevron, gentle, justice, millionaire, and mirage -- in each case, was it an early or late borrowing?
3. How might the widespread use of technology for recording and transmitting spoken language may affect the historical development of languages? If some languages are far more common in recorded and transmitted speech than in face-to-face conversation, what effects might this predominance have on minority languages and dialects?
1. How would one distinguish cases in which two unrelated languages coincidentally contain words with similar sounds and meanings from cases in which two languages contain such words because they have a common ancestor?
2. State parts (a) and (c) of Grimm's Law (pages 325 and 326 of our textbook) in terms of distinctive features.
3. Do exercise 4 on page 352 of our textbook.
1. Why is so little known about the origin of human language? What kinds of evidence would be needed in order to resolve this question?
2. What are the main causes of change in a language? Under what conditions would one expect a language to change most rapidly?
1. How do linguas francas, contact languages, and creoles differ?
2. Which, if any, of the slang terms in Table 7.3 (page 304) are still commonly used? Using these examples, explain why slang changes more rapidly than professional jargon.
3. Find three examples of euphemisms occurring in news stories on the World Wide Web.
1. Why is low-register English speech usually more concise than high-register English speech? Is this true in other languages?
2. Starting with each of the following sentences, add a tag question, then consider whether tag-controlled deletion is possible. If not, explain why not.
3. Do Exercise 4 on page 309 of our textbook.
1. The authors identify three factors that determine the identity of a dialect: region, social class, and ethnicity. Are there others?
2. Are there speakers of your own native language whose speech you cannot understand, or who cannot understand your speech, because of differences of dialect? Do any of the factors cited in the preceding question separate you from those speakers? If so, which ones, and in what ways?
3. Is there a Grinnell College dialect of English? Justify your answer.
1. Are any of the minor moods illustrated in example (29) on page 249 of our textbook marked by distinctive morphology or syntax? If so, what are the marks?
2. Which are more frequent, referential or attributive uses of definite descriptions? Provide some evidence by classifying all of the definite descriptions in the second and third paragraphs of a random page of Wikipedia.
1. Which of the following statements are analytic and which are empirically true? (a) Dogs are animals. (b) Whales are mammals. (c) Twentienth-century Presidents of the United States were either Republicans or Democrats. (d) An integer is either even or odd, but not both. (e) The sun rose yesterday morning. (f) The sun will rise tomorrow morning.
2. Are Republican and Democratic antonyms? Are dollar and yen antonyms? Are herbivorous and carnivorous antonyms? Are deciduous and evergreen antonyms? Justify your answers.
3. Questions and commands can also have semantic presuppositions. Give an example of a question or command that has a false presupposition.
1. An advocate of the denotational theory of meaning might say that the denotation of a common noun or an adjective is the set of things that the word correctly characterizes. So, for instance, the answer to our textbook's challenge to provide a denotation for empty is the set of all empty things. Could there be two adjectives or common nouns that have the same meaning, but characterize different sets of things? Could there be two adjectives or common nouns that characterize exactly the same things, but differ in meaning? Justify your answers.
2. Is an idea the same thing as a mental image?
3. One popular account of the nature of meanings, not discussed in the text, is that each word's meaning is its definition. How might one test this account? What evidence could one offer for or against it?
1. In computational linguistics, what does a parser do? Why might this be useful?
2. It is not difficult to write a computer program that counts the number of occurrences of each word in a long text. How have linguists used such unigram tallies to find out who wrote certain essays and books that were published anonymously?
3. Which of the courses offered at Grinnell College this spring are most likely to take up and extend topics that we have discussed in LIN 114?
1. Identify three causes of ambiguity and give an example of each.
2. When we encounter a newly created word for the first time, how do we figure out how to spell or pronounce it, how to inflect it, and how to fit it into larger syntactic structures?
3. What is a "natural class" of phonemes? Why is a natural class, such as /b/, /p/, /m/, more likely to appear in the statement of a phonological rule than an arbitrary class of phonemes such as /t/, /ɑ/, /θ/, /ʊ/?
1. Explain the differences among pictographic, ideographic, and logographic writing systems.
2. Why would a syllabic writing system be much less appropriate for English (or for, say, Russian) than for Japanese (or, say, Hawaiian)?
3. The authors state that alphabetic writing systems "represent an increased economy in the inventory of symbols needed." But isn't this "economy" offset by the fact that writing a single word in an alphabetic system requires several symbols, while a logographic writing system requires only one? Explain how changes in the technology of writing have affected this trade-off.
1. In who-questions, the interrogative pronoun displaces a noun phrase from the declarative form of the sentence. What kind of constituents do where-questions displace? What kinds of constituents can what-questions displace?
2. In forming some wh-questions, we must supply an extra auxiliary (do, does, or did), while in other cases the auxiliary is prohibited:
What's the pattern here? Under what conditions must the extra auxiliary be inserted?
3. Do exercise 4.9 on pages 115-117 of the workbook.
1. Could passivization and particle movement apply to the same sentence? If so, given an example; if not, explain why not.
2. The sentence A revised version of the bill was passed by the Senate that provides for additional funding shows the effects of both passivization and extraposition. Which transformation applied first? What were the original and intermediate forms of the sentence? Could the transformations have applied in the opposite order? If so, what would have been the result?
3. Answer question 7 on pages 219 and 220 of the textbook.
1. Passivization, the conversion of a sentence from active to passive voice, is another syntactic operation that takes the form of a transformation. For instance, passivization changes the sentence The Senate passed a revised version of the bill into A revised version of the bill was passed by the Senate. (a) Under what conditions can a sentence be passivized? (b) How would you describe the effect of passivization in terms of the grammatical relations among constituents of a sentence to which it applies?
2. One example of recursion in English is the repeated modification of an adjective, such as happy, by the adverb very: happy; very happy; very, very happy; very, very, very happy; and so on indefinitely. Draw a tree diagram for each of the first four phrases in this sequence. Is this an example of left embedding, center embedding, or right embedding?
3. Our textbook proposes an Extraposition transformation, which licenses the movement of a modifying clause from a position immediately following the noun that it modifies to the end of a sentence. For each of the following sentences, determine whether extraposition can be applied and, if so, what the result is: (a) A pill that is too large for anyone to swallow is useless. (b) Give the woman who is standing in the doorway the rent money. (c) The president flew to the city where the flooding appears to be most serious yesterday afternoon.
1. In English, an imperative sentence (such as Open the door!) appears not to have any subject. Can one add a tag question to an imperative sentence? If so, what does the tag question indicate about the subject of the sentence?
2. In the sentence The starting center let down the whole team, is the whole team a constituent? Try to form a cleft sentence that would show that it is. How about down the whole team? Again, try to form a cleft sentence.
3. Give one or more examples, not mentioned in the textbook, of discontinuous components in English or in some other language that you are acquainted with.
1. Describe an infinite set of English sentences, using some recursive construction to derive longer from shorter ones. Hint: Nursery rhymes that have a "cumulative" structure, with each verse extending the previous verse in some way, often contain recursive constructions that you can use.
2. The phrase small boys' school contains a structural ambiguity. Describe and explain it using word grouping.
3. The sentence Flying planes can be dangerous also contains a syntactic ambiguity, but word grouping cannot account for this one. How would you describe and explain it? Hint: Which word is the head of the phrase flying planes?
1. The Maximal Onset Principle that the authors propose as a way to determine the boundaries between syllables of a word often gives results that differ from traditional hyphenation rules. (For instance, the Maximal Onset Principle divides the word labyrinth into syllables la, by, and rinth, but the traditional hyphenation of the same word is lab-y-rinth, with the b at the end of the first syllable.) Who's right? How would you reconcile or explain this disparity?
2. Is the word fantastic a ternary foot, one unary foot and one binary foot, or three unary feet? How can you tell?
3. How would you divide the word archeology into syllables? Into feet? Does either the Vowel Sequence Condition or the Word-Final Vowel Condition play any role in determining your answer?
1. One of the examples summarized in Table 4.3 is the Ganda consonant /ɟ/, which has the features [−syllabic, +consonantal, −sonorant, +voiced, −continuant, −nasal, −strident, −lateral, −distributed, −affricate, −labial, −round, −coronal, −anterior, +high, −back, −low]. Describe the articulation of this consonant in the more traditional terms presented in chapter 3.
2. Table 4.1 doesn't include the glottal stop [ʔ], as found in the interjection uh-oh [ʔʌʔoʊ] and, in many American dialects, in the word kitten [kɪʔən]. For each of the distinctive features for consonants listed in Table 4.1, determine whether the glottal stop has that feature or lacks it.
3. A member of our class mentioned that, in her dialect, the word sing is pronounced as [siŋ] rather than [sɪŋ]. Suppose that this extension of [ɪ] to [i] also occurs in the words big, tick, bring, and nick, but not in pit, shim, tiff, lip, kiss, ridge, nib, or spill. Formulate a hypothesis about this pattern in terms of distinctive features. (Alternatively, suppose that the extension occurs in big and bring, but not in any of the other words cited. Again, formulate a hypothesis in terms of distinctive features.)
1. Back at the beginning of chapter 3 of our textbook (page 66), the authors raise the question of how to account for the three different pronunciations -- [s], [z], and [ɨz] -- of the plural morpheme for nouns in English. The choice appears to depend on the phoneme at the end of the base form of the noun. Specify exactly which terminal phonemes go with which pronunciation of the plural morpheme.
2. There are also three pronunciations of the morpheme -ed that forms the past tense of regular verbs in English: [d] (as in filed), [t] (as in wished), and [əd] (as in cited). Again, specify how the terminal phoneme of the base form of the verb determines the pronunciation of the past-tense morpheme.
3. As we noted in class, the /t/ sound in Spanish is dental rather than (as in many dialects of English) alveolar. But if the articulation point is different and the sound is audibly different, why do linguists use the same symbol for both? More generally, since almost every phoneme is articulated slightly differently and sounds slightly different in different languages, why don't we devise a separate alphabetic system for each language that reflects the unique phonetic characteristics of its phonemes?
1. Besides the contracted forms of be, which are discussed in the textbook, what other contractions exist in casual English speech? How (if at all) does the pronunciation of the contraction differ from the pronunciation of the full form?
2. Reformers have sometimes proposed using the International Phonetic Alphabet or some similar system of phonetic transcription as a writing system for English, arguing that the spellings of English words are so hopelessly anachronistic and confusing as to be an impediment to literacy and a constant drain on the mental faculties of authors and readers. Evaluate this proposal.
3. Does English put any constraints on the consonants and consonant clusters that can occur at the end of a word? If so, what are they? What is the largest number of consonant phonemes that can occur in a final consonant cluster in English?
1. Do exercises 2, 3, and 8 from the end of chapter 3 of the textbook (pages 103 and 104).
2. Formulate and test hypotheses about the phonemic forms of the present-participle (-ing) and regular past-participle (-ed) morphemes in English, analogous to our textbook's hypotheses about the phonemic forms of the plural morpheme.
3. As the author of our textbook notes, some native English speakers regularly distinguish the vowel sounds /ɔ/ and /ɑ/, as in the words cot and caught. Does your idiolect include this distinction? Do you distinguish these vowels when they precede a final /ɹ/, as in fore /fɔɹ/ and far /fɑɹ/?
1. What articulatory characteristics distinguish consonants from vowels? Are there any borderline cases -- sounds that might be counted either as consonants or as vowels? Are there any sounds used in speech that are neither consonants nor vowels?
2. What is the acoustic or physical difference between a vowel sound uttered at a high pitch and the same vowel uttered at a low pitch?
3. What range of frequencies (in hertz) are used in human speech? What range of volumes (in decibels)?
1. Our textbook says that dividing the word hospitable into two morphemes, a base hospit- and a suffix -able, is a false analysis. How is this word formed, then? How did it come into the English language -- was it coined, or borrowed, or blended, or what? (Trying to find the suffix -able in a word like constable or syllable might be a clearer example of false analysis.)
2. The textbook points out that intransitive verbs usually cannot receive the -able suffix, but there are a few that do: agreeable, conformable, perishable. Does the suffix contribute the same meaning to all of these words? Is adding -able to intransitive verbs productive?
3. English has several morphemes that attach to place names and mean "resident of," such as -er in New Yorker and Berliner, -ite in Brooklynite and Wisconsinite, -ian in Washingtonian and Parisian (sometimes reduced to -an, as in Chicagoan, or to -n, as in Iowan). Is there any pattern that describes which of these morphemes would be used for any particular place name?
1. The derivational suffix -ity usually attaches to an adjective to form a noun; for instance, publicity is derived from public. Is there an English adjective from which the noun integrity is derived? Can you think of other English nouns ending with the suffix -ity for which the corresponding adjective is difficult to identify or absent?
2. Some suffixes seem to be used particularly in jocular coinages: for instance, -orama for hyped-up spectacles and public events and (in the United States) -gate for political scandals. Can you think of other examples? Are these suffixes "productive," in the linguists' sense?
3. Do exercise 13 from the end of chapter 2 in our textbook (page 61).
1. If you know a language other than English, give examples (if there are any) of derivational and inflectional affixes in that language.
2. Give one or more examples of American English words ending with the suffix -ize in which the base form cannot be used as an independent word. Would any of these be good candidates for back-formation?
3. Give two examples not mentioned in our textbook of affixes that convert verbs into nouns.
1. Do exercises 5, 7, 8, 10, and 11 from the end of chapter 2 in our textbook (pages 58-60).
2. Can you think of any other ways, not mentioned in our textbook, by which new words are added to a language?
3. Suppletion is the replacement of one morpheme by another, etymologically unrelated morpheme in what would normally be inflected forms of the same word. For instance, in English, the past tense of go is went, rather than goed; went was originally a past-tense form of a different word, the one that became wend in modern English. Similarly, better is a suppletion for gooder, and people has partially suppleted persons as the idiomatic plural form of person. Can you think of other examples of suppletion, either in English or in some other language that you know? How can one distinguish suppletion from radical sound changes? (For instance, the past-tense form sought is not a suppletion of seeked; it's just a survival from a time in which the pattern that speakers conventionally followed in deriving past-tense forms from present-tense ones was different from the one we use now.)
1. Just a quick check to make sure that you're reading actively: What is the Swahili word for "traffic circles"?
2. Are there any examples of English words that now begin with an n that was acquired through the inverse of the process that converted a norange into an orange? How would you find out about such reanalyses?
3. Present-tense forms of the word be are generally omitted in telegraphic utterances, even though be is an open-class word. The preposition from is generally not omitted even though it is a closed-class word. Can these exceptional cases be explained by the nature and purpose of telegraphic language?
4. Do any of the languages that you know have word-categories -- parts of speech -- that English lacks?
1. The opening chapter of a widely used linguistics textbook contains the observation that the utterances
are acceptable English sentences, while
are not. The authors note that midnight, noon, and one o'clock are points in time, while summer, winter, a vacation, or a honeymoon are all periods of time. They conclude that verbs can be created from nouns expressing time only when the nouns denote periods rather than points in time.
Are the seemingly similar utterances
acceptable English sentences? Can you find examples of similar constructions on Web pages of English speakers? Can you find or construct examples in which a verb is formed from a noun designating a point in time?
2. How reliable are people's judgements about the acceptability or unacceptability of particular utterances? Is it possible for someone to be mistaken about whether or not an utterance is acceptable in her own native language?
3. To get an accurate estimate of how many words a person knows, it would be really helpful to have a clear-cut way of deciding whether or not a person knows a particular word. How would you determine this?
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created July 30, 2008
last revised December 3, 2008