General Knowledge

Question 0

What is syncretism?

Answer 0

One form, one function

Question 1

What kind of language is OE compare to PdE, concerning sentence structure?

Answer 1

• OE: V2 and SVO language

- PdE: not V2 anymore - residual V2, SVO

Question 2

What is a negative concord language?

Answer 2

A language where different negative expressions are combined to express a single logical negation.

Question 3

What is finiteness?

Answer 3

tense + agreement inflection + nominative case in the sentence

Question 4

What is a word?

Answer 4

Words label, refer to mental representations of specific entities in the world (concepts) in an arbitrary connection: signified vs signifier

Question 5

What’s the difference between derivation and inflection?

Answer 5

Inflection:
Signal syntactic relationship, don’t create meaning, nor change word category, highly productive, semantically transparent, syncretic, only suffixes

Derivation: generates meaning and changes category, highly selective, semantically often intransparent, not syncretic, prefixes and suffixes

Question 6

How can word be formed?

Answer 6

Compounding, abbreviation, conversion, clipping, backformation, onomatopoeia, clitics, word manufacture, derivation

Question 7

What’s a compound?

Answer 7

New words created by combining free morphemes/words. They behave like single words in sentences.

• only right headed compounds
• mostly no inflection inside compounds
• recursive (can be repeated ad infinitum)

Question 8

What are the two classes of abbreviations?

Answer 8

Initialisms: HIV (pronounced as letter)
Acronyms: NATO (pronounced as words)

Question 9

What is conversion?

Answer 9

Assigning an existing word to a new word category

To hit - a hit

Question 10

What are clippings and blendings?

Answer 10

Clipping: shortening a polisyllabic word (prof-essor)
Blending: two wordparts form a new one: breakfast+lunch=brunch

Question 11

What is backformation?

Answer 11

Creative reduction due to incorrect morphological analysis: television (1907) - televise (1927)

Question 12

What is word manufacture?

Answer 12

A person after whom something is named: Fahrenheit, Tempo, Kleenex

Question 13

Morphology typology

Answer 13

Isolating vs agglutinating vs inflectional
Free. Bound Add inflection
Morphemes

Vietnamese. Turkish. German+Engl

Question 14

What’s the difference between word and stem based languages?

Answer 14

Word/root based languages have the root as a perfectly good word, inflectional affixes are optional (English, German)

Stem based languages have stem + mandatory inflectional affixes (Latin, Russian)

Question 15

What’s a phoneme?

Answer 15

A sound that distinguishes meaning and can establish minimal pairs
— shown in broad transcription /…/

Question 16

What is an allophone?

Answer 16

Variants of a phoneme in complementary distribution, they don’t distinguish meaning

— narrow transcription (with diacritics h and ‘ stress marker)

Question 17

What’s a phone?

Answer 17

An actual speech sound

Question 18

How can phonemes be identified?

Answer 18

By the minimal pair test!

Question 19

What’s the difference between phonetics and phonology?

Answer 19

Phonetics: sound in an utterance (performance), independent of particular language, physical sound, concrete, phone […]

Phonology: sound in a system (competence), language-specific, systematic function (difference in meaning), abstract, phoneme /…/

Question 20

How many phonemes are there in English?

Answer 20

In RP 45

Question 21

How is a syllable structured?

Answer 21

Coda+nucleus = rhyme + Onset = syllable

Question 22

What are the levels of sonority?

Answer 22

1. Plosives 2. Fricatives 3. Nasals 4. Approximants 5. Vowels

(1+2 obstruents, 3-5 sonorants)

Question 23

What are suprasegmentals?

Answer 23

Parts of speech that are longer than just one sound/segment:

1) syllable
2) prosody: stress (lexical (a), phrasal (b)), pitch (tone (a), intonation (b))

(a) Vietnamese (b) German/English

Question 24

What is a morpheme?

Answer 24

A minimal linguistic sign carrying meaning + function

Question 25

What is a morph?

Answer 25

The concrete realization of a morpheme

Question 26

What is a allomorph

Answer 26

Two or more variants of a morpheme

1) phonologically conditioned (-al nation-al vs. nationality)
2) lexically conditioned: a) total suppletion (go vs went), b) partial suppletion (bring vs brought)

Question 27

What is derivation?

Answer 27

Combination of 1 free and x bound morphemes
– head is usually on the right and determines the word category

(Unhappiness)

Question 28

Grammatical categories vs grammatical functions?

Answer 28

Fixed vs dependent on syntactic content

Grammatical categories: noun, verb, adjective, preposition, determiner, auxiliary
Grammatical functions: subject, (object) complement, predicate, argument, adjunct

Question 29

What are the 4 clause functions?

Answer 29

Declarative
Interrogative
Imperative
Exclamative

Question 30

What is the innateness hypothesis?

Answer 30

Chomsky’s hypothesis that the course of language acquisition is determined by an innate language faculty