Author Topic: Linguistics midterm on Monday....I'm scared (Read 3188 times)

Belle · « **on:** September 29, 2006, 01:19:25 PM »

I hate morphology. There. I said it.

We had a quiz on phonology and I did well, but he said there will only be a few IPA transcription problems on the midterm, most of it will be morphology. I don't feel good about that at all.

Are any places online with good practice problems for phonology and morphology?

Jonathon · « **Reply #1 on:** September 29, 2006, 03:02:31 PM »

I don't know of any places online, but if you post some problems I'll try to help you through them.

pooka · « **Reply #2 on:** September 29, 2006, 03:18:58 PM »

Do they do that thing where it's a data set from some random language you've never seen before and you try to find a pattern? Like, figuring out which parts of the words are pronominal suffixes, and what they mean, based on the prior question when you figured out the gender markers?

Belle · « **Reply #3 on:** September 29, 2006, 06:43:58 PM »

Pooka, that would be a yes.

It's always some wonky language no one speaks, because we have speakers of German, Italian, Arabic and Spanish in our class so our problems are in things like Swampy Cree and Mokilese.

pooka · « **Reply #4 on:** September 29, 2006, 07:13:43 PM »

Do you know any foreign languages, Belle? It helps a great deal to see these principles in action in a system you are familiar with. Otherwise we can look at some Latinate words.

Okay, here is a data set from persian (from my ling 101 text)

dana 'wise'

danai 'wisdom'
xub 'good' xubi 'goodness'
darosht 'thick' daroshti 'thickness'
mard 'man' mardi 'manliness'

Also, here is a some English derivational morpheme rules (which are not intended to be exhaustive but to illustrate the princple of morphological analysis):

noun + -ful ----> adjective (doubtful)
adj + -ly ------> adverb (doubtfully)
verb + -ment ---> noun (amazement)
verb + -er-----> noun (teacher)
adj + -en ----> verb (harden)
noun + -en ----> verb (frighten)

Morphemes can be:
free
bound
derivational
inflectional

If you want to go ahead and define these, we'll see where we're at.

Noemon · « **Reply #5 on:** September 30, 2006, 03:09:11 PM »

I always thought that morphology exercises like that were a lot of fun.

pooka · « **Reply #6 on:** September 30, 2006, 05:05:52 PM »

If you're able to think of English as a foreign language, anything else should be cake.

Belle · « **Reply #7 on:** October 01, 2006, 10:25:12 AM »

Pooka, I'm good on what you've posted. I don't know any foreign languages, I just had two years of high school Spanish.

The thing that I was most shaky on was syllable diagramming. I was having trouble keeping all the terminology straight, but my linguistics textbook has a companion website with additional information and after studying it, I think I have it now.

I know for a fact there will be phonology problems where we have to identify whether two phones are separate phonemes or allophones of the same phoneme, but we did a lot of those in class and I feel pretty good about it. We've already had a quiz on phonology and I made an A on it so I'm pretty solid with my IPA transcription. We will have to identify features on the midterm but he's supplying a feature chart, so that helps tremendously.

I'm just scared because there will be little room for error - the test is worth 200 points and he said there are 5 or 6 questions only. So one slip up and you're in trouble. He does give partial credit however.

I'll let you know tomorrow afternoon how it went, I'm probably going to be off the computer studying the rest of the day. Thanks for helping out.

Jonathon · « **Reply #8 on:** October 01, 2006, 11:11:17 AM »

Quote

If you're able to think of English as a foreign language, anything else should be cake.

But English morphology is ridiculously simple. For the morphology final in my phonology and morphology class, we had problems taken from some obscure agglutinating language. Not exactly cake.

Tante Shvester · « **Reply #9 on:** October 01, 2006, 12:06:55 PM »

Quote

some obscure agglutinating language

What? Like Klingon?

Jonathon · « **Reply #10 on:** October 01, 2006, 03:37:37 PM »

No, I think it was some Native American language (though I should point out that Klingon is actually based in part on some obscure Native American languages). I want to say it was Western Shoshone, but that's what we did for the phonology test, and I'm pretty sure it was something different for the morphology test.

pooka · « **Reply #11 on:** October 02, 2006, 01:00:17 PM »

Quote

But English morphology is ridiculously simple.

Heh heh... I wouldn't agree, but okay. For starters, what governs the applicability of the rules I supplied above? (I don't actually know, but I'll be impressed if you do.)

Belle · « **Reply #12 on:** October 03, 2006, 11:43:10 AM »

Well, it was easy.

I am pretty sure I did well, I got together with some other students after the test and we compared notes, and we all got the same answers on the big questions and are confident we're right. So we're either all incredibly wrong, or we all made good grades. I think the latter is more likely.

Porter · « **Reply #13 on:** October 03, 2006, 11:45:57 AM »

Quote

So we're either all incredibly wrong, or we all made good grades. I think the latter is more likely.

If it's graded on a curve, those two things are the same.

Jonathon · « **Reply #14 on:** October 03, 2006, 11:48:28 AM »

Quote

Quote
But English morphology is ridiculously simple.
Heh heh... I wouldn't agree, but okay. For starters, what governs the applicability of the rules I supplied above? (I don't actually know, but I'll be impressed if you do.)

Okay, so I don't know all of those rules either. Maybe I should revise it to say that English inflectional morphology is ridiculously easy, while its derivational morphology is more complicated. I wouldn't say that everything else is cake, though.

Belle · « **Reply #15 on:** October 08, 2006, 04:28:15 PM »

We should get it back tomorrow. And he most emphatically does NOT grade on a curve.

On the bright side, we are doing syntax right now and it's fun.

Porter · « **Reply #16 on:** October 08, 2006, 07:07:44 PM »

I hate the entire idea of grading on the curve. It says "It doesn't matter how much you learned in this class. All that really matters is whether you learned more or less than your classmates."

kojabu · « **Reply #17 on:** October 09, 2006, 06:17:32 PM »

Belle I'm the opposite of you, I loved morphology, but didn't do very well on phonology.

pooka · « **Reply #18 on:** October 10, 2006, 04:39:12 AM »

Quote

I hate the entire idea of grading on the curve. It says "It doesn't matter how much you learned in this class. All that really matters is whether you learned more or less than your classmates."

Eh, maybe, if you believe professors are all wise and never make a mistake on composing a test. I remember the experimental section when I took the LSAT. It didn't have enough clues to generate a complete matrix on several of the problems, or the matrix would have to be 3 dimensional. So I went back and changed all my responses on that section to E. It was a gamble, but I was right about them being test items.

Porter · « **Reply #19 on:** October 10, 2006, 01:45:26 PM »

I remember being asked to join a study group for a class. I was afraid that I'd bring their grade more than they'd bring my grade up. Since the class was graded on the curve, that would lower my grade, so I decided to not study with them.

JT · « **Reply #20 on:** October 10, 2006, 01:58:23 PM »

I hate the idea of not grading on a curve. It doesn't need to be a normal distribution, in fact, my preferred method is curving by the number of points necessary to bring the median score to a 75 or so.

I had several electrical classes where no one, grad students included, got better than an 88 on any test all year long. When the two grad students get an 86 and an 84, I get an 81 and no one else even sniffs a B that tells me that the test is too hard. Or too long, but since this instructor wasn't strict on time that wasn't an issue.