LIN 3010 Chapter 1
Homework #2 Name: ___________________

Answer the following questions: 1. Look at the list of “surprising but true” facts about language given in Section 1.1.2 (pp. 3-4). Which items on the list were things you had heard before and which were new to you? Which really were surprising? What about those items surprised you?

2. Look at the list of “common misconceptions” about language given in Section 1.1.3 (p. 4). How many of these beliefs are ones you have held at some point or have heard other people express? For each, how do you think that it came to be widely believed? What sort of evidence do you think linguists might have that causes them to say that each is false? I have heard about every item on the list except for the special verb tense used for gossip.

3. Suppose that you are chaperoning a group of kindergarten students on a trip to the zoo. One of these children walks up to you, pulls on your sleeve, and exclaims, “Look at all the aminals! (note the spelling “aminals” is intended to indicate the child’s pronunciation.) a. Has this child necessarily made a speech performance error? yes b. How do you know? Out of excitement and distraction, he confused the pronunciation of animals. c. If you do not know, how might you find out? d. What sort of additional evidence might you need? e. What would you do to test your hypothesis?

4. Give a prescriptive rule and a descriptive rule for the placement of adjectives with respect to the nouns they modify in English. Explain how each type of rule might change if, at some point in the future, younger speakers of English began saying things like shirt green or idea brilliant
Prescriptive and descriptive rules are respectively the “proper” use of grammar and the common use of grammar. Descriptive is what happens,