German Linguistics - Phonology, Etc

Front 1

What is linguistics?

Back 1

Linguistics is the science of language.

Front 2

What is a grammar?

Back 2

A computational device. A system of rules (algorithms) plus an inventory of meaningful items (words, affixes, etc).

Front 3

What is a felicitous utterance?

Back 3

A well-formed utterance.

Front 4

What type of knowledge are linguists interested in?

Back 4

Tacit knowledge.

Front 5

What are four mediums for human language?

Back 5

Speech
Writing
Braille
Signing

Front 6

What do mediums do?

Back 6

Mediate between the producer and receiver of the language.

Front 7

What is language competence?

Back 7

the speaker-hearer’s tacit knowledge of his/her language

determines the connection between sound and meaning for each sentence

the internalized grammar (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics)

the central object of investigation of generative (formal) linguistics

Front 8

What is language performance?

Back 8

the actual use of language in concrete situations

Front 9

What is a lexicon?

Back 9

a finite memorized list of words

Front 10

What is phonology?

Back 10

combinatorial system that governs the sound patterns of language and a set of adjustment rules

Front 11

What is conversion?

Back 11

Multifunctionality, the creation of a new word by using an existing word as a different part of speech

Front 12

What is an example of recursion?

Back 12

Tara loves harp music.

I think [Tara loves harp music].

(Embedding principle)

Front 13

What does generality mean?

Back 13

Language is universal across societies and across neurological normal people within a society

Front 14

What does parity mean?

Back 14

All grammars are equal

Front 15

What does universality mean?

Back 15

Grammars are alike in basic ways.

Front 16

What is the Universal Grammar?

Back 16

The system of categories, operations, and principles shared by all human languages and considered innate.

Front 17

What are principles?

Back 17

characteristics that hold true for all languages and are part of Universal Grammar.

Front 18

What does structure dependence mean?

Back 18

Words are organized in:

hierarchical structures

with (binary) branching

Front 19

What is theta theory?

Back 19

Thematic roles characterize the relationship between a sentence’s parts and the event that it describes.

Front 20

What are parameters?

Back 20

aspects in which languages vary.

ex) basic word order: SVO, SOV, VSO

ex) pro-drop

Front 21

What is a dialect?

Back 21

a regional, ethnic, or social variety of a language
characterized by its own phonological, morphological, and/or syntactic rules, and lexical features

Front 22

Roughly how many native German-speakers are there in the world?

Back 22

90 million, tenth place

Front 23

Our intuitive understanding of “a (given) language” is tied to...

Back 23

Abstand(structural distance from one another)

nation-state

elaboration (Ausbau): Expansion of function, use in “higher”domains

Standardization, understood as the creation and establishment of uniform linguistic norms for these “high”functions.

literacy

Front 24

What does codification refer to?

Back 24

the existence of explicit statements of norms in dictionaries, etc

Front 25

What is a pluricentric language?

Back 25

One with multiple norms for standardization.

Front 26

What does diglossia mean?

Back 26

denotes a situation in which two varieties of language exist side-by-side throughout the speech community, with each being assigned definite but non-overlapping roles;

major Abstand between High and Low varieties

Front 27

What is phonetics?

Back 27

the study of human speech sounds (phones)

Front 28

What are the three types of phonetics?

Back 28

articulatoryphonetics

acoustic phonetics

auditory phonetics

Front 29

What are the three basic air-stream mechanisms?

Back 29

pulmonic, glottalic, velaric

Front 30

What are the two options for airpath?

Back 30

oral, nasal

Front 31

What are the three major class designations for phones?

Back 31

consonant, vowel, glide

Front 32

Define consonants.

Back 32

articulatory: sounds that are produced with a narrow or complete closure in the vocal tract. Air stream is obstructed (no free passage).

acoustic: low sonority

functional: forms the seams or margins of a syllable

Front 33

Define vowels.

Back 33

articulatory: stricture of open approximation; syllabic sound produced with less obstruction in the vocal tract than is required for glides.

acoustic: relatively sonorous

functional: normally the nucleus of a syllable

Front 34

Define glides (semivowels).

Back 34

sounds that are produced with an articulation like that of a vowel but move more quickly to another articulation

Front 35

Tense vowels involve...

Back 35

considerably more muscular effort in their production than lax vowels.

Front 36

Define duration or quantity.

Back 36

relative amount of time that a vowel
articulation is maintained

Front 37

What is a monophthong?

Back 37

a vowel sound produced with no movement of the tongue during

Front 38

What is a dipthong?

Back 38

a vowel sound produced by movement of the tongue from one point to another; diphthongs are dynamic

Front 39

What is nasalization?

Back 39

the effect that a nasal consonant [n m ŋ] can have on an adjacent vowel

Front 40

What does phonation refer to?

Back 40

the state of the glottis

Front 41

What is a location?

Back 41

position or posture of the articulatory organs

location of the closure or the stricture

Front 42

What is a stricture type?

Back 42

manner of articulation (ex. stop)

Front 43

How does German [j] differ from English [j]?

Back 43

the amount of turbulent air

Front 44

What are the three affricates in German?

Back 44

[pf] [ts] [tsch]

Front 45

What defines a fortis consonant?

Back 45

phenomenon of high air pressure, which is manifested in fricatives as greater turbulence

somewhat longer duration caused by greater muscular contraction
voicelessness

Front 46

What is aspiration?

Back 46

a lag or brief delay in voicing between the release of a voiceless stop and the following vowel

Front 47

When are German consonants aspirated?

Back 47

initially, at beginning of a stressed syllable:
Paß [p˙-] Tag [t˙-] Kamm [k˙-]

initially, at beginning of an unstressed syllable:
Parade [p˙-] Tablett [t˙-] Kalender [k˙-]

Medially, at beginning of a stressed syllable

Front 48

What is phonology?

Back 48

the branch of linguistics that deals with:
-how sounds function in a language
-the general principles that characterize the sound patterns of natural languages

the sub-component of the grammar (input-output device) that:
-specifies the sound patterns of a given language;
-assigns a pronunciation to each sentence

Front 49

What are segments?

Back 49

individual speech sounds

Front 50

What is a feature?

Back 50

the smallest unit of analysis of phonological structure

Front 51

What is a syllable?

Back 51

a unit of phonological structure consisting of an onset and rhyme {nucleus, coda}.

Front 52

How can a syllable be defined?

Back 52

peaks in sonority
peaks in prominence
bursts of initiator power

Front 53

What does contrast mean?

Back 53

segments are said to contrast when their presence alone may distinguish forms with different meanings from each other, e.g., dip, tip

Front 54

What defines a minimal pair?

Back 54

two forms with distinct meanings that differ by only one segment found in the same position in each form, e.g., lip : nip, etc.

Front 55

What is a near minimal pair?

Back 55

can be used to establish contrasts if no minimal pairs can be found

assure, azure

Front 56

What does environment mean?

Back 56

the phonetic context in which a sound occurs

Front 57

What are phonemes?

Back 57

are the constituent elements of words; units that have the capacity to change meanings of words (“contrastive phonological units”)

Front 58

How do we identify the phonemes of a language?

Back 58

the commutation test, that is, we find minimal pairsor near-minimal pairs

Front 59

What do you want to rule out through minimal pairs?

Back 59

complementary distribution

Front 60

What are allophones?

Back 60

variants or realizations of phonemes; two or more segments are phonetically distinct but functionally the same.

Front 61

Name some consonantal phones that German lacks.

Back 61

/w/ /theta/

Front 62

When is [R] nonsyllabic?

Back 62

After tense vowels.

Front 63

In German but not so much in English, /ptk/ are...

Back 63

...unaspirated medially before an UNstressed syllable

...aspirated in final position

Front 64

What do English speakers sometimes do to /t d/

Back 64

flap those suckers!

Front 65

What allophone of /l/ does German lack?

Back 65

the dark, velarized kind

Front 66

German /sch/ is always articulated with...

Back 66

...rounded lips

Front 67

When does [x] occur in German?

Back 67

only after central and back vowels

Front 68

When does [c with squiggle] occur in German?

Back 68

occurs after front vowels, after /nlr/, and in word-initial position

Front 69

What is a natural class?

Back 69

a set of sounds form a natural class if fewer features are required to designate the class than to designate any individual sound in the class

Front 70

[+consonantal]

Back 70

produced with radical obstruction in the mid-sagittal region of the vocal tract

Front 71

[+sonorant]

Back 71

sounds are produced with a vocal tract cavity configuration in which spontaneous voicing is possible; singable sounds

Front 72

What is spontaneous voicing?

Back 72

narrowing of the glottis so that the vocal cords will vibrate in response to unimpeded airstream vis-à-vis quiet breathing

Front 73

[+syllabic]

Back 73

sounds constitute the nucleus of a syllable

Front 74

[±nasal]

Back 74

lowering of the velum

Front 75

[+continuant] sounds

Back 75

the primary constriction is not narrowed to the point where the airflow past the constriction is blocked

Front 76

[±spread glottis]

Back 76

All aspirated consonants are [+SG]; all unaspirated consonants are [-SG]

Front 77

[±tense]

Back 77

The extent to which the tongue body is away from the neutral position [\]

Front 78

[+back]

Back 78

Consonants or vowels produced with the tongue body behind the palatal region

Front 79

[+high]

Back 79

Vowels produced with the tongue body raised from a central position in the oral cavity

Front 80

Is phonology compositional?

Back 80

No. One cannot predict the meaning of the Ente ‘duck’ from its phonemes.

Front 81

derivation

Back 81

the set of rule applications that transform an input string (the phonological or underlying representation) into a pronounceable string (phonetic or surface presentation)

Front 82

What is the schwa deletion rule?

Back 82

When a vowel follows a sonorant preceded by [ə], it is often deleted obligatorily

Front 83

What is the rule about lenis obstruents?

Back 83

In initial position lenis obstruentsare voiced following a pause, or if the sound immediately preceding them in a sentence is voiced

Otherwise, lenis obstruents are unvoiced

Front 84

Voiceless/fortis stops are aspirated when...

Back 84

they occur before stressed vowels and are not preceded by an obstruent

they occur before a pause

Front 85

Realization of long vowels...

Back 85

All (stressed) tense vowels are long

All lax vowels (except /ε…/) are short.

In German tense vowels are long when under stress, short when not

When tense vowels occur in absolute final position in a word, the length is reduced, falling half-way between “long”and “short”

Tense vowels in unstressed positions not only become shortened, they may also become lax (centralized) in rapid speech

Front 86

When is /alpha with dots/ realized?

Back 86

before a plural marker, the vowel remains long, e.g., Klimas

before a final sonorant, there is no shortening, e.g., Pelikan

Front 87

When is a glottal stop inserted in German?

Back 87

Glottal stop occurs before vowels

It is most common at the beginning of a word with initial stress and at the beginning of utterances

The glottal stop can occur within words

Front 88

How is the glottal stop represented?

Back 88

[+constricted glottis]

Front 89

What are phonotactics?

Back 89

the set of constraints on how sequences of segments pattern; syllable structure constraints

Front 90

In German /R/ and /l/ are the only possible consonants after...

Back 90

a stop or /f/ in the onset

Front 91

Before /p t/ in the onset, only...

Back 91

/snake/ can occur.

Front 92

/s/ cannot occur initially in German...

Back 92

...before a vowel

Front 93

German /h/ appears only...

Back 93

...initially

Front 94

For any voiced/voiceless pair of obstruents, only [-voice] members may appear...

Back 94

...in syllable-final position (coda)

Front 95

On the assumption that affricates are to be analyzed as sequences in codas, the maximum coda in German is...

Back 95

...five consonants

Front 96

Lax vowels do not occur in...

Back 96

...open syllables in German.

Front 97

What is an interlude?

Back 97

the consonant or consonants between syllabic peaks

Front 98

Syllable boundaries should be placed so as to...

Back 98

...maximize onsets.

Front 99

In German, syllable boundaries coincide with...

Back 99

...word boundaries. But they do not always coincide with morpheme boundaries.

Front 100

What is a morpheme?

Back 100

smallest meaningful unit of a language

Front 101

What happens to the consonants following lax vowels?

Back 101

They are phonetically slightly longer than those following tense vowels

Front 102

A consonant can serve as both coda of one syllable and onset of a following syllable. True or false.

Back 102

TRUE. It is then called ambisyllabic.