Language & Linguistics
What allows us to pair meaning (thoughts) with a signal (speech, writing, signs)?
Language
The study of dialects is called ……..?
Dialectology
What is the subfield of phonetics that focuses on how sounds are produced?
Articulatory phonetics.
Phonology deals with the physical characteristics of sounds. True or False? Justify if false.
False. It deals with the abstract representation of sounds.
What does morphology study?
The internal structure of words
The language box is comprised of the lexicon and what three types of rules?
Phonological, morphological, syntactic rules
Native speakers of Mandarin Chinese do not have an accent. True or False? Justify if false.
False. Everyone has an accent (native or foreign).
What is a phoneme?
An individual sound segment that distinguishes meaning
The English sounds /t/ as in pat and /d/ as in pad are in what type of distribution?
Contrastive
The smallest constituents that carry meaning are called……….
Morphemes
The fleshy, roundish, and usually red edible fruit that grows on tress is named apple in English, pomme in French, manzana in Spanish, and ringo in Japanese. What property of human language does this illustrate?
Arbitrariness
What level of syntactic variation is this meme representing?
Morphological level
Provide a minimal pair for the sounds /ʃ/ and /tʃ/.
Choose and shoes
The diacritic ̚ which appears in the pronunciation of sounds like [t] in Pete [pit ̚ ] marks what type of allophonic variation? (BONUS)
Unreleased stops
Identify the root and any base/s in the word unbelievable (BONUSDouble)
Root: believe ; Bases: believe, believable
How is linguistic competence different from performance? (BONUS)
Competence is the unconscious knowledge of the grammar of your language. Performance is your actual language output, what you produce.
Give an example of a language variety that reflects diatopic variation.
British vs American English
French and Canadian French
In this image the vocal folds are …….. . This configuration produces ……… sounds.
Abducted, voiceless sounds.
How many syllable nuclei are there in the word discombobulated?
Six
The morpheme -er is a derivational morpheme in the word teacher. True or False? Justify if false.
True
What type of grammar is this comic depicting?
Prescriptive grammar
What did William Labov’s “4th Floor” research demonstrate in the 1960s? (BONUS)
That lower-middle class employees showed the most linguistic variation.
Describe the vowel sound /e/ using all of the 4 features that characterize vowels. (BONUS)
Mid, front, tense, unrounded
What is the name of the regressive assimilation phonological process by which alveolar consonants like /t/, /d/, and /n/ take on the place of articulation feature of sounds like /θ/?
Dentalization
Give an example of each word formation process: clipping, blending, and borrowing
Ad, hangry, baguette