Miscellaneous
What is odd about this sentence? State which type(s) of linguistic competence enabled you to make your judgment.
These words do not mean anything in English. We know this because of our semantic competence.
Consider the word splash. Does this word show iconicity, indexicality, symbolism, or some
combination of these?
Splash is iconic to an extent, but also symbolic.
The use of metaphor flouts which of Grice’s maxims?
Maxim of Quality
What type of morphological process is used to form the Dutch participle gestofzuigd from the root stofzuig 'vacuum-clean'?
Circumfixation (ge~d)
What is odd about this sentence? State which type(s) of linguistic competence enabled you to make your judgment.
In addition to these words not making sense (which we know because of our semantic competence), this sentence does not follow English word order (which we know because of our structural, aka grammatical competence).
Define the narrative cohesion device known as reference. How is reference often achieved in English?
Participant/circumstance is introduced at one place in narrative and then referred back (or forward) to at some other point. Often via pronouns or demonstratives.
If I say, “I bet you $10 dollars it will rain today,” but I do not actually intend to give you $10, which of the Searlean felicity conditions have I violated?
The sincerity condition.
Identify the subject in the clause below. What formal criteria allow you to identify it?
Breakfast is eaten every morning on the terrace.
Subject: breakfast. Formal criterial: word order ("breakfast" precedes the verb “is”) and verbal agreement ("is" agrees with "breakfast" in person and number--i.e., 3SG).
It was argued in lectures that animal communication systems in the wild do not show evidence of displacement or productivity. Does this claim also hold with respect to animals that have been taught human communication systems? Give evidence.
Yes, it holds.
Displacement: In the data seen in class, Nim & Koko both signed almost exclusively about their immediate desires and surroundings—food, hugging, play.
Productivity: Lots of repetition, both of the trainers and of themselves. Utterances either very short, or long but very repetitive. Nim was also observed to rarely initiate signing.
Find two examples of redundancy in the following
sentence: “Tomorrow I think I’ll take the day off.”
“I”: appears twice.
"Tomorrow” and “[wi]ll": both indicate future.
"Tomorrow" and "day": both indicate the same time period.
Consider the following dialogue from the Beetle Bayley cartoon:
Sergeant: Beetle, I’d like this pencil sharpened.
Beetle: Boy! If I was using it, I’d like it sharpened too! (walks away)
Describe the miscommunication in the dialogue above by explaining the difference between the Sergeant’s intended speech act, and what Beetle understood this speech act to be.
Sergeant intended this as a directive. Beetle interpreted it as a representative—that is, simply a comment on a state of affairs (in the case, the state of Sergeant wishing the pencil were sharper).
Identify the subject in the underlined clause below. What formal criteria allow you to identify it?
Ice-cream I like, but jelly I detest.
Subject: I. Formal criterial: nominative case (i.e. ,it's "I", not "me"), word order ("I" precedes the verb “like”) and verbal agreement ("like" agrees with "I" in 1SG person and number, to the extent that it can).
A natural language can have an infinite number of grammatical sentences. Why is this so and why do linguists find this significant?
Recursion allows one sentence to be embedded inside another an infinite number of times. Significant because it shows how a language can take a finite number of grammatical rules and use them to produce an unlimited number of sentences.
What is the term for the minimal linguistic unit that can be given a truth value?
A proposition.
Which maxim is B flouting? What is B's implicature, and how does A derive it?
A. We’re going to the movies.
B. I’ve got an exam tomorrow.
B’s response flouts Maxim of Relation: taken literally, it does not seem related to A’s statement.
But due to Cooperative Principle, A will assume B is trying to make sense & turn to real-world knowledge to try to understand. “If someone has an exam tomorrow, they have to stay in and study today.”
Assuming A knows this, A will understand B is implying that s/he cannot go along to the movies. Communication will be successful.
Identify the subject in the clause below. What formal criteria allow you to identify it?
There’s no business like show business.
Subject: there. Formal criteria: word order (precedes verb “is”), agreement (verb “is” agrees with it in person and number—3SG)
What is a substitution class? Give examples from English to illustrate.
A group of elements that can be substituted for each other in the same grammatical frame. Shows that they are grammatically “alike” in some way.
E.g., NPs (“a car”, “six red monkeys”, “good health”). Can all fit in the same frame, e.g., “I would like ____.”
E.g., AdjPs (“long”, “very helpful”, “really quite bizarre”). Can all fit in same frame, e.g., “This book is ____.”
Give three examples of signs: one that is iconic, one that is symbolic, and one that is complex, containing both an icon and a symbol.
Examples:
Icon: a picture of fruit on a sign advertising fruit for sale
Symbol: the colour yellow on road signs to mean “caution”
Icon + Symbol: a road sign cautioning drivers about kangaroos might be yellow (symbolic) with a picture of a kangaroo (iconic)
Which maxim is B flouting? What is B's implicature, and how does A derive it?
A. Are you going to Steve’s barbecue?
B. A barbecue is an outdoor party.
Answer 1: B’s response flouts the Maxim of Relation: taken literally, it does not seem related (in the correct way, at least) to A’s statement.
Answer 2: B’s response flouts the Maxim of Quantity: a barbecue is an outdoor party by definition, so, taken literally, the statement does not add any information.
Either way, due to the Cooperative Principle, A will still take it that B is being informative and so will infer that the fact that the party is outdoors is somehow an answer to his/her question.
A must then turn to real-world knowledge (e.g., what A knows about B and the outdoors) to try to understand B’s implicature. (What that exact implicature is is not clear to us here, as we do not know B nor have the same real-world knowledge as A.)
“Inflectional processes make new grammatical words, derivational processes make new lexemes.” Explain this statement, making use of examples from English to illustrate your answer.
Inflection creates different forms of the same lexeme. These are the different "versions" (i.e., different grammatical words) that are required by certain syntactic or semantic contexts.
Derivation creates a new lexeme—that is, a new abstract category of meaning. A speaker chooses between different derived forms based on the meaning they want to convey.
Define the 4 narrative cohesion devices used in English (reference, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion). Then illustrate each with one example from the short passage below.
“The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator’s report card would say: Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills.
So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved—but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.” (Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, 1994)
Reference: participant/circumstance is introduced at one place in narrative and then referred back (or forward) to at some other point.
Ellipsis: leaving out word(s) that are supposedly required by the grammar of the sentence. Done to avoid repetition. The omitted words will be recoverable from context.
Conjunction: use of “connectors”—conjunctions, discourse markers—to link utterances and show relationships btw parts of a discourse.
Lexical cohesion: repeating words or using words are similar to ones already used in order to link parts of the narrative.