This exam will focus on the material covered after Exam #1: there will be no questions that are only about Exam #1 material. However, some of the Exam #1 material will be relevant (for example, when discussing rendaku or verb morphology).
Approximately 1/4 to 1/3 of the exam will be short-answer questions covering basic concepts and definitions, and the rest will be small or medium-sized data-based questions (including trees), similar to those that we have worked through in homework assignments or in class. Some of the data-based questions may ask you to think about how a rule or pattern is similar to or different from a rule or pattern that we have seen in class or in a reading.
You are responsible for the general concepts in the required syntax reading assignments (not the optional ones). However, most of the emphasis will be on topics that were discussed in class.
Some of the problem-solving you are asked to do may involve data from non-standard dialects of Japanese, and you may be asked to apply and compare or modify the analysis for standard Japanese to make it fit the other dialect.
Many, though not necessarily all, of the following topics will be included on the exam.
Morphology
- Understand how morphemes are represented in the mental lexicon
- Morpheme segmentation -- given a set of morphologically
complex forms, compare their segmental content and their meanings
to identify the morphemes they contain
[Data sets for practice:
adjectives |
verbs |
HW #4]
- Know how to apply the basic classification terms for morphemes
([handout]),
especially
- free/bound
- root/affix; prefix/suffix
- inflectional/derivational
- Know the word classes (syntactic categories, "parts of speech")
used in Japanese, and some of the tests for determining word class
[handout] |
[Google data (1)] |
[Google data (2)] |
[A/V: further issues] |
[A/V inflection summary]
- Given a word/root in several contexts, be able to recognize what word class it belongs to
- Be able to suggest ways of determining whether some word/root belongs to word class "X" or "Y"
- Recognize the verb suffixes covered on class handouts
[verb morphology data set] |
[A/V: further issues] |
[A/V inflection summary]
- Know how the suffix forms differ for "vowel verbs" and "consonant verbs"
- Be able to classify a given verb as vowel/consonant verb (or say when this is not possible), given inflected forms
- Past tense:
- Recognize that -ta (sometimes appearing as -da) is the verb past-tense suffix
- Know the phonological changes that each category of /consonant verb + ta/ undergoes (you do not need to memorize the rule names or know how general the rules are in Japanese phonology)
- You do not need to memorize specific irregular verbs, but if you are given an irregular verb, be able to identify where its pattern differs from that of a regular verb [examples for practice]
- About rendaku
[examples]
- Under what morphological conditions does this rule apply?
- What is the phonological characterization of this rule? That is, what happens to a word when the rendaku rule applies to it?
- What is the phonological context in which this rule is blocked?
Syntax
- X-bar structure
[handout] |
[O'Grady et al. reading]
- Know the general X-bar schema for Japanese and the associated terminology (head, phrase, node, constituent, complement, modifier, specifier)
- Be able to draw an X-bar tree for a phrase or sentence of Japanese -- this includes structures similar to those we have already seen, and possibly also a new kind of structure that you are given relevant information about
- Be able to handle: Ditransitive verbs, APs as predicates, possessives, relative clauses
- Remember that some sentences contain the null pronoun pro
- Subcategorization
[handout] |
[O'Grady et al. reading] |
[Koizumi reading]
- Understand why we need subcategorization in the model (why is the X-bar schema alone not enough?)
- What is the difference between predicates that are intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive? How are these differences represented in a native speaker's mental lexicon?
- Understand the concept of structural object and how that is related to the concept of transitivity
- Thematic roles and case-marking
[handout] |
[Santorini & Kroch reading] |
[Koizumi reading]
- Be familiar with Agent, Experiencer, and Theme thematic roles in particular
- Be familiar with the relationship we explored between predicates that have nominative objects and the thematic role that they assign to their subjects
- Variable word order (scrambling)
[handout] |
[data set]
- Understand what the nonconfigurational approach to Japanese word order proposes
- Understand why the nonconfigurational approach makes different predictions from the X-bar approach
- Understand what kind of evidence has been used to distinguish between them
- Numeral quantifiers
[handout]
- Understand the syntactic structure we have proposed for NQs, and why
- Understand the relevance of the NQ data for our analysis of ni
- Be able to draw a syntactic structure and use it to answer
questions such as these:
- why two constructions are different in their behavior
- how a particular syntactic structure relates to a particular meaning
- etc. ...