Tutorial Introduction to Linguistics

Winter term 2012/13 Nina Fiekers, Johanna Rudolph

Study questions for the additional tutorial on February 1, 2013:

1. What is linguistics and which subfields of linguistics are there? Please explain in your own
words.
2. Please define the following terms: phoneme, morpheme, lexeme, mental lexicon, phone,
allophone, syllable, minimal pair, phoneme inventory.
3. Please name the two most important varieties of English.
4. Please describe the speech sound production / the air stream mechanism.
5. Which are the three parameters for describing consonant sounds?
6. Which places of articulation are there? Choose three and describe them in more detail.
7. Which manners of articulation are there? Choose three and describe them in more detail.
8. Which of the following categorizations are correct?
[p] voiced, bilabial, plosive (or stop)
[m] voiced, bilabial, nasal
[k] voiceless, velar, plosive (or stop)
[l] voiced, dental, nasal
[f] voiced, labiodental, fricative
9. What do you know about the l-sounds of English?
10. Please indicate with a tick whether the following words contain a clear l [] or a dark l []:

clear l [] dark l []
hell
failure
intelligent
flower
table
William
left
shallow
little

11. What does the term silent letter mean? Please give examples.
12. What do you know about the two English sounds [] and [] (in contrast to German)?
13. Which of the following words are transcribed correctly into IPA?
viper [] William [] vain [] very well [ ]

victory [] vessel []
14. How do we distinguish vowel sounds? Make a list with all the vowel sounds of the English
language and categorize them.
15. Try to find the correct places for the following vowel sounds in the vowel chart:
[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []

16. What do you know about [] and [] and why do German native speakers have problems
with these sounds?
17. Are the diphthongs of English the same for the two major varieties of English?
18. Which two major types of word classes are there in English?
19. Please categorize the following words according to their word classes (N, V, Adj. etc.).
house animal many Mr. President
walk round quiet vocal cords
three apartment they plants
bilabial interestingly heavenly an
Lisa peacefully down above
cleaning stapler full romantic
20. Which types of morphemes are there?
21. What are affixes? Do you know different ones? If so, can you give examples?
22. Which morphological processes are there and which are the two most important ones in
English? Please describe them in more detail.
23. Do the morphological analysis for the following words. If there was a morphological
process involved, please name it.
Flowers, blackboard, brother, research, freedom, discourage, establish.
24. Which types of phrases can a sentence have?
25. Do the syntactical analysis for the following sentences:
a) We met an English history teacher.
b) Flying planes can be dangerous.
c) Peter saw the man with the binoculars.