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Interesting Questions, Facts and Information
- There are a total of 60 general entries. We are selecting 30 for display.
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 Interesting Questions, Facts, and Information
 Linguistics
| Who was considered the 'Father of Linguistic', a Swiss guy, who authored the seminal book entitled 'Course in General Linguistics'? | Linguistics
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| What is the name of the linguistic school, which attempted to uncover 'Discovery Procedures'; that are internally imbedded, and compose the underlying units of language? | Linguistics
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structuralists. Leonard Bloomfield's 'Language' laid down the science of language between 1933 to 1950, until Chomsky universalized the idea of language. The areas of phonological utterances were strictly analyzed, rather than the deep intentional structure...this where they went wrong, since we know that utterances in general can be arbitrary.
| Since language is arbitrary, but contain 'Permitted Moves'...what term best describes the system of this communicational system? | Linguistics
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| What three components, generally, make up a system of a typical language? | Linguistics
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phonology syntax semantics.
| What is the smallest segment of sound, that comprises the basic building blocks of a language? | Linguistics
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phonemes. Phonemes on the average are 35 per language, English has 44 phonemes....eg b.p,i,e..etc. the languages of the Caucasus may have the most with 89....do you know any language with more? if so email it to me...thanks.
| What is the term for unchanging, gliding vowels; which can be either consonant-based or vowel-based? | Linguistics
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| The morpheme is the smallest syntactical unit. How many morphemes would the word 'antidisestablishmentarianism' have? | Linguistics
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6. anti- , dis, establish, ment, arian, and ism....what about the word regurgitation...how many?
| What are the 2 main structures, found when deconstructing a sentence into a tree-diagram? | Linguistics
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np vp. Noun phrase and verb phrases also can be decomposed into smaller bundles....NP= D and N, etc...
| After, we analyze the syntactical order and construction, and find it worthy of our 'Permitted moves', does it mean that it will convey an idea cogently to us? | Linguistics
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General American. That's the accent that all TV newscasters try to speak with.
The way a language builds words by putting small, meaningful units together.. A morpheme is a small, meaningful unit. Take the word 'blackboard' - the two morphemes are 'black' and board'.
| A person with a higher social economic status (SES) could be expected to use more or less formal language than a person of a low SES? | Linguistics 2
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more. The lower classes normally want to speak like the people in the higher SES. (This often does *not* apply to teenagers, who often regard their variety of speech as an important badge of group identity).
| To which class in US society would a person like Bill Gates belong? | Linguistics 2
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Corporate class. He wouldn't belong to the upper class - that's mainly old and prestigious families who come from 'old money'. The corporate class is mainly made up of investors and high executives who control the major means of production.
| Morphology: Which hypothesis, which first appeared in Chomsky (1970), was a reaction to the programme of generative semantics? | Matve's Linguistics Challenge
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Lexicalist hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, words are to be treated as minimal units from the point of view of the syntax. I'm afraid the other answers are fictional. According to generative semantics, submorphemic semantic constituents are organised by syntactic operations.
| Syntax: What name is given in Principles and Parameters theory to verbs such as 'believe', which apparently govern across maximal projections, unlike most verbs? | Matve's Linguistics Challenge
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ECM verbs. ECM stands for 'Exceptional Case Marking'. Strong verbs are verbs such as 'bring' in English, which have irregular preterites and past participles. Particle verbs are English verbs composed of a simple verb plus a preposition. Matrix verbs are verbs found in main clauses.
N.S. Trubetskoy. Trubetzkoy belonged to the influential Prague School of phonology. Bloomfield was an American structuralist around the same time. Chomsky is a generativist. Saussure was a famous Swiss structuralist.
| Semantics: Which principle states that the meaning of an expression is determined by the meaning of its constituents and the way in which they are combined? | Matve's Linguistics Challenge
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Compositionality. The rest are made up (obviously). This is an important basic principle in semantics, but since I hate the subject, I won't tell you anything interesting about it.
Johannes Schmidt . This model is often contrasted with the Stammbaum or 'family tree' model. In a way they are complementary, and not opposite, ways of looking at language change.
| Syntax: In the Minimalist Programme, the 'external interfaces' have the initials PF and LF. PF stands for 'Phonetic Form' - what does LF stand for? | Matve's Linguistics Challenge
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Logical Form. These interface levels represent a radical overhaul of the Principles and Parameters model. Deep Structure and Surface Structure were seen as unnecessary and theory-internal levels, which were not supported empirically. LF and PF represent the external conditions on linguistic form.
Postalveolar click. The postalveolar click is found in such improbably-named languages as !Xu.
| Phonology: The important 1968 work by Chomsky and Halle, which introduced a new type of distinctive feature matrix, had what title? | Matve's Linguistics Challenge
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The Sound Pattern of English. 'Grundzuege der Phonologie' (1939) was by N.S. Trubetzkoy (as you should know if you've been paying attention!). 'Generative Phonology' (1979) is the title of a book by Michael Kenstowicz and Charles Kisseberth. 'Preliminaries to Speech Analysis' (1952) did introduce a new distinctive feature matrix, but it was by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant and Morris Halle.
Herbert Paul Grice. Again, I'm not big on this subject, but Grice's maxims come up again and again. They are supposed to describe the typical behaviour of speakers in actual conversational situations. The others are also eminent pragmaticists and semanticists.
Caucasian. Georgian is by far the Caucasian language with the most speakers. It has its own ornate alphabet, and is also famous among linguistics for being an 'ergative' language - that is, one where the same morphological endings are found on subjects of intransitive verbs as on objects of transitive verbs (at least, in the perfective aspect).
Syntax. Morphology is the study of the internal composition of words. Phonology is the study of sound systems (with reference to language rather than to the physical speech act), and semantics is the study of the meaning of words or sentences.
| In dialectology, what is the line on a map called which divides areas with different forms of a word? | Basic Linguistics
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Isogloss. I hope that was easy, if only because the other options were rather improbable. An example of a possible isogloss would be one dividing areas of England that have a long back 'a' in 'bath', and those that have a short front one. Unfortunately, as sociolinguistics has shown, the picture is more complicated: such variation is social as well as geographical.
| The sounds of a language change over time. English spelling does not always reflect this change: how was the 'gh' in 'night' originally pronounced? | Basic Linguistics
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Like German 'ch' in 'ich'. English did originally have this sound, believe it or not. Old English was very similar to German.
| And finally... Old Norse is almost the same as which modern Scandinavian language? | Basic Linguistics
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Icelandic. It's hardly changed since the Middle Ages. Norwegian, Swedish and Danish have all lost a lot of their inflectional morphology, so that, for example, all the present tense forms of a verb are now identical.
Rhotics. This category of speech sounds is rather odd, because these sounds are produced in completely different ways, as you shall soon see! They are classed together because people think they sound similar, and people learning a second language will tend to replace a foreign-sounding rhotic with the rhotic from their native language.
Trilling the tongue against the bony ridge behind the front teeth.. This kind of R is called an "alveolar trill." It's produced by trilling the tip of your tongue against the "alveolar ridge," that ridge of bone behind your front teeth. This is the most common rhotic in the world's languages. Spanish has another rhotic, the "alveolar tap." It is produced by striking the tip of the tongue very rapidly against the alveolar ridge. Interestingly, in Standard American, the alveolar tap is an allophone of /t/. For fun, contrast your pronunciation of the "T" in "Ted" with the "tt" in "Betty." The first is a normal "T," while the second is an alveolar tap in some dialects of English.
| Linguists call the French and German growling-in-the-throat R-sound a "fricative"-- it's produced with the tongue close enough to some other part of your mouth that air flowing out of the mouth is turbulent and noisy. For the French and German "R," what part of your mouth (and tongue) is this? | This Quiz Made Possible by the Letter "R"
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Back of the tongue body against the uvula.. It's called a "uvular fricative." It can be either voiced (using your vocal cords, like the sound "z") like in French "rouge," or unvoiced (without using your vocal chords, like the sound "s") like in French "lettre." The French and German "R" can also be produced as a uvular trill-- you trill the back of your tongue against your uvula. Sound complicated? You haven't made it very far in this quiz, have you?
| The exotic "alveolar fricative trill" sounds roughly like "rrrrjjjjj," a trilled "R" followed by a "J" sound. It's the "r with a hacek over it" in the name of the famous Classical composer Dvorak. It's indigenous to which Slavic language? | This Quiz Made Possible by the Letter "R"
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Czech. Truly a rare sound in the world's languages. The IPA transcription is a lower-case "r" with a small upside-down capital "T" under it.
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