Study guide:
Introduction to Linguistics:
a. What language is? Arbitrariness of language.
b. What linguistics does and what are its modules?
c. Descriptive vs. prescriptive approaches to language grammar.
d. Descriptive and prescriptive rules in language.
e. Idea of language change.
Introduction to Sociolinguistics:
a. Languages and dialects, mutual intelligibility.
b. Idiolects.
c. Sociolinguistics studies language variation.
d. Shibboleths.
e. Examples of sociolinguistic variables: class, ethnicity, gender, region.
f. Standardization of language -- its pros and cons.
g. Idea of Mainstream US English (MUSE).
h. Concept of accent: L1 vs. L2 accents, sound-house metaphor.
History of English:
a. How to use glosses and what they are: linguistic data.
b. Three main periods in development of English: Old, Middle, Modern.
c. The concept of a loanword/borrowing.
d. Old English brought by Anglo-Saxons to British Isles in 5th century AD, brought a lot of Germanic words and is the beginning of English.
e. Middle English began with Norman Invasion (French) in 1066 AD, and borrowed a lot from French.
f. Concept of case: in Old English nouns used to change depending on their function in the sentences (Subject vs. Object), in the same way pronouns change in Modern English (I vs. me). In Modern English case only exists on pronouns, and completely lost on nouns.
g. Change in verbs: in Old English verbs used to change depending on the subject (in Modern English there is only one change: -s is added if subject is he/she/it).
h. Word order was flexible in Old English: "John killed the dragon", "John the dragon killed", "Killed John the dragon" were all grammatical.
i. Modern English spelling often reflects Old English pronunciation: for example, kn and gh in "knight" were all fully pronounced.
j. The concept of The Great Vowel Shift
k. British settlements in the Americas -- 4 waves of colonization
l. Approximate number of speakers of English in America at different stages
m. Loanwords in the American English
IPA:
a. Problems with English spelling system.
b. Idea behind IPA -- why it is necessary for pronunciation descriptions, main principles (one symbol <-> one sound).
c. English consonants and their IPA representations.
d. English vowels and distinctions between monophthongs and dipthongs (no need to memorize all distinctions between English vowel sounds).
American vs. British English:
a. Lexical differences - just a few examples
b. Phonology: Intervocalic /t/, postvocalic /r/, /a/ vs. /æ/ on half, past, etc.
c. Syntax: Collective noun agreement, questions and negative sentences with have.
d. Spelling: The most notable patterns
Research on Dialects:
a. DARE, ANAE -- the purposes of these dictionaries, how are they created
b. Sources of variation in AmE: settlers from different parts of British Isles and different countries
c. Isoglosses, dialect boundaries
d. Major US regional dialects
e. Grammaticality vs. Social Acceptability (in Lectures 6-7, after the discussion of Appalachian English)
US Regional Dialects:
a. New England: low~back merger (cot~caught), r-lessness, /a/-fronting
b. North: ON line, AWY line, Northern cities shift (no need to remember exact pattern, just the concept of cyclical vowel shift)
c. Midland: low~back merger (cot~caught), positive anymore, need/want/like+Past Participle construction
d. South: pin~pen merger (only before nasals - n, m, and η), southern drawl as triphthongization, /w/~/hw/ difference, monophthogization (first state of Southern Vowel Shift) /aɪ/ -> /a:/, double modals, multiple negation, a-prefixing (why we did survey about it? what did we show by its results?)
e. Outer Banks (NC, SC) and Coastal Maine: /aɪ/ -> /ɔɪ/
f. West: basic ideas of California Vowel Shift (no need to remember the pattern, just remember a lot of fronting), hella as a divider between South and North, mainly not a regional distinction, but a group distinction: hippies/professionals/entertainment/Hispanics/etc.
g. New York: /r/-lessness, intrusive /r/, short a-raising, /ɔ/-raising (particular "nasalized" pronunciation of coffee, thought, dog), absence of low-back merger, evolution of NY dialect (younger people tend to use it less and less), concept of linguistic insecurity
Social Varieties:
a. sociolects
b. external vs. internal factors
c. ethnicity, class
d. examples of syntactic and phonological variables
e. stigmatized and prestige variaties
f. social stratification, examples
g. Labov’s NYC department store study, results
African American English, Ebonics
a. what is AAE, speakers of AAE
b. the origins of AAE: dialectalist/creolist/unified views; idea of pidgins and creoles
c. the slave trade
d. phonology: consonant clusters reduction and plurals (desk -> des -> deses), interdentals(/θ,ð/➝/t,d/), monophthogization
e. syntax: habitual be, remote past bin, completive done, copula drop (and: am doesn't drop), negative inversion, embedded questions, usage of come (she come tellin’ me), absence of 3rd person -s, usage of steady
f. social variation, some examples (copula absence, agreement) - no need to remember numbers, just the idea!
g. ebonics controversy: reasons for the resolution, content of the OSB resolution (year:1996), response to it, LSA response, linguistic validity of the resolution, discussion
Multilingual communities:
a. language vitality, factors affecting vitality
b. bilingualism, its benefits
c. examples of multilingual communities (Pennsylvania Dutch, etc.)
Creoles and Pidgins:
a. pidgins vs. creoles, superstrate (lexifier) and substrate languages
b. origins of creoles
c. Gullah: place, origin (Sierra-Leone), basic structure (no verbal conjugation, abundance of tense and aspect markers)
d. Louisiana: people moving from Maine to Louisiana, difference between Cajun French and Louisiana Creole, copula absence, no change in pronouns (no difference between I and me forms), absence of verb conjugation, tense-aspect markers — no need to remember French words, just the concepts.
e. Hawai’i: difference between Hawai’ian and Hawai’ian Creole English (HCE), history of Hawai’i and HCE, decreolization, attitudes to HCE, reaction, discussion, HCE in the courtroom, phonological features (th as [t,d], /r/-lessness), usage of stei for locations,copula absence, fo used for purpose statements, tense-aspect markers
f. Haitian Kreyol: based on French, official language of Haiti, one of a few written creoles, orthography is not French, but its own!
g. Jamaican Creole: based on English, all standard features of Creoles are there.
h. General features of creoles: fewer case distinctions on pronouns (me instead of I), lack of morphology(conjugations, plurals.), Tense-Aspect-Mood markers, copula drop, limited vocabulary
Native American (NA) Languages:
a. the largest tribes/languages
b. areas in US where Native American languages are currently spoken
c. language loss: number of NA languages
d. boarding schools
e. factors causing language death
f. the Native American language act (1992), language revitalization
g. basic grammar: varying phonologies; noun classification; a lot of morphemes marking: different objects, tense, evidentiality; polysynthesis; direction in NA languages (north/south/east/west, etc. instead of left/right)
h. the idea of linguistic relativity
Spanish:
a. heritage languages - definition
b. demographics (states, areas, most dominant groups overall and in NYC)
c. history of Spanish in the US/Southwest (major Spanish-speaking areas, approximate timeline)
d. Hispanics and Lations
e. bilingual education, Proposition 227 and Proposition 58 in California
f. most popular groups in NY and around the US, racialization
g. mock Spanish
h. five types of Latin American Spanish, two types of peninsular Spanish
i. yeismo, seseo
j. Spanish-English contact: code-switching: inter-sentential, intra-sentential, Spanglish (no need to memorize words/constructions)
k. Chicano English: who speaks it, it’s not necessary to be a speaker of Spanish to speak Chicano, basic features: z → s, v → f at the ends of words, v → b, θ, ð → t, d, going/talking pronounced as goween/talkeen, same pronunciation of feel and fill, multiple negation
Asian Americans:
a. who are Asian Americans
b. basic statistics (no need to remember precise numbers): which areas have more and which areas have less, top states, socio-economic difference (marital status,education, occupation, income -- enough to remember where Asian American stand with respect to average Americans: higher income, higher education, etc.)
c. survey of Asian Languages: most popular languages in the US, states where the languages are spoken the most (see maps)
Chinese:
a. languages in China (Mandarin is the official language, many others), Sino-Tibetan language family
b. Chinese in the US (immigration - three waves, current situation in NY, languages spoken by immigrants, Chinese exclusion act)
c. writing system - logographic
d. basic grammatical properties: tones, word order SVO, isolating language (lack of morphology), complicated system of classifiers, lack of articles
Korean and Japanese:
a. Altaic Language Family -- Korean, Japanese, Turkish
b. Korean: writing system (Hangeul, Sejong the Great), the idea behind Hangeul (no need to know Hangeul!), Konglish and code-switching, phonology (/r/ vs. /l/, no consonant clusters at the beginning/end of words, lack of certain sounds which exist in English, substitutions of sounds)
c. Japanese: orthography (Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana), phonology (absence of consonant clusters, /r/~/l/), loanwords and their phonology (no need to remember the exact rules - just what can and cannot be a Japanese word).
d. Grammar of Japanese and Korean: SOV, no articles, honorifics, postpositions.
ASL and Deaf Community:
a. Plains Indian Sign Language
b. invented vs. natural sign languages
c. Bioprogram -- importance of sign language - we can watch how language appears and see if humans have innate capacity for language.
d. American Sign Language: number of speakers, where it is spoken, no relation to spoken English
e. history of ASL (roots in OFSL, middle of 19th century, 1960s – recognition of ASL)
f. oralism vs. manualism vs. ASL (both oralism and manualism are based on English language, not on ASL)
g. learning English is hard, lip reading is inaccurateh. grammar: cheremes, features of cheremes (no need to remember any movements/positions/handshapes/etc!), iconic (transparent and translucent) vs. arbitrary signs, pronouns (pointing to a point in the personal space), tense (usage of adverbs such as yesterday, markers as finished, etc.), fingerspelling
i. manual and non-manual signs (those which are produced by eyes, lips, etc.), importance of non-manual signs for meaning (questions are formed by simultaneous eyebrow movement)
j. variation in ASL (dialects, ethnolects, registers)
k. cochlear implants controversy
Adolescent language:
a. adolescence (no precise definition)
b. jocks vs. burnouts: multiple negation use (burnouts > jocks), burnouts use more vernacular features
c. like: filler, quotative, hedge, focus
d. slang: what is it, it's role
ghgh223
description_and_guide.docx
0
