LING 1 Homework 1 Question Compilation

From the videos on BruinLearn and the Philadelphia Inquirer article, select the answer that is true about dialects of American English. [

(C) A word, like be or dog, may occur in two different dialects, but may be used in a different way in each dialect.

Select the choice that is not true regarding the standard and non-standard varieties of English.

All the statements above are false.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer article, the utterance "Don't nobody go over there!" can be interpreted in two ways. Which ones?

Imperative "Nobody must/should go over there!" as well as declarative/observational "Nobody goes over there."

Speakers can produce an infinite set of utterances from a finite set of lexical items and grammatical rules. This is called:

Linguistic Creativity

Consider the sentence (1) and then answer the question below. (1) Last week made Mary a cake for Jon. (intended meaning: 'Last week Mary made a cake for Jon'.) Would this sentence be a correct sentence of English according to a descriptive grammarian? Choose the most correct answer.

No. A descriptive grammarian would flag this sentence to be incorrect, since native speakers of English would reject this sentence as an "incorrect" (or ungrammatical) sentence of English.

Which answer most accurately characterizes the McGurk Effect?

Our perception of speech is not necessarily just based on sounds, but also visuals.

Which of the following is true about Singlish, given what you have learned this week?

Singlish can be described as a non-standard variety of English and non-standard varieties of a given language can exhibit grammatical phenomena that are not attested in the standard variety.

English disallows word-initial sequences like /zdr/; however, Slavic languages do not exhibit this constraint. This suggests that:

Speakers of different languages have specific, unconscious rules about how sounds are organized in that language.

Select the answer that holds for all languages.

Statements A, B, C are true.

What—if any—is the connection between the meaning of a word and the way it is pronounced?

The relation is arbirtary: the same objects are called different names in different languages.

Your roommate has been struggling with a data set. He tells you "I've been trying for hours and I think I've come up with a syntastic analysis—I mean syntactic analysis. Sorry, I'm exhausted." How would we characterize this error?

This is an issue of linguistic performance: Your friend knows English grammar and recognizes that she has made a speech error.

The aim of the study of linguistics is best described as

To study human language from a scientific perspective

Languages allow their speakers to able to produce and comprehend novel words, such as Googleable; however, other novel words like fallable seem uninterpretable. This tells us what about morphology?

Words can be created by combining individual morphemes, but this is constrained by the rules of the language.