LING-Go: Midterm Exam

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Midterm Exam

The test is cumulative, as usual. So there will be stuff from Language Essentials, Design Features, Orthography, Biological Adaptations, Vocal Tract Anatomy, IPA, Consonants and their feature bundles, vowels and their feature bundles, basics about the difference between a phone and a phoneme as well as between phonemes and allophones. Know the allophones of /t/ and /l/ we have covered in particular. There will be an English sentence that you will have to transcribe into IPA. You need to know natural classes and minimal pairs-if I give you ten phones you should be able to say what natural class they belong to (i.e., what feature(s) do they all share? Basics about sound systems of the worlds languages, etc. No phonology problems per se yet because we haven't covered that yet. Basics about syllable structure and rhythm versus syllable timed languages and how that relates to the schwa, etc. Be able to write out the consonant chart and the vowel chart from memory (on scrap paper. So basically from Behemoth II all you need is minimal pairs and natural classes. But you need to know everything from the other chaplets and all classes up to yesterday.

1 comment:

Zoë said...: Stop Fricative Affricate Nasal Lateral Retroflex Glide: Sing For A Neighbor Loudly [and] Run Gaily; February 26, 2008 at 7:44 PM

Post a Comment

More Extra Credit Opportunities

Newest EC OP:
1) take a phonetic form like “kasa” and track down its meaning in as many languages as you can. E.g., house in Spanish, umbrella in Japanese. . .

Even Newer EC OPS:

1) Make flashcards for terms in a chaplet-make them on a page that can be cut out and used by future students

2) Provide examples from English or other languages of the processes described in a chaplet.

3) Re-write tests questions you thought were confusing

4) Put together video clips from movies, TV, etc. illustrating something covered in the chaplets and/or class.

5) Create an IPA version of Scrabble

6) Put together 5-10 examples from literature of a linguistic point we've studied (e.g., dialectal features, double negatives, use of passive voice in literary dialogue, etc.)

7) Make a study guide for a given QuiXam or the Midterm

New EC OPS:
1) Double Challenge in Syllable Structure in the Behemoth
2) Triple Challenge, same place
3) Longest minimal set
4) Draw a Thelma Theta mnemonic (these may have to be voted on)
5) Make a visual mnemonic for the ethda/crossed d
6) Make a catalogue of lexical gaps in American English
7) Make a video clip of someone speaking with a particular accent and give an IPA transcription for both how you would pronounce the sentence and how they did. (Mel Gibson slips into Australian vowels every once in awhile in the Lethal Weapon movies. . .)
8) Find the longest single word you can whose IPA transcription has the highest number of different IPA symbols.

1) Make a snazzy power point over speech anatomy

2) Make a set of 10 or so matching questions that can be done by scantron. For example, i) Match IPA symbols to their places of articulation; ii) Match terms from the Big Kahuna to their definitions; iii) Match the design features to their descriptions

3) Make a fill in the blank version of a page or two of the chaplets

4) Make a nice list of (10-20) English words that come from French which you wouldn't necessarily immediately identify as French (e.g., words like naive and genre are more identifiable than subject and allegiance, perhaps) and type them up in the IPA with their standard spelling next to the IPA.