Applied English for Linguistics
Linguistics Lecture (Tuesday) Review

Read these statements to your partner and ask your partner to answer "true" or "false".
When you've finished, discuss the answers together. If the statement is "false", change it to make it "true".
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Partner one reads and listens for the answer

1. _F__ Humans learn and use language by memorizing all possible words and sentences -- and then using these sentences over and over again in many situations.

2. _T__ Linguists say that human language is creative. This means we have the ability to make and understand words and sentences we have never heard before.

3. _F__ The study of sentence structure is called phonology.

4. _T__ Morphology is the study of word structure and word formation.

5. _T__ "Linguistic competence" is the subconscious knowledge we use to tell whether a certain sentence is acceptable ("correct") or not.

6. _F__ Our knowledge of the "grammar" of our native language includes conscious knowledge of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics.

7. _T__ "Linguistics intuition" is the "feeling" that something you hear or read is grammatically or phonologically "correct".

Now partner two reads and listens for the answer

8. _F__ For linguists, not all grammars have parity: there are "good" and "bad" languages or dialects.

9. _T__ Prescriptive grammar describes how we should speak or write and is often what traditional grammar teachers or grammar books teach us.

10._T__ Descriptive grammar describes how people actually speak or write in everyday situations.

11._T__ "Between you and me" is an example of prescriptive grammar.

12._F__ People think that Tokyo dialect is the "best" Japanese dialect because it's really linguistically better than other dialects.

13._F__ Some languages don't change. Only languages in developed countries change.

14._T__ The "grammar" you know and use as a native speaker of a language is mostly unconscious knowledge of the language.