Fall 2009 Syllabus
Fall 2009 Syllabus
Fall 2009 Syllabus
Fall 2009
T/TH 8:00-9:20am
Tiffany Rousculp
Office: AD 218 (Writing Center) Office Hour: T/TH 10-10:50am
Phone: 957-4992, x. 3 or leave message E-mail: [email protected]
(best way to reach me)
Textbook: How English Works, 2nd ed.
Other Materials: For the final project, you will need a recording and
playback device (tape recorder/digital voice recorder)
Overview:
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to basic concepts in
linguistics, including the linguistic subfields of phonetics, phonology,
morphology, syntax, and semantics. The class also reviews selected topics of
sociolinguistics and applied linguistics( e.g., language variation and
language acquisition). Linguistic phenomena of English and other languages
will be examined in order to sharpen students' analytic skills and their
ability to apply key linguistic concepts to novel language contexts and data.
In this course, students will observe, collect, interpret and analyze natural
language events.
Course Expectations:
In order to learn about linguistics, you must “do” linguistics; it’s not a class
like history in which there might be a lot of memorization involved. This
class is quite exercise-heavy, meaning you will read and then apply what
you’ve read in problems at the end of each reading. We will be covering a
wide range of topics quite rapidly so it is important that you stay caught up
with the reading and the homework, as it can easily pile up on you. (I have
attempted to organize the homework so that you have the larger
assignments between Thursday and Tuesday and have more time.) Nearly
1/3 of your final grade is based on participation, which means that you need
to do the reading, have the homework done, and participate in class.
Since the goal is for you to learn, I want to provide you with opportunities to
revise your work, even though the majority of it is in exercise form. First,
you may turn in your homework after we discuss it in class so that you can
revise it based on our discussions. Also, after I review your work, if there
are any problems with it, you may also revise it and turn it in again.
However, this puts the responsibility on you to be sure you get your
homework turned in—and re-turned in if you’d like. I will keep track of
what you have turned in, but it’s up to you to check it if you are unsure.
We will have two mid-terms to assess how you are doing with your learning.
These will be take-home and open-book, and you can work with each other
on the tests. My purpose is to see how you are understanding and able to
apply your new knowledge, not to “test” you.
For the final project, you will conduct an investigation into an area of
Linguistics that you are interested in: phonology, morphology or syntax. You
will be given guidelines for each of these projects.
Assignments
Reading, Exercises and Participation 30%
Early mid-term 20%, Late mid-term 25%
Final Project: an investigation regarding Phonetics, Morphology,
or Syntax 25%
Absences/Tardies
Due to the quick pace of this course, please don’t miss more than two times.
Also, being late means that you’ve arrived after we’ve started. If you need
assistance in catching up, you can call on each other, meet me during my
office hours, communicate with me via email or talk with me on the phone.
Accommodations
Students with medical, psychological, learning or other disability desiring accommodations
or services under ADA must contact the Disability Resource Center, (801) 957-4659. The
DRC determines eligibility for and authorizes the provision of these accommodations and
services.
SLCC Outcomes
SLCC is committed to fostering and assessing the following student learning outcomes in
its programs and courses:
*Acquiring substantive knowledge in the field of their choice
*Developing quantitative literacies
*Developing the knowledge and skills to be civically engaged
*Thinking critically
*Communicating effectively
English 1200—Introduction to Linguistics/Study of Language
Fall 2009 Schedule
Tuesday Thursday
8/25- Introduction to Course
27 Pre-Course Survey
1. People who say Nobody ain’t done nothin’ can’t think logically.
2. Swearing degrades a language.
3. Kids need to study for years in school to learn to speak their language
properly.
4. Many animals have languages much like human languages.
5. Writing is more perfect than speech.
6. The more time parents spend teaching their children English, the
better their children will speak.
7. You can almost always recognize Jews and Blacks by the way they
talk.
8. Sloppy speech should be avoided whenever possible.
9. It’s me is ungrammatical, bad English, and out to be avoided by
educated speakers of English.
10. The English language traces its ancestry back to Latin.
11. Women generally speak better than men.
12. There are “primitive” languages with only a few hundred words.
13. French is a clearer and more logical language than English or
German.
14. People from the East Coast talk nasally.
15. Homosexuals lisp.
16. Some people can pick up a language in a couple of weeks.
17. It’s easier to learn Chinese if your ancestry is Chinese.
18. Native Americans all speak dialects of the same language.
19. The only reasonable way to arrange words in a sentence is to
start with the subject and follow with the verb.
20. English is a simpler language than Latin or Greek.
21. Every language distinguishes singular nouns from plural nouns
by adding an ending in the plural.
22. The only ways deaf people can communicate are by writing, by
reading lips, and by spelling out English with their fingers.
23. People all over the world indicate “yes” or “no” by the same set
of head gestures.
24. Correct spelling preserves a language.
25. International relations would improve if everyone spoke the
same language.
26. Japanese, Chinese and Korean are dialects of the same
language.
27. There were once tribes of Native Americas that has no spoken
language, but relied solely on sign language.
28. Eskimos don’t have a general word for “snow”, therefore they
can’t think abstractly.
29. The more words you know in a language, the better you know
the language.
30. Nouns refer to people, places or things only.
A note: Be sure to have your subject include their age, where they live, where they
were raised, and their permission to be recorded.
1. Which of the following statements are prespective and which are descriptive? (5pts)
a. “It’s me” is ungrammatical; “It’s I” is grammatically correct.
b. People who say “ain’t” may suffer negative social consequences because it is
associated with dialects of the lower classes.
c. In casual styles of speaking, English speakers end sentences with
prepositions; ending sentences with prepositions is avoided in formal styles.
d. “Between you and me” is correct; “between you and I” is ungrammatical.
e. Some speakers of English accept the sentence “My mother loved.”
12. Draw tree structures for the following sentences (in detail, no shortcuts). (10pts)
Pat loves Robin passionately.
The yellow parakeet asked if she could fly around the room today.
The girl swung up and down in the swing but never jumped off.
13. Draw trees for the deep-structure and the surface structure for the following sentences,
including transformations. (10pts)
(D-structure) __________________________________________________________________________
14. Draw the surface structure and the deep structure, including transformations, of the
following sentence (5pts Extra Credit)
(D-structure) ___________________________________________________________________________
5. English (5pts)
In the following dialect of English there is a predictable variant [əɪ] of the dipthong [aɪ].
What phonetic segments condition this change? What feature(s)
characterize the class of conditioning segments?
1. [bəɪt] bite 6. [fəɪt] fight 11. [taɪm] time
2. [taɪ] tie 7. [baɪ] buy 12. [təɪp] type
3. [raɪd] ride 8. [rəɪs] rice 13. [naɪnθ] ninth
4. [raiz] rise 9. [faɪl] file 14. [faɪr] fire
5. [rəɪt] write 10. [ləɪf] life 15. [bəɪk] bike
6. Farsi (5pts)
Farsi (or Persian) is an Indo-European language spoken in Iran. In the following data, do
[ŕ], [ŕŕ], and [ɾ] belong to one, two or three phonemes? If they belong to different
phonemes, give the minimal pairs that that show this. If they are
allophones of one (or two) phonemes, state the rule for their distribution.
Which one would you choose as the phonemic form and why?
[ŕ] voiced trill [ŕŕ] voiceless trill [ɾ] voiced flap
1. [æŕteʃ] ‘army’ 7. [ahaŕŕ] ‘starch’ 13. [ahaɾi] ‘starched’
2. [faŕsi] ‘Persian’ 8. [behtæŕŕ] ‘better’ 14. [bæɾadæŕŕ] ‘brother’
3. [qædŕi] ‘a little bit’ 9. [hærntowŕŕ] ‘however’ 15. [beɾid] ‘go’
4. [ŕis] ‘beard’ 10. [ʧaŕŕ] ‘four’ 16. [biɾæŋg] ‘pale’
5. [ŕah] ‘road’ 11. [ʧeʤuŕŕ] ‘what kind’ 17. [ʧeɾa] ‘why’
6. [ŕuz] ‘day’ 12. [ʃiŕŕ] ‘lion’ 18. [daɾid] ‘you have’
7. Igbirra (5pts Extra Credit)
Examine the sounds [e] and [a] in the following data from Igbirra, a language spoken in
Nigeria. Do they appear to be allophones of separate phonemes of allophones of the
same phoneme? If the two sound are in complementary distribution, state
the conditioning environments for the allophones.
1. [mezi] ‘I expect’ 5. [mazɪ] ‘I am in pain’
2. [meze] ‘I am well’ 6. [mazɛ] ‘I agree’
3. [meto] ‘I arrange’ 7. [matʌ] ‘I pick’
4. [metu] ‘I beat] 8. [matʊ] ‘I send’
8. Turkish (5pts)
Examine the following data from Turkish and answer the questions that
follow.
[deniz] ‘an ocean’ [elim] ‘my hand’
[denize] ‘to an ocean’ [eller] ‘hands’
[denizen] ‘of an ocean’ [diʃler] ‘teeth’
[eve] ‘to a house’ [diʃimizin] ‘of our tooth’
[evden] ‘from a house’ [diʃlerimizin] ‘of our teeth’
[evʤɪkden] ‘from a little house’ [elʤɪke] ‘ to a little hand’
[denizʤɪkde] ‘in a little ocean’ [denizlerimizde] ‘in our oceans’
[elde] ‘in a hand’ [evʤɪklerimizde] ‘in our little houses’
Give the Turkish morpheme that corresponds to each of the following
translations.
___________ ‘ocean’ __________ ‘in’ __________ ‘my’ __________ ‘house’
___________ ‘to’ __________ ‘of’ __________ ‘hand’ __________ ‘from’
__________ ‘our’ __________ ‘tooth’ __________ ‘little’ __________ plural marker
Give the Japanese verb form for the following English translations:
1. (She) will make (him) open (them)._____________________________
2. (He) will be made to open (them).______________________________
In Japanese [uketa] means ‘(She) took (a test).’ Using this fact, how would you say the
following in Japanese?
1. ‘(She) was made to take (a test).’ ______________________________
2. ‘(She) will not take (a test).’ ____________________________________
2. (10) List two English words each that have been created using of the
following language change processes:
a. Acronym
b. Blending
c. Clipping
d. Coinage
e. Conversion
Need a little more morphology?