Matrikulationsnummer: 2096962
Comment sheet. Introduction to (applying) linguistics – WiSe 2005/6
This sheet describes the particular points that were being looked for in answers to the questions of
the exam. It picks out both positive features and negative features. The more general points can
be applied more generally to how you go about answering exam questions. For each each question
you can also see how your answer was rated with respect to the points available.
Note that first of all, if a question asks about a ’method’ (think! a method is a Manner Circumstance!), then it is expected that you provide information about how exactly something is done.
Just saying that something happens, or somebody did something, or discovered something will
not be enough. It is equally not enough to say that something changed or something is different,
or that a change is “obvious”: it is not up to the examiner to work out what you might mean, you
must make it clear yourself exactly what you are referring to!
Second, it is essential since this is a linguistic exam that if you are called on to provide a discussion
of an analysis then you stick to the linguistic facts that your analysis reveals: you are not being
asked to endulge in fantasy or psychological guessing concerning the impressions of readers! The
more explicitly and focusedly you can draw on the linguistic analysis that you are asked to perform
the better.
Lastly, it is essential the an answer reads as an answer to the question asked! It cannot be
simply a collection of loose facts on a topic related to the question–it must explicitly address the
issue raised in the question.
Q1 Here you are asked to carry out some basic syntactic analysis of sentences, both functional
and formal.
a The first analysis is functional, you needed to provide the hierarchical structure of the
selected sentences. A functional analysis involves the categories clause, verbal group,
nominal group, prepositional phrase and so on. To start a functional analysis you always
start by looking for clauses; then you can fill in the verbal groups and the dependent
nominal groups, prepositional phrases, adverbial groups, etc. In this case the clauses
were:
Lucy watched the trains
as they slackened speed
going round the sharp curve
that encircled Crackenthorpe property
You got marks for getting these clauses right, and more marks if you said something
about the relationships between them, since, clearly, the last clause is actually a part
of the nominal group [the sharp curve that encircled Crackenthorpe property].
Here is a possible rank-based analysis. There are some other possible alternatives,
mostly concerned with how you relate the top clauses, but this is the most likely. The
underlined elements are also words.
You scored 4.5 / 5 points .
b This clause has to receive an analysis where the ’a short distance away’ is recognized as
a Circumstance (of manner). Some people were misled by the fact that this does not
look like a simple prepositional phrase and thought that it was a Participant (although
this is not a simple nominal group even though it begins with a determiner). But such
an analysis makes no sense; you cannot perceive ’a short distance away’ as if it were a
sound or a smell. All tests give you the same result: try ommission if you are not sure.
You scored 2 / 2 points.
c Here you obtained marks for any two phrase structures that were possible and which
were different from each other. The clearest examples to choose are ones involving the
attachment of the prepositional phrase ’in the road’. Many people made trees which
included a prepositional phrase ’of the traffic in the road’ as a constitutent of the clause:
this also does not work, as you cannot move this constituent to the front, e.g.,
* Of the traffic in the road she could hear no busy hum
Ideally, the ’of the traffic’ has to be inside the nominal phrase ’no busy hum of the
traffic’.
Here are the most likely two contrasting phrase structure trees:
You scored 5 / 5 points.
d Here you obtained marks for a functional description of the meanings entailed by your
two phrase structure trees. If you were working with PP-attachment of ’in the road’,
then you could relate this directly to Circumstances.
You scored 1.5 / 4 points.
e An example of a difference in results is the one we saw above with moving ’of the traffic
in the road’. Also, if ’in the road’ is part of the nominal phrase ’no busy hum’ then it
cannot be moved along to the beginning of the sentence; if it were a PP under the VP
(i.e., a Circumstance), then it could be. You got marks for identifying relevant tests
and for stating what the results would be of applying them to their trees. You did not
get marks for saying ’there will be a difference because the trees are different’: that is
obvious; you were being asked to give precise examples of what those differences are.
You scored 0 / 2 points.
h You got marks here to the extent that your rules precisely covered the trees that you
gave in part (c), regardless of whether the trees made sense or not. Providing rules that
match the trees shows that you understand the relationship between trees and rules; if
your rules did not match your trees, you got fewer marks.
You scored 2 / 2 points.
Marks: You scored 15 out of a maximum possible of 20.
Q2 The main point of the parts of this question had to do with identifying and using phonetic
and phonological (distinctive) features. In almost all parts, you obtained marks by working
with these features and showing that you know what kinds of phonetic features there are
and how they relate to their production or perception.
a The trick here was to recognise that there is a swapping round involved in the production
error. Swapping things round, i.e., getting two things in the wrong order, is a common
linguistic production error, a kind of Spoonerism that has long been observed with entire
sounds or words. The important point with the present example is that it is not a sound
that gets swapped, it is a phonetic feature: that is voiced and unvoiced. Speech errors
of this kind are a convincing kind of proof that the brain really does work with phonetic
features of this kind, otherwise it could not swap them. Note that some of you wrote
that this speech error happened ’because it is easy to confuse voiced and unvoiced’.
This by itself is unlikely: we are not likely to suddenly and spontaneously produce a
voiced form instead of an unvoiced. It all depends on the context of production: and
here the fact that we have two opportunities for a mistake following closely together.
You scored 3 / 3 and 2 / 2 points.
b Here you needed to show that the fact that a language such as is described might not
use voicedness as a distinctive phonological feature. This would create the opportunity
for a broad range of allophones for phonemes that English could not have. You got
marks for showing that you know that allophones are alternative ways of saying single
phones. You got marks for relating these to complementary and free distribution, and
for other examples that you might have given.
You scored 2.5 / 3 points.
c Here you needed simply to go through the standard places of articulation, saying what
they are (i.e., where they are produced in the mouth and how). This involves active
and passive articulators being brought together. Working from the front of the mouth
and bilabials (lips brought together), all the way back to the glottis.
You scored 4 / 4 points.
d The corresponding features for vowels involve the dimensions front-back, and high-low
(closed-open). You could also mention the shape of the lips (rounded, unrounded). For
extra bonus marks you were asked about the relationship to formant analysis, which
involves primarily the ratio between the first two formants F1 and F2.
You scored 2 / 2 points.
e You got marks for saying approximately when the Great Vowel Shift occured, that
it effected only the long vowels of English, and for describing precisely what changed
in what way. You did not get marks for saying that in the Vowel Shift ’the vowels
changed’. That is obvious from the name; you needed to mention raising explicitly.
The trick with the explanation for serene/serenity was then that in one of the pair, the
vowel was previously shortened so that when the Great Vowel Shift came along, that
member of the pair was not effected.
You scored 4 / 4 points.
f Here the crucial point is that changes in language move through a language over time,
they do not happen everywhere at once. Because they move slowly, there will be times
when one region has been effected and another region not. Therefore you will necessarily
have two dialect regions established. For the Great Vowel Shift, this is most clearly
seen in the difference in the vowels in southern dialects (where the Great Vowel Shift
started) and northern dialects, going all the way up into Scotland. You got marks
whenever you made this essential relationship between language change in time and
geographical variation clear.
You scored 2 / 2 points.
Marks: You scored 19.5 out of a maximum possible of 20.
Q3 This question centered on lexical semantics, on compositional semantics, on the relationship
between syntax and compositional semantics, and on stating semantic relationships between
the meanings of sentences (entailments).
a This was simply to see if you had remembered the main different kind of lexical semantic
relations; most of you remembered most of them.
You scored 5 / 5 points.
b This part of the question asked you to be inventive in showing how all the words given
as examples could be related together using the relations of part (a). Ideally you should
also have shown which relations held between each pair of words: many of you just drew
lines without differentiating, which still got you most of the marks however.
Here is one possible answer to this question:
You scored 4 / 4 points.
c Entailments are relationships between sentences: i.e., one sentence can entail another
if the latter has to be true when the first one is. An example of an entailment that
follow directly from the relations that you set out in (a) and (b) would be:
The tiger ate the onion entails The animal ate a vegetable
which uses hyponomy. You got marks for making up further examples of such entailments employing the other relations too.
You scored 3 / 4 points.
d This was a difficult question that asked you to experiment with what you had learned
or remembered about logic and logical formulae. An example would be the following
for hyponomy:
∀x . onion (x) → vegetable (x)
which would enable you to work out an entailment of the kind seen in (c) above.
Antonyms and converses would involve logical ’not’, meronymy would require some
notion of ’part’, etc. And representing the tiger sentence needs you to have both a
two-place predicate for ’eat’ and two one-place predicates for the participants, e.g.:
tiger (x) ∧ onion (x) ∧ eat (x,y)
You got some marks for getting anywhere near the above points.
Writing statements out with logical formulae also lets you see the difference between
antonym and converses much more easily. Thus:
X is an antonym of Y if the following relationship holds:
X(x) ↔ ¬Y (x)
X and Y are converses if the following relationship holds:
X(x, y) ↔ Y (y, x)
Therefore, if something is on, then it cannot be off, or if something is hot, then it cannot
be cold. These are antonyms. Converses involve relationships such as husband/wife or
north/south. If X is a husband of Y, then Y is a wife of X. Similarly, if X is north of
Y, then Y is south of X. It does not really make sense to say that husband and wife are
‘opposites’. North and south can lead you into difficulties though, can you work out
why? It is something to do with how we use such spatial terms and what we means
when we say ’north’ or ’south’; we get similar problems with left and right...
You scored 0.5 / 2 points.
e The essential point of compositional semantics is the connection between putting parts
together to get the meaning of the whole and the role that syntax plays in this. ’Putting
parts together’ is therefore only half of the story (and half of the marks). The rest of
the story is that it is the syntax tree that defines precisely which parts get put together
when. This does not work because we ’know’ what a tiger is, and what eating is,
and what an onion is; it works because we ’know’ that to work out the meaning of,
for example, a verb phrase, we take the lexical semantics of the verb and the lexical
semantics of the nominal phrase in the verb phrase and we put precisely those two
meanings together. And so on with the nominal group and the verbal group.
You scored 4 / 5 points.
Marks: You scored 16.5 out of a maximum possible of 20.
Q4 In this question about reconstruction, you needed to say how such reconstruction works,
what particular details of language are looked at in order to carry it out. Saying that ’Jones
discovered that X’ is not enough: how did he do so? Also, you were not being asked to ’guess’
which languages were involved in the first part, the question was all about the method being
employed.
a For full marks here you needed to pick out the first letters of the words, relate these to
the probable sounds involved, and group the languages together on this basis. This was
not answered by saying that B and D are Germanic languages, etc. It was answered by
saying that B and D have almost the same sounds in the first position compared with
the sounds for the other languages.
You scored 4 / 4 points.
The kinds of problems that occur include the fact that one of the languages did not fit
so neatly into the overall classification, that one does not know in which direction the
changes have occured, that some words may mean the same but be taken from different
origins and so cannot really be compared using this method at all, etc.
You scored 1 / 1 points.
The essential property of sound change that makes this all work is systematicity. This
is the Neogrammarians idea of exceptionless sound changes. Phonetic plausibility can
also be mentioned usefully here.
You scored 1 / 1 points.
b The other sound changes fill in the entire set of changes that were worked out in the first
half of the nineteenth century and which are generally referred to as Grimm’s Law or
the First Germanic Consonant shift. The former state of the language that the change
works against is Proto-Indo-European.
You scored 4 / 4 points.
c Here you needed to provide the phonetic features for each of the sounds in the table
and the sounds involved in (a).
You scored 0 / 5 points.
d Finally you simply needed to look at the pairs of sounds involved in changes and see
if you could find a difference in the features involved, writing this down as a rule. So,
for example, in the shifts /b/ to /p/, /d/ to /t/ and /g/ to /k/ we have simply that
the feature +voiced changed to the feature -voiced. So we replace three changes by one
single rule. Note that the actual rules have to be a little more complex, in that not all
the voiced sounds changed to unvoiced; so this means that to get the answer absolutely
correct, one would need to combine features, e.g., to say that it was the voiced plosives
that change to unvoiced plosives.
You scored 0 / 5 points.
Marks: You scored 10 out of a maximum possible of 20.
Q5 Since this is a linguistics exam, you obtained the most points for this question for describing
concrete linguistic details of the changes that English has gone through. The historical events
and dates should have been background to the linguistic changes. So if you only described
the historical events, or if you put these in the foreground, you would have got accordingly
lower marks. The kinds of linguistic details required include: the word order of Old English
and how this changed over time, the inflections of Old English as a Germanic language,
where those inflections occured and what function that performed, and how these forms and
functions changed over time, examples of grammatical constructions that changed over time
(e.g., the use of ’do’-support for questions), the kinds of sound changes that occured over
time, etc. etc. All of these should have been placed against the usual division of English
into Old, Middle and Modern.
Marks: You scored 14 out of a maximum possible of 20.
Q6 Here the main points you needed to raise were examples of cases where the given definition
does not work, the relation between ’language’ and political decisions, the fact of the dialect
continuum, and the notion of a ’norm’ to which users of a language orient themselves. All
of these together begin to give a firmer notion of just what a ’language’ is.
Marks: You scored 0 out of a maximum possible of 20.
Q7 This question gave you a simple opportunity to get marks by analysing some straightforward
textual properties of the example text.
a Referential cohesion refers to all the cases where an item in the text is referred to again
with something like a pronoun (e.g., ’Lucy’-’she’, ’the track’-’it’, etc.). Lexical cohesion
is where words from a similar lexical field are brought together (e.g., ’train’-’railway
arch’, ’factory buildings’-’houses’, ’track’-’mainroad’-’lane’, etc.).
You scored 8 / 10 points.
Lexical cohesion
Referential cohesion
b Here you needed to show that you know the difference between grammatical Themes
and Subjects. The following table shows the grammatical themes and grammatical
subjects as asked for in the question.
Theme
Every few minutes
Lucy
they
She
It
On the one side
on the other
She
She
A woman
Lucy
Subject
a train
Lucy
they
She
It
the railway embankment
a high wall which enclosed some tall factory buildings
She
She
A woman
Lucy
You scored 5 / 5 points.
c We can also see here from the table precisely which grammatical themes are not grammatical subjects: these are called marked themes and do particular work for the construction of texts. In this case they serve to anchor the text in time, “every few
minutes”, and also to set up points of local contrast “this side” / “that side”. They
can do a lot more however!
Questions of excitement, interesting the reader, and such psychological issues are not
relevant here–the question concerns the textual organisation, not what some reader may
or may not do with that organisation. Also words used more or less meaninglessly such
as “emphasis”, “stress”, “importance”, etc. lead to a lowered mark. Higher marks are
gained when you have recognized correctly the general kinds of Themes being selected,
which will include Themes of time and place of particular types.
You scored 5 / 5 points.
Marks: You scored 18 out of a maximum possible of 20.
Your total score was 93% giving a grade of 1 . See your exam sheet for further comments and
particular points/problems/praise.