LING-Go: Reviewing 8-28-08

Friday, August 29, 2008

Reviewing 8-28-08

What existed before Linguistics? Why was language studied? What was its purpose? What varieties of language were seen as valid objects of academic pursuit? What variety of what language was an exception to the 'prestige' condition? Why? What's ironic about that in the way that original work was translated into languages all over the world for the next 20 centuries or so after it was written?

Who is called the father of modern linguistics? What country was he from? How did he come to teach this course? What did he propound were the neglected elements of language that a scientific approach would have to attend to? What is metalanguage? What terms did Saussure introduce? What is the relationship of anthropology to linguistics? (This could be a trick question).

What do these terms mean?
metalanguage
semiotics
prescriptive vs. descriptive
diachronic vs. synchronic
langue vs. parole
paradigmatic vs. syntagmatic, which is illustrated by and which is illustrated by ?

What is schema and how does it relate to semiotics?
Why do you have to teach a computer about the qualities of a room before it can 'understand' a story that involves a room?

What do linguistic, paralinguistic and extralinguistic mean?

How do linguists define GRAMMAR?? Why does ee insist that your grandma has perfect grammar in her native language?

What is the difference between 'good' English and 'standard' English, 'bad' English and 'nonstandard' English? Which should cause you to break out in hives?

How is semiotics related to intellectual curiosity as presented in class?

How did the French accidentally invent dialectology?
Why is American Sign Language more like spoken French than spoken English?

Why is narrative so important in the classroom according to mee?

How is the way you talk related to your identity?

Who is Wallace Chafe? What fruit is featured in the title of the important book comparing oral and written language within and between cultures? The ____ Stories. What animal will become the central artifact in the American Southern imagination in the 21st century? Wait, that wasn't my question. . . whose was it?

What is the irony of how the study of language progressed from written to spoken to gesture?

Bonus info: how not to make yourself America bait overseas, how to deflect the identity of an ugly monolingual American in Europe. . . how not to get chased by a band of angry protestors in Brussels, the truth about ugly babies, the virtues of naming your children after your siblings, the origin of madelina margarita, the significance of Sanskrit in East Asian languages, whether or not Chinese and Korean are related. . . who are Roger Shuy, Ralph Fasold and Walt Wolfram? What is the word for a line on a map that shows generally where one dialect ends and another begins regionally? What does learning two languages simultaneously as a baby do to your brain?

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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.