Key questions for our chapters:
 

Baugh Chapter 1
Why study the history of English language?
What is meant by lingua franca?
What makes English a good candidate for lingua franca? (vocabulary, natural gender, few inflections)
What are the obstacles to English as a lingua franca? (spelling, idioms)

Cable Chapter 0
What is the IPA?
What is articulatory phonetics?
What is meant by manner and place of articulation?
Know the consonants: stops, fricative, affricatives, nasals, liquids, glides (semivowels); bilabial, labiodental, dental (interdental), aleveolar, palatal, velar, glottal.
Know the vowels: high, mid, low; front, central, back.
What is meant by tense and lax?
What is meant by rounded and unrounded vowels?
What are the diphthongs?

Pinker Chapter 1
What is meant by “An Instinct to Acquire an Art” – instinct – as opposed to the “Standard Social Science Model"?

Pinker Chapter 2
Chapter 1: “An Instinct to Acquire an Art” – instinct – as opposed to the “Standard Social Science Model”

Chapter 2:
Language is Innate – what is the evidence?    Universality (ubiquity) of Language
Example from New Guinea – quote on page 14
Complexity of aboriginal languages – cf the Bantu example p. 15
Business of grammar versus usage; the issue of nonstandard  – pp. 16-18

Ubiquity is not enough for innate: children reveal the answer
1. Example of creolization and children
Hawaiian creole
Deaf creoles – LSN to ISN and  Simon
2. Language Acquisition
 logic of errors
 complexity untaught – making interrogatives
3. Language disorders
 Aphasia
 SLI (Specific Language Impairment)
 Denyse (spina bifida)

Chapter 3: Mentalese : “Thought is different from language” (57)
How does the existence of mentalese argue against the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis?
What is meant by the Eskimo vocabulary hoax?
What is some of the evidence of thinking without words? Babies, Vervet Monkeys, Adults – creative ones (experiment of timed rotating of the F)
How does the Turing Machine answer the question of existence of language of thought?

Chapter 4: How Language Works

1. Language an amazing engineering trick humans are born to do.
Trick based on two principles
 1. arbitrariness of the sign -- Ferdinand de Saussure
 2. "infinite use of finite media"  --"discrete combinatorial system" vs. blending system -- Wilhelm von Humboldt

  Two effects: sheer vastness of language; autonomous from cognition

2. How does this discrete combinatorial system work?

 Markov or word-chain model -- no can't handle embedding and dependencies
 Tree model
 Toy Grammar
 Phrase structure rules
  1. Three rules of phrase structure 1. head, 2. role players (complement) 3. modifiers
  2. X bar
  3. head first, head last
  4. Case rules -- combinations
  5. Sentence as a big IP phrase structure
 d-structure, transformations, s-structure
 

Pinker Chapter 5
How are words made?
What are morphemes?
What is meant by free and bound morphemes?
What is meant by inflectional and derivational morphemes?
What morphemes does contemporary English use most for developing words?
What is meant by regular and irregular inflections?
Are irregular inflections all dead?

Chapter 6: Sounds
What are phonemes?
What is meant by duality of patterning?
What is meant by features?

Chapter 7: Talking Heads
How do we process language?  Parsing
Grammar is the protocal -- right branching and left branching
   breadth first, depth first search
   garden path sentences
  Context, inference

Chapter 8: Tower of Babel

Just how confused are the tongues?
What accounts for the differences?
What is meant by the Darwinian Model of Language Differences?

1. Page 242 -- quote from Darwin

2. Page 243 -- working analogy -- variation, heredity, isolation

Heredity -- instinct to learn -- vocabulary

Variation -- Reanalysis (analogy)

Isolation -- separation and isolation the history of the languages.
What is Nostratic and Proto-World?

Baugh Chapter 2
How do languages change?
What is meant by the term Proto-Indo-European?
What did Sir William Jones have to do with all of this?
What is Grimm's Law?  Give an example.
What is Verner's Law?
Know some of the major branches of the PIE family: Germanic, Celtic, Italic, and Hellenic?
Know what languages go with what branches: English, Old English, French, Latin, Greek, Gaelic, Breton, Welsh, Spanish.
What are the two theories of the Indo-European homeland that we discussed?

Terms to know

1. Arbitary signifers
2. Discrete combinatorial system
3. Duality of Patterning
 Patterns of sounds (phonemes) within morphemes (words) regardless of meaning.
 Patterns of word (morphemes) within words and phrases (and sentences) specifying meaning.
4. Part of speech categories (N,V, P, A -- also adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions)
5. Head phrases with X-bars
6. Nouns marked for case and assigned role by mental dictionary entry for verb or predicate.**
7. Phrases can be moved from d-structure place to s-structure by transformation movement rules.
8. Sounds are arranged in syllables and metrical feet by trees and are altered by the specifications of their features.

Review terms:

standard social science model
language as innate -- an instinct to acquire an art
mentalese - language and thought are different (Turing Machine)
phoneme, manner and place of articulation, features, phonemic
morpheme (free and bound) inflectional and derivational
syntax -- discrete combinatorial system; word-chain vs. tree structure (phrase structure)
 
 

The above are the principles, the parameters then are set by a culture: