LING-Go: Friday's Exam

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Friday's Exam

There's a nice list of study questions on p. 26 in the second installment of chaplets, Adaptations & Orthography.

Here is a pithier set:

Know the difference between prescriptive and descriptive and that your grandmother has perfect grammar.
What passed for linguistics before modern linguistics? What/who was privileged? What was the goal of that approach to language study? What was ironic about New Testament Greek?
Saussure, descriptive/prescriptive, semiotics, synchronic/diachronic, syntagmatic/paradigmatic, langue and parole
Genie-critical window of first language acquisition
Science and Ideology
Chomsky: the LAD, the UG, competence vs performance, relationship between human language and other primates we know of
form and function, formal linguistics vs functional linguistics
animal communication systems,what they can't do that humans can
design features-we actually went over most of these in class when we talked about animal communication systems, so we'll go ahead and cover them

I'm going to add to this so check back in.

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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.