REVIEW Questions/ MAY 2008

Important Concepts (this list will be made longer soon)

1.  What are suprasegmentals?

2.  What is phonotactics?

3.  What is contrastive analysis?

4.  What is an archiphoneme?

5.  What is neutralization?

6.  What is intonation?

7.  What is interlanguage?

Other Questions to Consider (this list will be made longer soon.  some answers will also be posted.)

1.  How does stress help explain the difference between rhythm in English and Spanish?

2.  Which archiphoneme can be related to how some speakers pronounce the medial consonant in the words latter and ladder?

3.  Do all English vowels have allophones?  Explain and provide examples to support your answer.

4.  Provide 3 examples of 3-consonant clusters in NAE and examples of words in which they are phonologically realized. 

5.  What are 4 characteristics of strong vowels?

6.  What is the "wedge n" and when is it likely to occur?  Provide an example to support your answer.  

7.  What does it mean to say that a sound is ambisyllabic?  Provide an example of a word which includes a sound that might be described this way by a linguist. 

8.  How many weak vowels occur in English?  What are they?

9.  What are the 3 perceptual properties of stress that we discussed in class?

a.  relative loudness with which an individual syllable is produced

b.  the length or duration of an individual syllable

c.  the tone of the nuclear vowel compared to that of adjacent segments (here pitch is significant)

10.  Which of the above properties tends to be the most indicative of stress in NASE?

11.  What are some of the pragmatic functions of intonation in NASE?  (In other words, what is it used to express?)  

Linguists such that it is pitch.

12.  Does English have phonemic stress?  Provide an example to support your answer.

It is frequently used to express doubt, anger, surprise, and to clarify question formation.

13.  Is English stress-timed or syllable-timed?  How does its organization of rhythm compare to that of Spanish?  Which is described as galloping and which as staccato?

14.  How does Walt Wolfram respond to the assertion that children who are speakers of African American are verbally deprived?  What principals does he define?