Essay Questions

Chapter 2

1. Speech is sometimes called a derived ability in that it is, in part, made possible by systems responsible for other bodily functions. What does this statement mean?
2. In what ways can the air stream from the lungs be altered before that air stream exits the body?
3. What is the phonetic difference between consonants and vowels? Is the difference between consonants and vowels always clear cut? Explain.
4. Consonant sounds are described by the place and manner of articulation. In your own words, explain some of these places and manners. Give examples of each.
5. What advantage does the phonetic alphabet have over regular spelling? Why do linguists use it?
6. We are all Homo sapiens. So, all humans use the same number and the same sounds for their languages. Is this statement true or false? Explain.
7. Give at least three examples of how the phonetic environment of a sound affects the articulation of that sound.
8. What are suprasegmentals? Are suprasegmental characteristics of speech sounds important? Explain.
9. What are some general ways in which connected speech differs from saying each word individually?
10. Several actors appearing in American television programs are not from the United States or Canada. An example would be Hugh Laurie, who was in the title role as an American doctor in the TV series House. He usually has a British accent but there is no trace of it when he plays Dr. House. How would learning the phonetic alphabet help him and other actors convincingly speak a dialect that is not their own?
11. The title of Table 2-5 is Suprasegmentals: perceived juncture? Why is the word “perceived” used in the title?

For an easy way to write the phonetic symbols on your computer see:
“Eureka! The Easy Way to Type Foreign Alphabets and Accented Letters in MS Word”—www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/Eureka.doc; and
“Adding IPA! The Easy Way to Type Phonetic Symbols, Too, in MS Word—www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/eureka-ipa.doc.

Chapter 3

1. What is phonology? What are some of the areas of study of interest to linguists who concentrate on phonology?
2. What is meant by the statements: “A phoneme is a mental construct” and “No one has ever heard a phoneme”?
3. What is the difference between broad and narrow transcription?
4. What is one way to determine the phonemes of a language?
5. What is a feature matrix, and what types of phonological facts can be discovered from a distinctive features analysis?
6. How do optional and obligatory phonological processes differ from each other?
7. Explain the difference between obligatory phonological processes and optional phonological processes. Use examples from your own speech.
8. Describe some redundant phonological features of language and explain how they might function.
9. Give some reasons why adults learning a new language have difficulties with the pronunciation of the new language.
10. Explain how the redundant features of language might help students at the back of a lecture hall hear accurately even though they are farther away from the lecturer than those at the front of the room.
11. Natural classes of sound are groups of sounds with similarities in their distinctive features. Why would a computer scientist working on voice-simulation and voice-recognition technology want to isolate as many natural classes of sound as possible?
12. What would be the practical application of this information?

Chapter 4

1. What are morphemes? What are the major types of morphemes?
2. How does a linguist determine what the morphemes of a language are?
3. What does the term morphophonemic refer to? Give some examples of morphophonemic rules of English.
4. What is morphological typology? What are the major language types based on differential use of different types of morphemes?
5. What are the major ways in which new words can be coined? Explain each process and give examples of each.
6. Words can pick up additional meanings or change meaning altogether over time. Discuss the ways in which the meaning of words might change.
7. Why is the traditional way of dividing words into eight parts of speech not a sufficient way of classifying words for the purposes of the morphologist?
8. Make up five new words using five ways described in Chapter 4 for forming new words. Describe the process that you used in forming each of those words.
9. Find two additional examples of words formed by each of the nine processes mentioned in this chapter. Do not use the examples given in the chapter or in class. Do not collaborate with your friends. Originality counts! Try to find words from your own fields of interest.

Chapter 5

1. What is syntax? What are some of the things that linguists interested in syntax study?
2. What are the two basic types of phrase? What sentence types are there based on the use of these two types of phrase?
3. Why do most English teachers discourage the use of passive constructions in expository writing?
4. What are the types of ambiguity discussed in the text? Provide a number of examples of each, say why each is ambiguous, and explain how the ambiguity can be resolved.
5. What are phrase structure rules? Diagram a couple of sentences in terms of phrase structure rules, and create tree diagrams for those sentences.
6. Explain the concept of deep and surface structure. How does the deep structure become the surface structure?
7. What are some of the contributions of Noam Chomsky to linguistics?
8. Explain the four main kinds of transformation. Make up an example demonstrating each kind.
9. What is recursiveness and why is it considered such an important feature of language?
10. What does the term grammaticality judgment mean? On what factors is the grammaticality of an utterance based? On what factors is it not based?
11. What is the head of an utterance? What are the other parts of an utterance called? Give examples of different types of phrase. Label the heads of the phrases and the non-head components.

Chapter 6

1. Name the three different kinds of antonyms. Explain the characteristics of each kind. Give examples of each.
2. Explain how markedness can give us an idea of how people think about their world. Use examples such as the weather terms from a ski report, the color terms in the paint department at a hardware store, or kinship terms in a culture with which you are familiar.
3. Explain what is presupposed in the sentence “The supermarket on Main Street was open at 9:00 am.”

Chapter 7

1. Explain the difference between Western Apache greeting rituals and Senegalese greeting rituals. How does it reflect the cultural values? How are these cultural values different from Anglo-American cultural values?
2. Explain how you may be violating the maxims of conversation when you engage in a greeting ritual in a doctor’s office. How might a teacher’s lecture appear to violate the maxims of conversation?
3. Write three pairs of sentences that have the same referential meaning but different affective meanings. Explain the difference in the affective meaning of the pairs of sentences.
4. Write a set of sentences that have the same referential meaning but different social meanings. Explain the difference in the social meaning of the sentences.
5. We talked about referential meaning, social meaning, and affective meaning in this chapter, mostly in relationship to verbal communication. These meanings might also be gathered from nonverbal communication such as facial expressions, body language (kinesics), physical appearance, touching behavior, and other behaviors. Assuming that your resume represents referential meaning about you, how might your nonverbal behavior affect the outcome of a job interview because of the social and affective meaning it might convey?
6. Describe some cultural differences in maxims of conversation that you have learned in class, from the textbook, or from personal experience.
7. Describe a fictional character (other than Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory) that has difficulty understanding indirect speech. (Think of characters like Amelia Bedelia from the children’s books, or Mork of TV show Mork and Mindy.) What is the source of the misunderstanding? Is the character from a foreign country? Or planet? Is this a source of comedy or drama? What would it be like if this were a real-life situation?

Chapter 8

1. Explain how English speakers indicate informality. Give examples of four different components of informal speech. Explain the importance of the word ain’t in the language of educated people.
2. Explain the difference between the meaning of “I’m sorry” when it is said by a man or said by a woman. What does a woman expect to hear in response to her utterance? Why does a man try to avoid saying it? What kinds of problems could this cause in a personal relationship? In a business relationship?
3. At awards shows for television and film, as well as in other contexts, women who act often refer to themselves as actors, not actresses. What are some of the social reasons for this change? What other language changes in the areas of gender identification have occurred in American English in recent decades?

Chapter 9

1. Why are so many languages disappearing or on the verge of disappearing?
2. Why were early anthropologists so interested in studying languages that they thought might be on the verge of extinction?
3. Discuss the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. How does it explain the number of Japanese words for rice and the number of Eskimo words for snow?
4. Contrast the strong and weak versions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis.
5. Part of the habitual use of language is the use of schemata. Explain this statement.
6. Describe how the language a person speaks might influence that person’s culture and, conversely, how a person’s culture might influence their language. Use examples from the book as well as examples that you have found in your research on this topic.
7. How does the language a person speaks influence the social and personal identity of that person?
8. How do middle-class Anglo-Americans treat their infants differently than the Kaluli? Explain how the treatment of infants reflects cultural values and practices.
9. Research and then explain why some groups of people (racial, ethnic, occupational, or gender groups) have purposely chosen or changed the label that identifies them.
10. Contrast various ways that different cultures socialize their children through language learning. In addition to the examples used in this chapter, find other examples of language socialization.
11. Wars are often fought over access to resources or territory and ethnic distrust and hatred. Wars have also been fought over what language should be the official language spoken in a territory. Why is the choice of a national language of a territory so important to the people who live in that territory?

Chapter 10

1. Explain the major theories of language acquisition. Give examples supporting each of the theories. Give examples that contradict each of the theories.
2. Explain the concept of universal grammar. How is it possible to have a universal grammar when each language has different grammatical rules?
3. Explain the stages of language acquisition. Give examples of typical utterances at each stage.
4. Explain how overgeneralization works in the acquisition of the plural morpheme and the past tense morpheme. Compare and contrast it to overextension and underextension in semantics.
5. How can children learn language when they are not spoken to directly? Explain the concept of poverty of stimulus.
6. Why were immigrant parents in the past advised to speak “English only” to their children? What was the false assumption of progressive thinkers in the 1920s? What are some of the advantages of childhood bilingualism?
7. Children learn many of the rules of their native language by the time they are ready for preschool. What are some of the linguistic steps that they take during their preschool years and beyond?
8. Explain the difference between simultaneous bilingualism and sequential bilingualism.
9. Explain the unitary system hypothesis and the separate systems hypothesis of bilingualism. Which one do you think is a better explanation for bilingualism? On what do you base your conclusion?
10. Look at these three YouTube videos of Jude, a young child. What are the stages of language development that Jude is demonstrating in these videos?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRyCaYZBgv0
www.youtube.com/watch?v=68ez1ANC3RY&feature=related
www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVFSWCGRCr8&feature=related

Chapter 11

1. What is the basis of the statement “Sign languages are complete languages, equivalent in their ability to communicate anything an oral language can communicate”?
2. What are some common misconceptions about deaf people and sign language?
3. Describe the phonology of American Sign Language (ASL).
4. Why does the acquisition of ASL among children who are deaf from birth often differ from the acquisition of oral language among hearing child?
5. Redundancy is a characteristic of all languages. How does ASL display redundancy?
6. What is meant by the term “Deaf community”? What are some aspects of the Deaf community?
7. Why do French and French Sign Language have a relationship to ASL?
8. Have sign languages been developed by people who are not deaf or mute? If they have been, for what reasons were they developed?
9. Until 1817 there was no formal sign language training or other schooling for deaf individuals in the United States. What is the history of teaching sign language and other schooling for the Deaf in the United States?
10. Why don’t all deaf children receive education in sign language? Why do some deaf children spend much of their time in school learning oral language? Explain the basic controversy in the education of deaf children in the United States.
11. Students at Gallaudet University, a university for deaf students, protested when a hearing person was appointed to the presidency of the university. Why did they protest?
12. What lessons about language in general can be learned from the way in which Nicaraguan Sign Language originated?

Chapter 12

1. Why is writing secondary to speech?
2. What advantages does writing have over speech?
3. What are the three main ways that speech is represented visually?
4. What are some advantages of the alphabetic system over the two other types of writing systems?
5. What does it mean when we say that all modern systems mix the different ways of representing speech visually? Give examples of how these three systems are used in English.
6. Explain how the writing system of a language might affect the speech pattern.
7. If writing had never been developed, could the world have changed in as dramatic a fashion as it has in the last 5000 years? Explain.
8. Develop a general outline of the history of the development of writing. What do you think some trends for the future might be in the history of writing?
9. Describe some of the main effects of the printing press on human cultural evolution.
10. How is the Internet changing the way we communicate with each other?

Chapter 13

1. What is nonverbal behavior (communication)? What is its importance in human communication?
2. What are the main types of nonverbal communication discussed in this chapter? Discuss each one briefly.
3. What is meant by the statement: “Nonverbal communication and verbal communication are often synchronized”?
4. What evidence is there that basic facial expressions are innately produced and understood?
5. If basic facial expressions are innately produced and understood, what consequence would this have to the general debate over whether human behavior is the result of nature or nurture?
6. In what ways are looking or gazing patterns important in human communication?
7. We are sometimes told that it is what is inside you that is important. Yet, physical appearance influences many things that happen or will happen in your life. In what ways is physical appearance important with regard to how others judge you?
8. “What is considered attractive is relative to a specific culture.” Explain this statement.
9. Although attractiveness is in large part a cultural value, what are some universal factors that influence judgments about attractiveness?
10. What are some of the things that people who are interested in proxemics might study?
11. What are the four distances that Edward T. Hall defined, and what types of behaviors happen at each distance? Are the actual distances (number of feet) for each of Hall’s categories different for different cultures? Explain.
12. In what way might the characteristics of the locale where communication takes place affect that communication?
13. Making physical contact (touching) is an important way in which humans and other animals communicate. What are some of the functions of touching behavior?
14. “It is not what we say, but how we say it that matters.” How does paralinguistic research show that this common saying is often correct?
15. American newscasters on national television or radio programs almost always speak Standard American English, regardless of the part of the country they are from. Why is this so?

Chapter 14

1. What are some of the subject areas that historical linguists are interested in studying?
2. What is Proto-Indo-European? Are there other proto-languages? Can proto-languages at the level of Proto-Indo-European be grouped together into more inclusive proto-languages?
3. Contrast the family tree model of language relatedness to the wave model of language relatedness.
4. What are the regularity hypothesis and the relatedness hypothesis?
5. What are regular sound shifts and why do they occur?
6. Explain the difference between a conditioned sound change and an unconditioned sound change. Give examples of each.
7. Name some types of sound, morphological, syntactic, and semantic changes that have occurred during the history of the English language.
8. What is glottochronology? Do you thing that this method is an accurate way to calculate the rate of language change?
9. Is there agreement as to where and when the Indo-European languages originated? Explain.
10. In what ways did the numerous invasions of Great Britain change the English Language?
11. What is meant by the word “Englishes”?
12. Why has English become the most commonly spoken second language in the world today?
13. Could the fact that English is the most common second language change in the future? If so, why might it change? What might replace it as the most common second language in the world?
14. How might Internet communication, text messaging, and other electronic means of communication be influencing general language change throughout the world?