Problems from the book
-- please use Answer Key (as pdf) / Answer Key (as doc)

• Chapter 3 #29, 36, 38
• Chapter 4 #2, 3, 4

Preparation for quiz / exam

We will have a quiz next Tuesday on the phonetic symbols; it will be exactly the same format you can expect to see in our first exam (scheduled for March 23). To practice, fill in charts like the following. You can create your own -- simply leave out some labels and some symbols in the chart, and then see if you can fill in the rest without referring to your textbook.

• Practice phonetic chart (MS Word .doc format)
• Practice phonetic chart (PDF format)

Review Material from Previous Quiz

On the first quiz, many people provided answers that were accurate, but incomplete. Although I don't want you to add verbiage just for the sake of lengthening your answer, I do want a complete answer to demostrate the depth of your understanding. Here are examples of the kinds of answers I will look for:

1. "productive" -- in our definition of language, the word "productive" means that users of language are able to produce and understand an unlimited number of novel sentences. For example, I can say "Opened cans of delicious Bumble Bee tuna are unlikely to be found on Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of my favorite planet -- Saturn;" and although you likely never heard that exact utterance before, you can understand it.
2. "Arbitrary Lexical Symbols" -- the words or morphemes of a language are "lexical symbols," in that sequences of sounds represent meanings. For example, the sounds [ but ] combine to represent a kind of shoe (a boot). These are "arbitrary symbols" in that there is no natural association between the representer (the sound sequence) and the thing represented. The assocation is purely conventional; agreed upon by a society.
3. "scientific" -- Linguistics is scientific in that it follows a scientific methodology. As with other sciences, we begin with observation; we form a hypothesis to account for what we observe; we state it in a way that it makes a testable prediction; and then we carry out the test or experiment to see if our hypothesis makes accurate predictions. When we find that it does not, we cycle through again, gather more data if necessary (observation), reforming hypotheses, predicting, and testing. This is the same cycle of steps used on other contemporary scientific fields.
   
   For example, we might observe that English speakers produce two different sorts of voiceless bilabial stops: an aspirated version and an unaspirated version. Oddly, English speakers seem to be unaware of the two distinct sounds, classifying them as a single sound. We hypothesize that the two sounds are allophones of a single underlying phoneme, and their distribution is predicatable. After looking at some data, we hypothesize that the aspirated version appears in word-initial position, and the unaspirated version everywhere else. We have thus made a prediction: if we gather more data, we should find aspirated p in word-initial position and nowhere else; and we should find unaspirated p everywhere EXCEPT in word-initial position. We collect some more data, and find that we're not exactly right, since aspirated p appears in some non-initial positions, as in the word 'repair.' We thus go back to our hypothesis and see if we can modify it to match the data that we have.