Intro to Linguistics Midterm Essay
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?
The word phonetics describes the part of linguistics that involves studying how human speech sounds. The phonetic alphabet is designed to be a language-neutral way of expressing these sounds so that it can be applied to all languages, regardless of alphabet. For example, the vowel in the English “sit” can be written as /ɪ/, signifying that it is a short vowel. The vowels in the English “books” can be written as /ʊ/, signifying that specific close back vowel sound.
The phonetic alphabet has the advantage that it is consistent, so can be applied to almost all languages when trying to determine how they sound. It also has the advantage of having many more symbols than a typical language to specify precisely which sound should be made. Linguists use it to highlight the similarities and differences between sounds in languages, as well as to accurately depict words in written form.
The term phonology is used to describe the organization of sound in a language. Unlike phonetics, it does not focus on how the sound is produced, but on the conveying of meaning that comes from different sounds, as well as on the function of those sounds. Linguists that are interested in phonology may also study stress, syllables, accents and intonation of a language to understand it more fully.
One topic of interest to linguists in this area is how certain phonemes can be classified as one group even though they make different sounds as part of the language. English is a good example of this as different letters represent different sounds, despite the fact that they can be classified as the same phoneme category - /p/, for example.
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.
Morphology is the study of how morphemes and other types of linguistic unit work together. It can be used to assess how speakers of a language can know what a new word means based on how they understand the different elements in it.
There are many different ways in which new words can be creative. The first is blending, which involves a combination of two or more words that are known. An example of this could be hangry, which combines the words hungry and angry. Calque are terms that are literal translations from other languages. Neologisms are completely new words. Clipping is when an older word becomes shortened to become a new word. An example of this could be coff, which I have shortened from coffee. Finally, compounding occurs when two existing words are joined to make a new one. An example of this could be penbook, which I have created out of pen and book to describe a book that is stored on an electronic pen.
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.
The term syntax describes the way that words are put together to make sentences, usually describing sentences or phrases. Phrase structure rules are the rules used to describe how linguists can break a phrase up into its parts.
In the example “the big dog jumped into the bushes”, the phrase structure rule to describe it would be S – NP VP. The example “six tall boys from her school are flying a kite” can be described as S - NP NP VP. These are shown as tree diagrams below.
What does the term grammaticality judgment mean? On what factors is the grammaticality of an utterance based? On what factors is it not based?
A grammaticality judgment is based on whether or not an utterance follows the rules of grammar in that language. It is based on how competent the speaker is and the context in which the sentence was said. It is not based on whether it is meaningful, likely, or whether it already exists in the corpus of a language. A nonsense sentence can be grammatical, but would not make sense in the language.
