Principles of Linguistics Phonetics Phonology and Morphology Essay

Principles of Linguistics Phonetics Phonology and Morphology Essay

Professor Rebecca Board Liljenstolpe

Teaching it Back: Intro Linguistics Midterm Essay | 50 points | Due Monday Week 8

We have spent the first half of the quarter studying basic principles of linguistics: phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax. Before we move into the study of sociolinguistics, we should stop and summarize some of the key concepts we’ve learned.

In an essay, address each of the following sets of questions and write to me as if you want to show me what you have learned so far. Explain, use examples to illustrate, be thorough. If you use wording from your textbook, you must put it into quotation marks and logically connect it to your own sentences—do not cut and paste or simply copy text from the book. I want this to be YOUR words, YOUR summary, YOUR knowledge. I want to see that you can talk about basic principles of linguistics in your own linguistic style, using your own language and sentence structures as if you were teaching someone what you learned. Quoting is OK, but only within the context of an idea you have introduced and are developing. You will need to upload your essay to Turnitin.com. Any detection of plagiarism, including undocumented/unquoted passages, will cause you to fail this important assignment. Be careful!

1). What is phonetics? Explain what the phonetic alphabet is and provide some examples. What advantage does the phonetic alphabet have over regular spelling? Why do linguists use it? (10 points)

2). What is phonology? What are some of the areas of study of interest to linguists who concentrate on phonology? (10 points)

3). What is morphology? What are the major ways in which new words can be coined? Explain each process and also give examples of each. Make up three new words using three different ways (your choice) and be sure to describe the process that you used in forming each of those made-up words. (10 points)

4). What is syntax? What are phrase structure rules? Diagram the following sentences in terms of phrase structure rules and also create tree diagrams for the sentences. (10 points, and you can attach these tree diagrams separately)

The big dog jumped into the bushes.

Six tall boys from her school are flying a kite.

5). What does the term grammaticality judgment mean? On what factors is the grammaticality of an utterance based? On what factors is it not based? (10 points)

Points will be awarded based on the extent you follow these directions, answer all parts of the question in each set, and write clearly. Exemplary papers will give thorough, detailed answers and illustrate ideas/principles with original examples not used in the book.