LIN 211 Midterm

According to Pinker, in what environment is the past tense -ed suffix pronounced as /t/?

After voiceless consonants

The following sentence is ambiguous: "Enraged cow injures farmer with ax." Identify its two meanings.

An enraged cow injures a farmer who is holding an ax. An enraged cow injures a farmer by means of an ax.

Based on our discussion of phonological rules, in what environment do stops become aspirated in American English?

At the beginning of the word

Which of the following consists of ONLY ONE listeme? Select all possible answers.

Break a Leg Kick the Bucket

What are egocentric directions?

Directional words that conceptualize space in relation to the human body.

Identify the root of the "longest" word in the English language: antidisestablishmentarianism.

Establish

According to Pinker, a determiner is the head of a determiner phrase.

False

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

False

According to the reading "Phonetics vs. Phonology" (in Canvas), phonetics is about how sounds interact and phonology is about the articulatory and acoustic properties of speech sounds.

False

Air is forced from the lungs by means of the pulmonic ingressive airstream mechanism.

False

Which of the following is NOT an example of one of the origins of different spelling conventions in written English?

Japanese

What is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?

The language you have affects how you think.

A constituent is a syntactic unit that functions as part of a larger unit within a sentence.

True

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language.

True

According to Pinker, a word is a unit of language unsplittable by syntactic rules.

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, the concept of language as a kind of instinct was first articulated in 1871 by Charles Darwin in "The Descent of Man."

True

Allophones are surface structures of the sounds in the mind.

True

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

True

In unstressed syllables, American English often uses the "schwa" sound, the mid central vowel [ə].

True

Nasal sounds are produced when the velum is down and the nasal cavity is open.

True

Phonological rules are applied in a specific order.

True

The English writing system is segmental.

True

There are no languages whose writing system is purely logographic.

True

Pitch is specified by which of the following?

Vibration of the vocal folds

What is a predicate?

What the speaker wants to say about the subject, represented by VP on a syntax tree.

The word "bit" (in English) is pronounced with which IPA vowel sound:

[ɪ]

Which of the following is considered an approximant?

[ɹ]

The following data are taken from Farsi: selfish = khodkhah intelligent = hushmand conscious = agah selfishly = khodkhahane intelligently = hushmandane. Which of the following words means "consciously"?

agahane

Identify the preposition(s) in the following sentence: "The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain." There can be multiple answers.

on in

The vocal tract does not include which of the following:

the diaphragm

Which one of the affixes in the word "defamiliarizes" is inflectional?

-s

How many morphemes are in the word "friends"?

2

Consonants are produced through a combination of tongue position (height & frontness), muscle tension, and lip rounding.

False

English is a tonal language.

False

Nouns are a closed class of words, meaning that you can't create any new ones.

False

Prepositions are an "open" lexical category (part of speech).

False

Sentences cannot be grammatical if they are meaningless.

False

The following sentence is descriptively ungrammatical in all English dialects: "I ain't gonna do nothing."

False

The languages of primitive peoples have simpler grammars than languages such as English or French.

False

The number of morphemes always equals the number of syllables.

False

Which of the following process(es) produce the different forms of the verb "drink, drank, drunk"?

Interweaving

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.

Which of the following is not a place of articulation we use when describing sounds?

Obstruent

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.

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.