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Structure
Interesting Questions, Facts and Information
- There are a total of 70 general entries. We are selecting 30 for display.
Special Topics
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 Interesting Questions, Facts, and Information
 Linguistics
| 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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| What are the two 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...
| 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 is the term for unchanging, gliding vowels; which can be either consonant-based or vowel-based? | Linguistics
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| What is the smallest segment of sound, that comprises the basic building blocks of a language? | Linguistics
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phoneme. 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 three components, generally, make up a system of a typical language? | Linguistics
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phonology syntax semantics.
| Since language is arbitrary, but contain 'Permitted Moves'...what term best describes the system of this communicational system? | 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.
| Who was considered the 'Father of Linguistics', a Swiss guy, who authored the seminal book entitled 'Course in General Linguistics'? | Linguistics
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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'.
General American. That's the accent that all TV newscasters try to speak with.
| 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 term refers to 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.
| 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).
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).
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.
| 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.
Postalveolar click. The postalveolar click is found in such improbably-named languages as !Xu.
| 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.
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.
| 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. This is an important basic principle in semantics, but since I hate the subject, I won't tell you anything interesting about it.
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.
| 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.
| 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.
| 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.
| 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.
| 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.
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.
Yes. The R-lessness of RP (Received Pronunciation, that is, "The Queen's English," or the accent you'd have to have to work at the BBC) began in the 18th century as an affectation among London's elite. Before that time, "R" was pronounced in British English just like it is pronounced in today's Standard American. The pronunciation of Standard American has changed since Shakespeare's day, too. So, it's wrong to think that British English or American English, or any dialect of English, for that matter, is the "correct" or "authentic" dialect for performing Shakespeare.
| No quiz "brought to you by the letter R" would be complete without a question about "R" the letter. So, here it is. Did the Greek alphabet ever have a "rho" that looked like the "R" in the Roman alphabet? (By implication, if you say "no," the Greek alphabet only ever had a rho which looks like the "P" in the Roman alphabet, and the extra diagonal stroke was a purely Roman invention.) | This Quiz Made Possible by the Letter "R"
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Yes. For most of its history, the Greek alphabet was not the single unified entity that math books and modern editions of ancient Greek texts would have you believe. In Classical Greece, each city-state had its own version of the alphabet. The two versions of rho, the "P-version" and the "R-version," co-existed happily, and sometimes both versions were even used in the same city-state.
The Etruscans adopted the Greek alphabet for their language and gave it to the Romans. The Etruscans, and, hence, the early Romans, used the "P-version." By Rome's Republican period (3rd century BCE), the Roman alphabet had taken its current form, and they had switched to the "R-version" of "R," and the "P-version" came to be used for the sound "P."
Can be a consonant or a vowel.. "R" can be a consonant, of course. A little-known fact is that "R" can also be a vowel. So, what is a vowel? A vowel is the most acoustically prominent sound in its syllable. That "R" can be a vowel is more obvious from a language like Czech, which has wonderful tongue-twisters like "Strch prst skrz krk" ("stick a finger down your throat"). Sanskrit, really Sanskrt, the ancient Indian language, even had a distinction between long and short "R." Now, the shocker: English has vocalic "R"! In the General American dialect of English, the word "burger" is pronounced like "brgr," with two vocalic R's. So there.
After several years, but even school-age kids may not yet have it completely mastered.. R is one of the last sounds to be learned--in any language-- just because it's so enormously difficult.
Sounds which children learn last tend to be rare in the world's languages. For instance, the English "R" takes many years for children to master fully, and it is extremely rare in the world's languages. The only other "major" language in which it occurs is Mandarin Chinese. This isn't because children are born knowing the distribution of sounds in the world's languages-- it's because sounds learned late are the most likely not to be learned at all. If a generation of children never learns that sound, then it drops out of the language.
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