Linguistics

Front 1

What are the five basic principles of grammar and language?

Back 1

Generality: All languages have a grammar.

Parity: All grammars are equal.

Universality: Grammars are alike in basic ways.

Mutability: Grammars change over time.

Inaccessibility: Grammatical knowledge is subconscious.

Front 2

Contrast articulatory phonetics with acoustic phonetics.

Back 2

Articulatory phonetics studies the mechanisms of speech production, while acoustic is concerned with measuring and analyzing the physical properties of sound waves produced when we speak.

Front 3

How is the sound-producing system organized?

Back 3

Air supply: lungs

Sound source: larynx

Filters: pharynx, oral cavity, nasal cavity

Front 4

What are the main glottal states and the position of the vocal folds in each?

Back 4

Voicelessness: vocal folds pulled apart.

Voicing: vocal folds brough close together, but not tightly closed.

Whisper: voiceless, but vocal folds adjusted so that front is pulled close together while back portions are apart.

Murmer: voiced, but vocal folds relaxed enough to allow more air to escape.

Front 5

Describe the articulatory and acoustic difference between vowels and consonants.

Back 5

Consonantal sounds (voiced or unvoiced) are made with either complete closure or narrowing of the vocal tract. Vowels are produced with little obstruction in the vocal tract and usually voiced.

Vowels are more sonorous than consonants, and are perceived as louder and longer lasting.

Front 6

What are the two liquids?

Back 6

Varieties of 'l' (laterals) and 'r'

Front 7

What is the vowel equivalent of the glide [j]?

What is the vowel equivalent of the glide [w]?

Back 7

[i]; [u]

Front 8

What are three suprasegmentals?

Back 8

Pitch: tone and intonation.

Length [:]

Loudness

Pitch + Length + Loudness = Stress

Front 9

Contrast tone and intonation.

Back 9

Tone: differences in word meaning are signalled by differences in pitch. Level tones are called register tones and moving pitches are called contour tones.

Intonation can convey information but not differences in word meaning. Terminal (falling) contour signals completion and non-terminal (rising) contour signals incompleteness.

Front 10

Define assimilation and contrast regressive with progressive assimiliation.

Back 10

Assimilation is a group of articulatory processes that results from a sound becoming more like another nearby sound in terms of one or more of its phonetic characteristics.

Regressive: preceding segment takes on characteristic of following segment.

Progressive: following segment takes on characteristic of preceding segment.

Front 11

What is epenthesis?

Back 11

When a syllabic or non-syllabic segment is inserted within an existing string of segments.

i.e.
warmth -> warmpth
length -> lenkth
prince -> printce

Front 12

What is metathesis?

Back 12

A process that reorders a sequence of segments, often to make it easier to articulate.

i.e.
prescribe -> perscribe
prescription -> perscription

Front 13

When two segments never occur in the same phonetic environment, we say they are in _________ _________.

Back 13

Complementary distribution.

Front 14

List the following in order of sonorority.

(i) Liquids
(ii) Nasals
(iii) Vowels
(iv) Glides

Back 14

Vowels, Glides, Liquids, Nasals

Front 15

What are the elements that make up the internal structure of a syllable?

Back 15

σ

Onset - Rhyme


Rhyme: Nucleus + Coda

Front 16

What are phonotactics?

Back 16

Phonotactics are the set of contraints on how sequences of segments patter, forming part of a speaker's knowledge of the phonology of their language.

Front 17

What is a derivational affix?

Back 17

A form of affixation that forms a word with a meaning distinct from that of its base.

Front 18

What is an inflectional affix?

Back 18

Affixational process that does not change word meaing, but instead provides additional grammatical information.

Front 19

What is suppletion?

Back 19

A form of inflection that replaces a morpheme with an entirely different morpheme in order to indicate a grammatical contrast.

Front 20

What is conversion and another name for it?

Back 20

AKA zero derivation, conversion is a process that assigns an already existing word to a new syntactic category.

Front 21

What is clipping?

Back 21

Clipping is a process that shortens a polysyllabic word by deleting one or more syllables.

Front 22

What are blends?

Back 22

Blends are words that are created from non-morphemic parts of two already existing items, usually the first part of one and the final part of the other.

Front 23

What is backformation?

Back 23

Backformation is a process that creates a new word by removing a real or supposed affix from another word in the language.

Front 24

We say that an utterance is _________ if native speakers judge it to be a possible sentance of their language.

Back 24

Grammatical

Front 25

What is Universal Grammar and some characteristics?

Back 25

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

Lexicon - mental dictionary.
Computational system - operations that combine and arrange words in particular ways (ex. Merge and Move)

Front 26

What are five lexical categories and 4 non-lexical categories?

Back 26

Lexical: Noun, Verb, Adjective, Proposition, Adverb.

Non-Lexical: Determiner, Degree, Auxiliary (Modal and non-modal), Conjunction.

Front 27

What four generalizations are captured by the X' schema?

Back 27

1. All phrases have a three-level structure (X, X', XP)

2. All phrases contain a head, X.

3. If there is a complement, it is attached at the intermediate X' level, as a sister of the head.

4. If there is a specifier, it is attached at the XP level.

Front 28

What are the three tests for phrase structure and how do they work?

Back 28

The substitution test - Can the phrase be replaced by an element such as 'they', 'there', 'it', or 'do so'.

The movement test - Can the phrase be moved to a different position within the sentence?

The coordination test - Can it be joined to another group of words by a conjunction such as 'and', 'or', or 'but'.

Front 29

What is subcategorization?

Back 29

The term subcategorization is used to refer to information about a word's complement options. This information helps ensure that lexical items appear in the appropriate types of tree structures.