LIN 211 QUIZ Q's Midterm

T/F: A grammar is a "discrete combinatorial system," in that a finite number of discrete elements can be combined to create larger structures with properties different from the individual elements themselves.

True

T/F: According to Pinker, adjectives with high, fronted vowels such as "teeny" that remind people of small things is an example of phonetic symbolism.

True

T/F: According to Pinker, people do not think in languages like English, Arabic, or Japanese; they think in a language of thought.

True

T/F: According to Pinker, the concept of language as a kind of instinct was first articulated in 1871 by Charles Darwin in "The Descent of Man."

True

T/F: Despite Whorf's claims to the contrary, the Hopi can conceive of time, and Ekkehart Malotki showed that their language contains tense, metaphors for time, units of time, ways to quantify units of time, and words like "ancient," "quick," "long time," and "finished."

True

T/F: English has a lot of derivational morphology but not a lot of inflectional morphology.

True

T/F: Every component of a language changes over time, despite the moans and groans of the language mavens.

True

T/F: George Bernard Shaw led a vigorous campaign to reform English spelling because the system was so illogical that it could spell "fish" as "ghoti".

True

T/F: If a language has only two color words, they are for black and white (or dark and light, essentially).

True

T/F: One definition Pinker gives of "word" is that it refers to the units of language that are the products of morphological rules, and which are unsplittable by syntactic rules.

True

T/F: Sentences and phrases are built out of words, words are built out of morphemes, and morphemes are built out of phonemes.

True

T/F: Since a word is a pure symbol, the relation between its sound and its meaning is utterly arbitrary (except, perhaps, in the case of onomatopoeia).

True

T/F: The basic design of human language is innate.

True

T/F: The frequency of the vocal folds' opening and closing determines the pitch of the voice.

True

T/F: The sentence "Two cars were reported stolen by the Groveton police yesterday" has at least two meanings.

True

T/F: The smallest part of a word, the part that cannot be cut up into any smaller parts, is called its root.

True

T/F: There is no English Language Academy (like L'Académie Française" in France).

True

Which of the following statements about how we perceive color physiologically is true?

"Language cannot change the way in which the ganglion cells are wired in the retina." "The cones in our eyes are wired to neurons in a way that makes the neurons respond best to certain color patterns." "Eyes contain three kinds of cones, each with a different pigment."

Beginning on p. 120, Pinker gives an example word from Kivunjo, a Bantu language that has quite a lot of interesting morphology. The word he gives is "Näïkìḿlyìïa," which means "He is eating it for her." Which part of this word is the verb, "to eat"?

-lyì-

According to Pinker, English has ______ phonemes, which is a bit above average for the world's languages.

40

According to Nagy and Anderson (p. 144), how many words does the average American high school graduate know?

45,000

On p. 395 (in Chapter 12), Pinker says that English adverbs need not indicate the manner in which the verb takes place. Which of the following sentences contains an adverb that is a "sentence adverb," referring instead to the attitude of the speaker toward the content of the sentence?

Amazingly, I managed to finish the syllabus before the semester started.

Edward Sapir was

Benjamin Whorf's teacher A linguist A student of Franz Boas

What does "disinterested" mean, according to Pinker?

Both "uninterested" and "unbiased"

What is the root of the word "Darwinianisms"?

Darwin

T/F: According to Pinker, a word-chain device is an excellent model of syntax.

False

T/F: Eskimos have way more words for snow than English speakers.

False

T/F: In Pinker's discussion of phrases, he states that a determiner is the head of a determiner phrase.

False

T/F: Pinker claims that we hear speech as a string of separate words because, in the speech sound wave, words do not run into the next seamlessly; instead, there are little silences between spoken words just like there are white spaces between written ones.

False

T/F: Schizophrenics, Alzheimer's patients, and autistic children can never have fluent, grammatical speech.

False

T/F: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism states that people's thoughts are only influenced by the categories made available by their language.

False

T/F: The rule that defines the English sentence (S) is as follows: "A sentence consists of a noun phrase followed by a preposition phrase."

False

T/F: Unlike with Syntax, Pinker believes words do not have structure.

False

When you produce "ssss", the tip of your tongue is behind the gum ridge but leaving a small opening. Air comes through the opening, the air breaks apart turbulently, and noise is created from the friction moving air. We call such sounds ______.

Fricatives

Which of the following is one of the languageless beings Pinker discusses that have been studied experimentally to discover how they reason about space, time, objects, number, rate, causality, and categories?

Human adults who claim they think without words Babies Monkeys

Which of the following consists of ONLY ONE listeme?

Kick the bucket

In Chapter 2, Pinker provides examples of speakers with Broca's aphasia as well as speakers considered to be linguistic idiot savants to show that:

Language is separate from intelligence.

The ______ is a valve consisting of an opening (the glottis) covered by two flaps of retractable muscular tissue called the vocal folds.

Larynx

Which of the following is one of the problems Pinker discusses (beginning on p. 69) about English and its suitability to serve as "our internal medium of computation"?

Synonymy Deixis Ambiguity Lack of logical explicitness

We know that languages differ with respect to their inventory of colors. Which of the following is one of the distinctions listed in chapter 3 of your book?

Navajo collapses blue and green into one word Latin lacks generic gray and brown Russian has distinct words for dark blue and light blue

What word does Pinker use to describe strings of sounds that can be carved into words in two different ways?

Oronyms

In the example of Hawaiian Creole given in Chapter 2, Pinker says that the use of English verbs like "go" and "stay" are not haphazard; instead, these words have been converted into

Relative pronouns Prepositions Case markers Auxiliaries

Word order in English is typically [in this question, S = subject, V = verb, O = object]

SVO

Which of the following are some of the consequences Pinker discusses with respect to the design of grammar as a discrete combinatorial system?

Sheer vastness of language The code is autonomous from cognition These are all consequences of this design

In Chapter 12, "The Language Mavens", Pinker writes that "there is no contradiction in saying that every normal person can speak grammatically... and ungrammatically..." What does he mean by this?

Speakers of a single language may utter words and sentences that obey descriptive rules but violate prescriptive rules.

According to Pinker, which of the following is something noun phrases have in common with verb phrases?

They both have heads, which give the phrase its name and determines what it is about They both have some role-players, which are grouped with the head inside a sub-phrase They both have modifiers

Which of the following English words is an example of compounding?

Toothbrush

Which of the following is a name Pinker gives to the model of syntax discussed beginning on p. 82?

Word-chain device Markov model Finite-state model

Which of the following sounds is a nasal sound in English?

[ŋ] [m] [n]