Exam #1

You must answer each of the first four questions and you may choose any one of the final three questions as your fifth question to answer.

Please begin each answer on a new page of the blue book. There are additional blue books, so don't worry about length. You should budget about 12 minutes for each answer. Be sure your answers are concise and complete. All claims and positions should be justified.

Please put your name on the front of each blue book you use!

1. Imagine that an isolated group of the genus Homo erectus is discovered. They seem to communicate with combinations of brief utterances, perhaps just single words, and with gestures. Which of Hockett's features (stick to the 6 listed in your text) are most likely to be present? Justify your answer (always! this should go without saying!).

2. Currently the computer is viewed as an apt metaphor for the brain, with a focus on both as general-purpose problem-solving systems that encode, store, and retrieve information. Is this comparison based on a computational, representational, or implementational analysis? Explain. If you specified just one level of analysis, do you believe that computers can be compared to human memory at either of the other two levels? Why or why not?

3. Draw a phrase structure tree for "George stayed after school with the teacher." Now extend the tree one level further by showing the morphemes that compose each word (where there is more than one in a single word). Should this tree diagram be considered as one kind of knowledge or two (syntactic and morphemic)? Explain.

4. Describe the structural ambiguity of the sentence, "The princess thought the shooting of the prince was terrible." If possible, illustrate your answer with tree diagrams.

5. Answer any one of the following three questions:
   1. from Kurt Salzinger, Pleasing Linuists: A Parable, JVLVB, 9, 725.

      And the linguist said, "Our truths are universal truths for from them we can generate all sentences particular and none of them impossible, except, of course, the non-sentences which speakers really say." As the trouble with actual speech is that it is too remote from people's competence for talking, the linguist continued, "People's behavior does not adhere to rules and meta-rules - only their competence does."

      As there is this seeming gap between knowledge of language and use of language, What does it mean to explain language? What must be accomplished if we are to do that?

   2. Why are many linguists interested in discovering features that are universal across all languages?

   3. Explain what is meant by codability. How is codability related to tests of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Describe similarities and differences between codability and categorization.