Kathryn Flack

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Linguistics 201

Introduction to Linguistic Theory

Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays
10:10 - 11:00
Machmer W-21

I'm done grading the exams and calculating final grades. Please feel free to e-mail me if you'd like your grades. The exams were very good - the class average was 87.7! Thanks for a great semester, and I hope everyone has a good summer!

If you'd like your exam back, let me know. I'll post a key in a few days, after one last make-up is done.

Old homework key: Optional Homework 11. I apologize for not putting this up earlier.

Monday, April 14

The exam is at 8:00 am on Wednesday, April 23 in Bartlett 61.

I'll have exam-review office hours on Tuesday, May 22 from 1-3 pm. If you can't make it but have questions, feel free to e-mail me and we can find another time to meet.

Remember that optional extra credit homework 11 is due, in my mailbox or by e-mail, by 5:00 on Friday, April 18.

Extra credit essays and experiment slips can be turned in at the exam, or to my mailbox any time before the exam.

Friday, April 11

Homework: Optional extra credit Homework 11: Syllable structure. Due to me, by e-mail or in my mailbox, by 5:00 pm on Friday, May 19.

Old homework key: Homework 10: Phonological rules and syllable structure.

Exam study guide: Final exam study guide. We'll review for the exam in class on Monday; it would be a really good idea to look at the study guide before then, and bring a copy with you to class.

Things to know: The conditions under which people with a Boston accent drop "r" are systematic, and are based on syllable structure.

Wednesday, April 9

Exercises: What kinds of restrictions on the sounds they use and on syllable shapes do we see in data from Gita, Sean, and other English-speaking kids?

Things to know: When kids mispronounce words, they do so in very systematic ways.

Monday, April 7

Exercises: Characterizing syllables in Japanese loan words, and how English words must be adapted to be appropriate Japanese words,

Things to know: Know what the parts of a syllable are (onset, nucleus, rhyme, coda); what English syllables typically look like; how syllables can be different in other languages.

Friday, April 4

Homework: Homework 10: Phonological rules and syllable structure. Due Friday, May 11.

Old homework key: Homework 9: Phonemes and allophones.

Exercises: Phonological explanations for English allomorphs.

Things to know: Choosing between two allomorphs often follows the same kinds of rules as choosing between two allophones.

Wednesday, April 2

Exercise: Phonemes vs. allophones, finding the basic phoneme, and writing phonology rules in German.

Things to know: Know how to choose the basic phoneme for a pair of allophones (it's the one with the more general distribution), and how to write phonology rules that explain which allophone occurs in which context.

Monday, April 30

Exercises: Phonemes vs. allophones in Korean.

Things to know: The lexicon is where all unpredictable information about language (like relationships between words' meanings and pronunciations) is stored. In the lexicon, words' pronunciations have only basic phonemes; these sometimes turn into different allophones through phonological rules.

Homework: Homework 9: Phonemes and allophones. Due Friday, May 4.

Old homework key: Homework 8: Phonemes.

Things to know: Sometimes the distribution of allophones depends on more complex properties than simply neighboring sounds, as is the case for English aspirated and unaspirated stops.

Wednesday, April 25

Exercise: Finding phonemes and allophones in Cree.

Things to know: Be really sure you know the difference between phonemes and allophones, and how to decide whether some pair of sounds are phonemes or allophones in a new language. If they're allophones, be able to work out a description of what predictable contexts they appear in.

Monday, April 23

Exercise: Finding phonemes and allophones in Italian.

Things to know: Know the difference between phonemes and allophones, and how to tell whether two sounds are phonemes or allophones in some language.

Also, Wednesday evening at 8:00 at Amherst Books, UMass linguistics professor Tom Roeper will read from and talk about his new book about how children acquire language. It should be lots of fun, and it would be great to see you there!

Friday, April 20

Homework: Homework 8: Phonemes. Due Friday, April 27

Things to know: Know what a minimal pair is; also, know what phonemes and allophones are, and the difference between the two.

Wednesday, April 18

Things to know: Be comfortable figuring out how to transcribe English words in IPA symbols and vice versa. Also, when words rhyme imperfectly (like in songs or poems), different sounds that share features (place and manner of articulation, voicing) make for better partial rhymes.

Tuesday, April 17

More extra credit options are here.

Things to know: What sounds all the symbols for English vowels (and consonants) represent; what features each vowel (and consonant) have. Be able to transcribe the sounds in English words.

Friday, April 13

Here's the key for the take-home portion of the syntax exam.

Things to know: What sounds all the symbols for English consonants represent; what place and manner of articulation and voicing features mean.

And in case you're curious, here's a video of someone's larynx while they're talking.

Wednesday, April 11

The take-home portion of the syntax exam is due at class time on Friday, April 13.

And here's the key for today's in-class portion of the exam.

Friday, April 6

Exam study guide: Exam 2 study guide. We'll review for the exam in class on Monday, so it would be a very good idea to look through the study guide over the weekend and bring it to class on Monday.

The exam will have an in-class portion and a take-home portion. The in-class portion will be on Wednesday, April 11; the take-home portion will be due at class time on Friday, April 13.

I'll have extra office hours on Tuesday (April 12) from 3 - 4:30; feel free to come by if you want to study more for the exam.

Old homework key: Homework 7: Transformations.

Things to know: Transformations make any kind of sentence other than declaratives, including things like Cheese, I like (but tofu, I hate). and Get that chicken!

Wednesday, April 4

Exercises: Finding d-structures and writing transformations in Japanese and Turkish.

Things to know: Make sure you really understand what d-structures and s-structures are, how to find d-structures in any language, what transformations are, and how to write transformations for any language.

Monday, April 2

Exercise: Finding d-structures and writing transformations in French.

Things to know: What d-structures for English WH questions look like and how to find them; why transformations sometimes need to add words to d-structures. How to find d-structures and write transformations for languages other than English.

Friday, March 30

Homework: Homework 7: Transformations. Due Friday, April 6.

Old homework key: Homework 6: Phrase structure rules and syntax trees 2.

Things to know: To make a sentence, first start out with the set of words that will go into the sentence. Phrase structure rules assemble these words into declarative sentence order; then, if necessary (as for a question), transformations move words around or add predictable words to make the form of the question that you say and hear. Know what d-structures and s-structures are, and how to write transformations.

Wednesday, March 28

Things to know: Questions (like What could Oscar give to a hobo?) are very similar to declarative sentences that answer them (like Oscar could give chicken to a hobo.). This leads linguists to propose that every question starts out its existence as a declarative sentence (like Oscar could give what to a hobo.), then the question word and the auxiliary move to the beginning of the sentence.

Monday, March 26

Exercises: Finding phrase structure rules in Afar, Lilloet, and Yaqui.

Things to know: Make sure you can find phrase structure rules in languages other than English; these can be used to illustrate similarities and differences among languages.

Friday, March 16

Homework: Homework 6: Phrase structure rules and syntax trees 2. Due Friday, March 30.

Old homework key: Homework 5: Phrase structure rules and syntax trees.

Wednesday, March 14

Exercise: Finding phrase structure rules in Japanese.

Things to know: How to find phrase structure rules and draw trees in langauges other than English.

Monday, March 12

Things to know: How to draw syntax trees, which represent the structure of a particular sentence. Trees must follow the phrase structure rules you've written for a language. (Practice drawing trees for the sentences in Friday's exercise.)

Friday, March 9

Homework: Homework 5: Phrase structure rules and syntax trees. Due Friday, March 16.

Old homework key: Homework 4: Syntactic constituency.

Exercise: Find all phrases and use them to write phrase structure rules for English verb phrases and prepositional phrases.

Things to know: Know how to use the structure of individual sentences to write phrase structure rules for NPs, PPs, VPs, and Ss. Also, knowing where different songwriters/poets put line breaks within phrases can help tell who wrote what, and can explain why some songs/poems are hard to understand when you hear them.

Wednesday, March 7

Things to know: Be sure you can find all phrases in a sentence using constituency tests. Know how to use this information to write phrase structure rules for English sentences. For example, what phrases are there in My big red feathery chickens with long legs eat nasty green rotten chicken feed in the barn? What phrase structure rules can you write based on this sentence?

Monday, March 5

Things to know: Sentences are made up of phrases; phrases are made up of words. Phrases are identified using constituency tests. Know how to use constituency tests to find all NPs (noun phrases), VPs, and PPs in an English sentence.

Friday, March 2

The key for the midterm will be posted once all the scheduled make-ups are completed.

Homework: Homework 4: Syntactic constituency. Due Friday, March 9.

Things to know: Sentences have internal structure that determines their meaning, like words do. If a sentence has more than one possible structure, it has more than one meaning -- it is ambiguous.

Wednesday, February 28

Here's the take-home portion of the first midterm. It's due by class time on Friday; as usual, late exams will not be accepted.
Note: Question 3.2(b) should say Draw a tree structure for the word you built in 3.2(a). I apologize for the typo.

Monday, February 26

Things to know: Be ready for the midterm in class on Wednesday; the take-home section will be due on Friday. I'll have extra office hours on Tuesday (tomorrow) from 2:00 - 3:30; please feel free to drop by if you have questions.

Also, everyone should watch Stephen Colbert talk about truthiness.

Friday, February 23

Exercises: Finding a rule for the placement of the expletive infix -fuckin- as in Cali-fuckin-fornia, etc. using state names as test data.

Old homework key: Homework 3: Morphological analysis and tree drawing.

We'll review for the first exam (which will be Wednesday, Feb. 28) in class on Monday; it's a good idea to look at the study guide and bring any questions (and perhaps a copy of the study guide) to class.

Wednesday, February 21

Things to know: How to draw morphology trees for English words; some English roots can be bound rather than free, like fer in re-fer, de-fer, in-fer, etc.

Exam 1 study guide. The in-class portion of exam 1 will be on Wednesday, Feb. 28; the take-home portion will be passed out in class on the 28th and will be due in class on Friday, March 2.

Friday, February 16

Things to know: How to use structural tests to identify a word's part of speech; words like undoable are ambiguous, and can have two different morphological structures; the morphological structure of words can be represented using trees.

Old homework key: Homework 2: Morphological analysis 2.

Homework: Homework 3: Morphological analysis and tree drawing. Due Friday, Feb. 23.

Wednesday, February 14

NO CLASS - SNOW DAY. Homework 2 is still due in class this Friday; feel free to e-mail me if you have questions.

Monday, February 12

Exercises: Figuring out the meaning of the English -gate suffix (lots of examples can be found here), and what kinds of words the English -ass suffix can attach to.

Things to know: People have much more detailed knowledge of morphology than the rules we've been discussing for the past two weeks.

Friday, February 9

Exercises: Writing rules for the complex reduplication patterns found in Jingulu, Chukchee, Washo, and Temiar.

Old homework key: Homework 1: Morphological analysis 1.

Homework: Homework 2: Morphological analysis 2. Due Friday, Feb. 16.

Wednesday, February 7

Exercises: Writing more complicated morphology rules for Koasati and Ndebele.

Things to know: Morphology can do all kinds of things besides adding affixes to words.

Monday, February 5

Exercises: Identifying allomorphs and writing rules in Turkish and Dyirbal.

Things to know: Be able to find consistent conditions (based on the sounds of words) for when allomorphs occur, and write good rules to describe the morphology. Be careful of rules that depend on intuitions about syllables, as not everyone's intuitions always match.

Friday, February 2

Exercise: Finding morphemes and writing rules in Cree.

Homework: Homework 1: Morphological analysis 1. Due Friday, Feb. 9.

Things to know: Morpheme terminology (morpheme, morphology, root, affix, prefix, suffix, infix, free, bound); what allophones are; how to write morphology rules in the correct format.

Wednesday, January 31

Exercise: We started working out how to identify morphemes and predict new words in Zulu.

Things to know: How to identify morphemes in data from an unfamiliar language. Also, be familiar with course policies in the syllabus. Course packets will be passed out on Friday.

Monday, January 29

If you missed the first day of class: Please do this exercise on using your English-speaker intuitions to judge words and sentences you've never heard before; this is the kind of knowledge of language that we'll discuss in the class.

I also passed out the syllabus; you can pick up a copy in the next class. Course packets, which we'll use instead of a book, will also be passed out later this week.