Test 2 Tips & Practice QuestionsTest 2 Tips & Practice Questions
The test is cumulative: it will cover material covered in the class lectures, discussion sections, readings and homework assignments since the beginning of the semester, but the main emphasis will be on semantics, phonetics and phonology. Below is a list of some of the most important topics and concepts covered so far. You can use this as a check-list to see if you are prepared for the test. Note: this list is not exhaustive, but it does cover most of the key areas.
Examples of the kinds of questions that may be asked include:
Remember that we can only give you credit for answering the questions that we ask. So answer them, and not some other question. Good efforts and near misses can also receive credit. But answers to phantom questions cannot!
Here are some sample questions to give you some practice with questions in phonetics and phonology.
1) Look for minimal pairs; they signal that two sounds are contrastive and need to be stroed as two different underlying phonemes.
2) If you suspect that two sounds may be allophones (two surface forms of the same underlying phoneme), list the environments where each allophone occurs. Once each list is complete (i.e. you have given the environments for every occurence of the allophones), attempt to make a generalization about the environments in which each allophone occurs. For example, a consonant might only occur before the vowels /i/ and /u/. Instead of listing two different environments for this allophone, we could make the generalization that the consonant occurs only before [+high] vowels.
3) Compare the environments for each allophone to determine whether or not they are in complementary distribution. If they are, then we can be fairly certain that we are dealing with different allophones of a single phoneme.
4) Choose one of the allophones as the underlying form, or the underlying phoneme. This is usually (but not always) the allophone with the widest distribution (the one occuring in the greatest number of environments). We want the underlying form to cover as many cases as possible.
5) Write the rule(s) which will derive the other allophones from the underlying phoneme.
6) Double-check to make sure that the rules you have written can account for all of the data that you are given.
Tamil (Sri Lanka)
In this language, some words begin with glides and others do not. Determine whether the sounds that begin the words in the following data are different phonemes or allophones which can be derived from a single phoneme.
(Hint: The glides [w] and [y] do not necessarily have to represent underlying sounds. Remember that there are different types of rules (p. 244-250 in your text); some surface sounds are not present in the underlying form of the word. They must be systematically inserted by some phonological rule.)
Luganda (East African Bantu language)
Determine the rules for the [r] / [l] alternation in Luganda. (" : " following a vowel indicates that it is long)
(additional question: Is vowel length phonemic or allophonic in this language? Give reasons for your answer.)
Lithuanian
This language contains a prefix which shows alternation depending on the root to which it is attached. State the rules which will derive the surface form of this morpheme. For this exercise, sh = voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative (the sound in the English "ship"), zh = voiced alveolo-palatal fricative, and ng = velar nasal.