midterm guide

Your midterm will be on Tuesday, September 23, during class time. It is worth 20% of your course grade.

Section 1 (75% of the exam grade): a mix of 50 short answer, matching, and fill-in-the-blank questions.
Section 2 (25% of the exam grade): you will choose 4 out of 5 passages and explain in your own words why a particular statement is a valid linguistic observation or not

To prepare for the midterm, review the following concepts in particular:

memorize the phonetic alphabet and be able to name each letter, where appropriate (eng, schwa, j-wedge, epsilon, etc.)

be able to describe features of consonants and vowels and identify a phoneme (phonetic letter) by the description of its manner and place of articulation (consonant), or its height, tenseness, etc. (vowels) [you will not need to memorize the vowel chart, though you will need to memorize the different parts of the mouth involved in consonant production]
E2.1-2

be able to read phonetic transcriptions (and ‘translate’ into English orthography)
E2.3-10

understand the different aspects of schwa in English

perform a phonological analysis to determine if two sounds are phonemes or allophones in English
E3.1-5

recognize phonotactics of English and name syllable parts
E3.15

recognize features of word classes of English (major and minor classes [Ch 4 and Ch 6])–you should be able to do this in terms of word function (features for which it is inflected, like number, case, tense, aspect) and in terms of co-occurrence.
E4.1, E6.1, 6.3

inflection
case
person
number
comparison
tense
aspect
participle

determiner
article
quantifier
demonstrative
pronominal determiner
preposition
auxiliary
modal
conjunction
coordinating conjunction
subordinating conjunction
noun phrase
verb phrase
attributive adjective
predicative adjective
sentence adverb
manner adverb
degree adverb

perform a morphological analysis of an English word, breaking it down into its morphemes and labeling them:
E4.2-5

free morpheme
bound morpheme
lexical morpheme
grammatical morpheme
root morpheme
affix morpheme
inflectional affix
derivational affix

recognize different types of morphological shift and neologism
E4.7

affixing
functional shift
semantic shift
compounding
blending
borrowing
acronyming
root creation

recognize sentence types (simple, coordinate, complex, complex-coordinate)
E6.2-3

recognize clause types (adverbial, nominative, adjective)
E6.3

determine and represent the hierarchical structure of sentences
E6.5

understand phrase structure rules
E6.8

recognize subcategorizaton restrictions such as different verb types identified through their complements: transitive, intransitive, complex transitive, linking
E6.10

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