Linguistics 001
Mid-term study guide

This document will give you some key terminology, topics and questions to help focus your review for the mid-term exam. You should not assume that this guide is exhaustive: in principle, anything in the assigned reading or covered in the course lectures is fair game. However, you can rely on this guide to give you a fair picture of the relative importance of various aspects of the course material as we see them.

The exam will not contain trick questions, nor will it require knowledge of unimportant details. For instance, p. 144 of the course text tells you that Hermann von Helmholtz was born in 1821 and died in 1894. We are certainly not going to ask you for these dates. In fact, since Helmholtz was not covered in any of the lectures, and will not be mentioned in this study guide, you could reasonably conclude that he is quite unlikely to be mentioned on the exam.

The outline below follows the division into lectures. Where several lectures cover the same topic, only a single outline point is given.

If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to ask them by email.
Answers of general interest will be sent to the course mailing list.

The study guide for the topic of sociolinguistics, to be covered in class on 10/15 and 10/20,  will be added later.

  1. Approaches to the study of language
    1. Subdisciplines of linguistics
    2. Basic concepts of semiotics
  2. Prescriptive and descriptive linguistics
    1. Levels of correctness
    2. Diglossia, shibboleth, U and non-U
    3. The facts of the "singular their" controversy
    4. The facts of the "Ebonics" controversy
  3. Communication: a biological perspective
    1. Vocal tract and brain changes in hominid evolution
    2. The "Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis"
    3. What are various hypotheses about the adaptive value of spoken language?
  4. Communication: a philosophical perspective
    1. Strawson's dichotomy
    2. Frege, Wittgenstein, Austin, Grice: what were the key ideas of each about language?
    3. The "theory of mind" problem
  5. Morphology
    1. word, morpheme, bound vs. free, lexical categories, affix, inflection vs. derivation, content words vs. function words, allomorphy, constituent structure
  6. Phonetics and phonology
    1. The "pronunciation learning problem" and the "phonological principle"
    2. Basic phonetic sound production mechanisms
    3. Basic nomenclature of the vocal anatomy
    4. The International Phonetic Alphabet -- what is it and how does it work?
    5. phoneme, syllable, consonant, vowel,  feature, tone
  7. Syntax
    1. The principle of compositionality
    2. Structural ambiguity
    3. Syntactic deficits in Broca's aphasia
    4. Basic ideas of the "logical grammarians"
    5. Zellig Harris and operationalist discovery procedures
    6. Noam Chomsky and generative grammar
      1. what is a "formal language"? what is a "generative grammar"?
    7. The "Chomsky hierarchy"
  8. Sociolinguistics