Final Exam
If a language has only two color words, they are for black and white (or dark and light, essentially).
True
In English, voicing in obstruents is never predictable from the phonetic context
True
In describing how children develop language, Pinker says that the vocabulary spurt and the beginnings of grammar happen alongside the child's ability to walk unaccompanied (at around 15 months old).
True
In the Outer Banks, one might hear "It's hoi toid" for "It's high tide."
True
It is impossible to speak the English language without speaking a dialect.
True
Old English did not have a phonemic distinction between [f] and [v]; instead, /f/ became [v] between vowels. Today, however, they are separate phonemes.
True
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
Sentences and phrases are built out of words, words are built out of morphemes, and morphemes are built out of phonemes.
True
Since a word is a pure symbol, the relation between its sound and its meaning is utterly arbitrary.
True
Some areas of increasing prosperity and cultural influence, like Seattle and Northern California, are starting to express their new regional identity by developing new dialect traits.
True
Some older mountain people (at least in Western North Carolina) may use the word dope to refer to a soft drink
True
The basic design of human language is innate.
True
The fact that no languages have fewer than three vowels is a language universal
True
The frequency of the vocal folds' opening and closing determines the pitch of the voice.
True
The number of minimal pairs involving a particular sound is called the functional yield of that sound.
True
The sentence "Two cars were reported stolen by the Groveton police yesterday" has at least two meanings.
True
The smallest part of a word, the part that cannot be cut up into any smaller parts, is called its root.
True
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 not true?
"Eyes register wavelength the way a thermometer registers temperatures."
Which of the following best describes Pinker's explanation for linguistic universals?
"Language is an instinct, and any variation between languages can be explained by the effects of three processes acting over long spans of time - variation, heredity, and isolation."
What is syntax?
"The way in which words are put together to form phrases and sentences." -It's all about structure and rules!
Tense markers may come from auxiliaries. Pinker argues that, in English, the past tense marker -ed may have evolved from
"did"
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-
English-learning infants under the age of six months cannot distinguish phonemes used in Czech, Hindi, and Inslekampx, but English-speaking adults can.
False
Eskimos have way more words for snow than English speakers.
False
Features whose presence is entirely predictable based on the phonetic environment are called contrastive phonetic features.
False
In American Tongues, a man from Ohio says that in his area they speak "just plain American, no dialect, no accent...straight out of the dictionary." He's right; no one in Ohio has a dialect.
False
In Pinker's discussion of phrases, he states that a determiner is the head of a determiner phrase.
False
In terms of morphological typology, English belongs to the synthetic type of language
False
In the investigation of language universals, it has been found that many languages form questions by exactly reversing the order of words within a sentence, as in Built Jack that house the this is?
False
Linguists are in agreement that language universals are based on the fact that all languages originate from one language spoken many years ago
False
Phonetic features that are redundant in one language can never be phonemic in another.
False
According to Pinker, the word orange was originally norange, but some speakers reanalyzed a norange as an orange.
true
In what year did William the Conqueror invade Britain, bringing with him the Norman dialect of French that was very influential in Middle English?
1066
At around 18 months, vocabulary growth jumps to a rate of about one new word per ____, according to Pinker
2 hours
According to Pinker, English has ______ phonemes, which is a bit above average for the world's languages.
40
According to Nagy and Anderson, how many words does the average American high school graduate know?
45,000
Hawaian has
5 vowels
The following tree diagram taken from Pinker illustrates movement in which type of sentence?
A passive sentence
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
Edward Sapir was:
All Of The Above: -A student of Franz Boas - A linguist -Benjamin Whorf's teacher
Which of the following pairs of English words represents a minimal pair?
All Of These: -Law/Raw -Cat/Caught -Put/Foot
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?
All of Above: -Human adults who claim they think without words -Monkies -Babies
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
All of these
What is Gullah?
All of these describe Gullah -A creole language -A variety originally spoken in the days of rice plantations -A way of speaking that is also called Geechee
Languages with exclusive and inclusive personal pronouns
Also have first person personal pronouns
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.
What is a Boston Brahmin, as discussed in American Tongues?
An elite member of Boston society who is wealthy and well-educated
Parts of Speech
Are categories of words based on similar meanings, forms, and functions -AKA lexical categories, word classes, syntactic categories Nouns, Verbs, Prepesations
When does Pinker say that babies begin to understand and produce words?
Around 1 Years Old
[See slides on Pidgins and Creoles] In a creole continuum, what do we call the linguistic variety located at the base of the continuum (i.e., the broadest form of the creole)?
Basilect
According to American Tongues, why is it difficult to hear differences between accents in the western part of the United States?
Because the west is composed of a mix of southern and northern accents.
What does "disinterested" mean, according to Pinker?
Both "uninterested" and "unbiased"
If a language marks trial number then it must also mark
Both of these
Schizophrenics, Alzheimer's patients, and autistic children can never have fluent, grammatical speech
False
In talking about a certain place, Wolfram describe the pronunciation of the vowel in "so" as similar to the vowel /o/ in French, which does not have a glide ending as it typically does in English. Which place is it?
Charleston, SC
Which of the following is NOT one of the problems Pinker discusses (beginning on p. 69) about English and its suitability to serve as "our internal medium of computation"?
Co-articulation
When two sounds never contrast to produce a difference in meaning, we say that those sounds are in _______.
Complementary distribution
Which of the following is not a name Pinker gives to the model of syntax discussed beginning on p. 82?
Complex blending model
What is the root of the word "Darwinianisms"?
Darwin
Descriptive Grammar
Described -Linguists observe language and describe what they find, without passing judgment. -In linguistics, native speakers set the standard for what is "good" grammar. -" Bad" grammar is something that native speakers don't normally do.
Wolfram claims that recent research shows that Northern and Southern speech are
Diverging
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Do they really have that many? All language communities have complex vocabularies for concepts that are important for them -This is simple example of jargon. -Linguists have lots of names for types of verbsn -transitive, intransitive, polyvalent, active, passive, etc -But most people just say 'verb' or even 'word'
Which of the following is NOT a type of universal discussed by Pinker in Chapter 8?
Ergative universals
According to Pinker, a word-chain device is an excellent model of syntax.
False
According to Wolfram, all speakers in the American South sound exactly the same.
False
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism states that people's thoughts are only influenced by the categories made available by their language.
False
The fact that no languages have words that are three hundred phonemes long is a language universal
False
The rule that defines the English sentence (S) is as follows: "A sentence consists of a noun phrase followed by a preposition phrase."
False
The use of mad to mean "angry," fall to mean "autumn," and sick to mean "ill" are purely Americanisms and have never been found in the English of the British Isles.
False
Typology is all about sorting out languages according to their genetic relations.
False
Unlike with Syntax, Pinker believes words lack 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 sentences represents an overgeneralization of the English past tense marker -ed in the speech of a child?
I finded the book
Which of the following is NOT one of the ways Childs claims that dialects are differentiated?
Indignantly
With reference to children raised in linguistically-deprived circumstances, Pinker says that acquisition of a normal language is guaranteed for children up to the age of six, is steadily compromised from then until shortly after puberty, and is rare thereafter.
True
Who is credited with discovering that there is a rule by which [p] and [t] in Proto-Indo-European became [f] and the "th" sounds in Germanic, as can be seen by comparing English father to non-Germanic languages, like Latin pater?
Jacob Grimm
Which of the following consists of ONLY ONE listeme?
Kick The Bucket
Which of the following is not one of the consequences Pinker discusses with respect to the design of grammar as a discrete combinatorial system?
Language allows only a finite number of sentences
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
To differentiate "language" from "dialect," some say that people "speak the same language" if they understand each other without too much difficulty. This is called _____.
Mutual intelligibility
Typologists are curious about what a possible language could be, so it's important for them to
None Of These -Look at dialects but not languages -No answer text provided. -Look at only dead languages -Look at languages but not dialects
What word does Pinker use to describe strings of sounds that can be carved into words in two different ways?
Oronyms
Which of the following is NOT one of the characteristics Pinker describes for Motherese?
Parents' speech, when directed at children, is less grammatical.
In phonology, we group together all the sounds that actually occur in a language into contrastive sets called _______.
Phonemes
This reading refers to "speech sounds" as _______.
Phones
The Minor Classes
Pronouns, Determiners, Prepositions, Auxiliaries, Conjunctions, etc. Much more rule based -The minor classes are closed classes -The minor classes consist of function words
Word order in English is typically [in this question, S = subject, V = verb, O = object]
SVO
[See slides on Pidgins and Creoles] In terms of the rules of pidgins, use of words like "dog baby" and "cow baby" for puppy and calf (respectively) is the result of which of the following types of processes?
Semantic/Lexical reduction
Which of the following is a reason Pinker thinks children are typically better at learning their first language than adults are at learning a second?
Sheer age. The only thing for Pinker is the difference in age.
We know that languages differ with respect to their inventory of colors. Which of the following is not one of the distinctions listed in chapter 3 of your book?
Shona speakers use one word for green, yellow, blue, and purple
Which of the following is NOT one of the characteristics of a head-final language
There are prepositions not postpositions
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.
When you encounter a phonetic transcription, the symbols will be enclosed in _______ brackets
Square
English has a lot of derivational morphology but not a lot of inflectional morphology.
True
English has fixed word order, though it also has free ordering in strings of prepositional phrases, where each preposition marks the semantic role of its noun phrase as if it were a case marker.
True
Every component of a language changes over time, despite the moans and groans of the language mavens
True
Prescriptive Grammar
The grammar learned in school -Prescriptivistscome up with rules for a language and expect all speakers to conform to them -High school English teachers are often prescriptivists.
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
According to Pinker, which of the following is something noun phrases have in common with verb phrases?
These are all things they have in common: -They both have heads, which give the phrase its name and determines what it is about -They both have modifiers -They both have some role-players, which are grouped with the head inside a subphrase
Which of the following English words is an example of compounding?
Toothbrush
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
According to Dennis Preston, language is not a fixed system; it evolves, often in the direction of how lower-status speakers use it.
True
According to G. Tucker Childs, from a linguistics perspective, no dialect is inherently better than another.
True
According to Pinker, adjectives with high, fronted vowels such as "teeny" that remind people of small things is an example of phonetic symbolism.
True
According to Pinker, all infants come into the world with linguistic skills.
True
According to Pinker, people do not think in languages like English, Arabic, or Japanese; they think in a language of thought.
True
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
According to the younger brother in the Boston example from American Tongues, speaking with a local dialect not only helps him appear tough in front of men but also allows him to impress local women with his "Italianness."
True
According to your reading, Phonetics simply describes the articulatory and acoustic properties of speech sounds while Phonology studies how sounds interact as a system in a particular language.
True
Deaf parents of hearing children were once advised to have the children watch a lot of television (theoretically to facilitate language learning, though such efforts were never successful)
True
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
Dialects are a natural, inevitable part of cultural and regional differences in American society.
True
The video American Tongues highlights words that arrived in certain varieties of American English through contact with other languages. In the English of Hawaii, what does "pau hana" mean?
Work is finished
Which of the following sounds is NOT a nasal sound in English?
[p]
