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This exercise is taken from Language files, tenth edition, edited by Anouschka Bergmann, Kathleen Currie Hall, and Sharon Miriam Ross (Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University Press, 2007; ISBN 978-0-8142-5163-8), where it appears as exercise 8 in File 8.6 (page 345).
The data below are from a child named Paul at the age of two. They were collected by his father, Timothy Shopen. Consider each set of examples, and answer the questions at the end of each section.
Section A.
State a principle that describes Paul's pronunciation of these words. That is, how does Paul's pronunciation systematically differ from the adult pronunciation?
Section B.
State another principle describing Paul's pronunciations here. Be sure to word your statement in a way that reflects the fact that (B9)-(B12) are not affected.
Section C.
State a third principle describing Paul's pronunciation in this section. Based on the principles you have seen so far, suggest how Paul would pronounce the word love.
Section D.
State a fourth principle describing the new aspects of Paul's pronunciation in these examples.
Section E.
Do these two words illustrate an exception to the fourth principle? If so, how?
Here are phonetic transcriptions of six words from eight languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent.
(i) Separate them into two families on the basis of their phonetic similarities. Justify your classifications.
(ii) One of the two families is Indic, a branch of Indo-European. The other is Dravidian. Identify which family is which by noting similarities between the given words and phonetically similar words in other Indo-European languages that you know.
(Note: [ɭ], [ʈ], and [ɖ] are retroflex versions of [l], [t], and [d].)
This exercise is taken from Language files, tenth edition, edited by Anouschka Bergmann, Kathleen Currie Hall, and Sharon Miriam Ross (Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University Press, 2007; ISBN 978-0-8142-5163-8), where it appears as exercise 39 in File 12.8 (page 524).
Here are phonetic transcriptions of six words from four languages of the Turkic family that are thought to have a common ancestor, Proto-Western-Turkic:
(i) Identify the sound correspondences illustrated by this set of cognates, and reconstruct the six Proto-Western-Turkic forms from which the cognate words are derived.
(ii) Describe the sound changes that have affected each of the descendant languages.
In exercise 2 of chapter seven of our textbook (page 285), the authors provide phonetic transcriptions of ten French words, first as typically pronounced in a dialect spoken in France ("European French"), then as typically pronounced in a dialect spoken in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia ("Acadian French").
One regular difference in pronunciation is that European French uses the voiced uvular fricative [ʁ] where Acadian French uses the rolled [r]. That's interesting, but it's not relevant to the point of the exercise, so put that difference aside.
(i) The first six words that the authors transcribe are pronounced differently in the two dialects in another way as well. Using the terminology from the chapters on phonetics and phonology, give a precise description of the difference.
(ii) Historically, these dialects diverged from a common ancestor. Which is more likely to have preserved the pronunciations in that ancestral dialect, and which is more likely to be the result of a systematic sound change? Justify your answer by citing one of the recognized patterns of sound change that could account for the divergence.
(iii) The remaining four words that the authors transcribe are pronounced in the same way in both dialects (except for the different phonetic renderings of the phoneme /r/). This suggests that the sound change was conditioned by some feature of the words in which it occurred, a feature present in the first six examples but not in the last four. Describe this condition precisely.
(iv) Formulate the sound change as a phonological rule, in the notation that the authors describe in section 6.1 of chapter three.
Even apart from idiomatic expressions like white elephant, there are many adjective-noun combinations in English in which the meaning of the phrase is not straightforwardly obtained by adding the meaning of the adjective to the meaning of the noun:
(a) A large ant is small, not large -- it's just larger than most ants.
(b) Naturally occurring red hair isn't red, just reddish brown.
(c) A counterfeit dollar isn't a dollar (in fact, that's kind of the point).
(d) A prospective purchaser isn't a purchaser -- not yet, at least, and maybe never.
In these cases, the semantic relationship between the adjective and the noun is more complicated than the principle of compositionality would suggest. In particular, the extension of the phrase as a whole is not simply the intersection of the extension of the adjective and the extension of the noun.
(i) Give two other examples from English of adjective-noun phrases in which the extension of the phrase isn't a subset of the extension of the adjective.
(ii) Give two other examples from English of adjective-noun phrases in which the extension of the phrase isn't a subset of the extension of the noun.
(iii) What are the relationships between the extension of the idiomatic phrase white elephant, the extension of the adjective white, and the extension of the noun elephant?
A particle is a preposition that has effectively fused with a "host" verb, giving it a different sense. For instance, up is a particle in the sentence The loudmouth finally shut up. Instead of acting as the head of a phrase, a particle simply tags along with the verb. The verb-plus-particle combination can have different complements than the verb alone would have. For instance, sit out can take a noun phrase as complement, while sit cannot:
(a) They sat out the fourth dance.
(b) *They sat the fourth dance.
Note that the words out the fourth dance do not form a constituent of sentence (a) -- they fail all three of the tests proposed in section 1 of chapter 5:
(c) *They sat out the fourth dance and we sat there too. (Substitution)
(d) *Out the fourth dance, they sat. (Movement)
(e) *They sat out the fourth dance and in the folding chairs. (Coordination)
This emphasizes the fact that the particle out is not really acting as a preposition here, but just as a kind of separable fragment of the verb.
One unusual feature of particles in English is that, when a verb-plus-particle combination takes a noun phrase as its complement, the particle can be moved to the position after the noun phrase:
(f) They sat the fourth dance out.
(g) This threat shut the captive up.
(h) The teacher ran today's handouts off.
(i) The lecturer summed his main points up.
When the complement is a pronoun, the particle must be moved in this way.
(j) They sat it out.
(k) *They sat out it.
(l) This threat shut him up.
(m) *This threat shut up him.
(n) The teacher ran them off.
(o) *The teacher ran off them.
(p) The lecturer summed them up.
(q) *The lecturer summed up them.
Answer the following questions about particle movement:
(i) Which of the following are verb-plus-particle combinations? Justify your answer: run away, depart from, leave out, wish for, put down, drive by, take off.
(ii) Suggest a way to represent particles in tree diagrams. (Hint: Is the particle inside the head of a verb phrase, or is it a complement or a modifier within the verb phrase? You may be able to use one or more of the constituency tests on page 162 of the textbook to resolve this question.)
(iii) Particle movement can be modelled as a transformation in which the particle is detached from its usual position near the verb and moved to the other side of the noun phrase. How should it be reattached to the tree in its new position? What kind of a structure results from this reattachment?
(iv) Using the transformation you described in part (iii), diagram the deep structure and surface structure of sentence (g) above.
(i) The English word unbendable has two distinct meanings: "capable of being straightened out after bending" and "not capable of being bent." Show that these two meanings correspond to different morphological structures by drawing two tree diagrams that exhibit the different structures.
(ii) List some other English words of the form un____able that have the same ambiguity.
(iii) Many English words of this form -- unpredictable, unreadable, and untaxable, for instance -- do not have this ambiguity. What distinguishes the ambiguous words of this form from the unambiguous ones?
Study the twenty-five Gascon words presented on page 102 of our textbook (in exercise 4 of chapter 3). Formulate the pattern that distinguishes the contexts in which the sounds [β], [ð], and [ɣ] occur from those in which they appear, at least from this list, not to occur. What features do these three sounds have in common? With what other sounds are they most likely to be in complementary distribution in Gascon? Describe the phonemes of which they might be allophones, and use those phonemes in writing phonemic transcriptions of the four additional words that are transcribed phonetically in part v of the exercise in the textbook (page 103).
Either find a native speaker of English to read the words in the following list to you, or, if you are a native speaker, make an audio recording of yourself reading them and play it back, listening carefully. Then transcribe what you have heard phonetically, using the International Phonetic Alphabet.
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created July 30, 2008
last revised November 6, 2009