The final exam will consist of 5 questions (each will be answered in one or two

paragraphs). They have asked me to keep the format that the previous professor
had, since there are still some students of his that need to take the final. Please
make sure you review all units, but I will list some of the key topics that you should
know in great depth (wink-wink):

-arbitrariness of language: is the fact that symbols we use to communicate

meaning do not have any natural form or meaning in and of themselves; society
has assigned them a particular meaning that does not have any particular relation
to the word, unlike onomatopoeias, which are words that reduplicate the sound
they describe.

-limited lexis and syntax rules yet unlimited possibilities

-oral language more "basic" than written (lyons' 4 "priorities")

-Chomsky and innateness hypothesis: Chomsky developed a theory of language

acquisition based on his observations that children of different cultures acquired
their respective language in a similar way and at the same age. His conclusion
stated that humans were naturally endowed with the capabilities of learning a L1 by
being exposed to it since early childhood. This theory was first referred to as UG
and later as Innateness hypothesis.

-prescriptive vs. descriptive

-competence vs. performance

-characteristics of ALL human languages (pg. 315-316)

-be able to break up a word into its morphemes, and say open/closed, pre/in/suffix,
derivational/inflectional.

-show ambiguity in words based on morphemes (and in sentences based on

syntax). You must be gay to be here (two possible meanings)

-backformations and compounds: Backgrounds refers to the insertion of new words

in the language lexicon due to the speakers’ incorrect morphological analysis.
Example of this process are: peddle became part of the language when speakers
mistook the –er in peddler as and agentive suffix, the same happened with edit,
act, revise.

Compounding refers to the process of adding morphemes to root morphemes in

order to create more complex words, the result of this process can lead to the
changing of grammatical class of original stem (in the case of derivational
morphemes) or the marking of properties such as tense, number, person, etc.

-what syntax rules do and don't do: The rules of syntax combine words into
phrases and phrases into sentences. A second important role of the syntax is to
describe the relationship between the meaning of a particular group of words and
the arrangement of those words. The rules of the syntax also specify the
grammatical relations of a sentence, such as subject and direct object. In other
words, they provide the information about who is doing what to whom. Our
syntactic knowledge crucially includes rules that tell us how words form groups in a
sentence, or how they are hierarchically arranged with respect to one another.
Among other things, the rules specify the correct word order for a language. For
example, English is a Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) language.

-know the constituents of a sentence and lexical/functional categories: Syntactic

categories include both phrasal categories such as NP, VP, AdjP (adjective
phrase), PP (prepositional phrase), and AdvP (adverbial phrase), as well as lexical
categories such as noun (N), verb (V), preposition (P), adjective (Adj), and adverb
(Adv). Each lexical category has a corresponding phrasal category. Following is a
list of lexical categories with some examples of each type:

Lexical categories

Noun (N) puppy, boy, soup, happiness, fork, kiss, pillow, cake,

cupboard

Verb (V) find, run, sleep, throw, realize, see, try, want, believe

Preposition (P) up, down, across, into, from, by, with

Adjective (Adj) red, big, candid, hopeless, fair, idiotic, lucky

Adverb (Adv) again, carefully, luckily, never, very, fairly

Auxiliaries provide the verb with a time frame, whether ongoing (John is dancing),
completed in the past (John has danced), or occurring in the future (John will
dance). Auxiliaries may also express notions such as possibility (John may dance),
necessity (John must dance), ability (John can dance), and so on. Lexical
categories typically have particular kinds of meanings associated with them. For
example, verbs usually refer to actions, events, and states (kick, marry, love);
adjectives to qualities or properties (lucky, old); common nouns to general entities
(dog, elephant, house); and proper nouns to particular individuals (Noam
Chomsky) or places (Dodger Stadium) or other things that people give names to,
such as commercial products (Coca-Cola, Viagra).
-evolution of written language

-characteristics of written/oral languages (what can you communicate in one and

not in the other and vice versa)

-ideolects/languages/dialects/accents (differences and similarities; causes)

-reasons behind "prestige" of one dialect over another

-pidgin/creole and creolization: Pidgin refers to a language specifically developed

to communicate among speakers of different languages, the main characteristic is
that it has reduced forms (grammatical structures and lexicon).

-influences of one language/dialect on another

-behaviourism and its hypothesis (and why they are not completely right)

-innateness/poverty of stimulus/parameters

-stages of acquisition: babbling, holophrastic (one-word stage), bootstrapping

(children identify isolated words by paying careful attention to stress patterns)

-types of bootstrapping: Many experimental studies show that children are sensitive
to various linguistic properties such as stress and phonotactic constraints, and to
statistical regularities of the input that enable them to segment the fluent speech
that they hear into words. One method of segmenting speech is prosodic
bootstrapping. Other bootstrapping methods can help the child to learn verb
meaning based on syntactic context (syntactic bootstrapping), or syntactic
categories based on word meaning (semantic bootstrapping) and distributional
evidence such as word frames.

-acquisition of sign languages (difference with other languages?)

In other words, we end up knowing far more about language than is exemplified in
the language we hear around us. This argument for the innateness of UG is called
the poverty of the stimulus. But most important is the fact that children come to
know aspects of the grammar about which they receive no information. In this
sense, the data they are exposed to is impoverished.