Language and Linguistics: Nature, Design, Competence and the History of the Field

Practice questions (16)

Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.

1. Which statement best reflects the linguistic view of the relationship between speech and writing?

   1. Speech (or sign) is primary and acquired naturally, while writing is a later, learned technology that represents language
   2. Writing is the primary and most authentic form of language, while ordinary speech is merely a careless and degraded approximation of the written standard
   3. Speech and writing are two independent languages that happen to share much of their vocabulary
   4. Only languages that possess a writing system can be counted as full human languages
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   Answer: A — Speech (or sign) is primary and acquired naturally, while writing is a later, learned technology that represents language

   Every normal community has a spoken or signed language acquired without instruction, while writing is a historically later, taught technology that many languages never had; writing therefore represents language rather than being it. The tempting distractor reverses this, treating the written standard as the 'real' language — a prescriptive attitude, not a linguistic finding.

2. Consider the sentence: 'In casual speech many educated speakers end questions with a preposition, as in Who did you give it to?' This statement is best described as which kind of claim?

   1. Prescriptive, because it instructs speakers on the single correct way in which they ought to be constructing their questions
   2. Descriptive, because it reports an observed pattern of usage without judging it right or wrong
   3. Prescriptive, because it is correcting a grammatical error that occurs in formal writing
   4. Neither descriptive nor prescriptive, because it concerns written language only
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   Answer: B — Descriptive, because it reports an observed pattern of usage without judging it right or wrong

   The sentence reports what speakers actually do ('many educated speakers end questions with a preposition') and passes no judgement, so it is descriptive. The prescriptive distractors add a 'correct way' or an 'error' that the sentence never states; a prescriptive claim would be 'you must not end a question with a preposition'.

3. Which of the following is true of sign languages such as Indian Sign Language?

   1. They are manual re-codings of the surrounding spoken language and share its grammar exactly
   2. They are simplified systems of gesture that lack grammatical structure
   3. They are full natural languages with their own grammar, acquired like any first language
   4. They can express concrete objects but not abstract, hypothetical or displaced meanings
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   Answer: C — They are full natural languages with their own grammar, acquired like any first language

   Modern linguistics established that sign languages are full natural languages with their own phonology, morphology and syntax, arising spontaneously in Deaf communities and acquired like any first language. They are not manual codings of a spoken language (the tempting distractor) and are not grammarless gesture; like all human languages they show displacement and productivity.

4. Which of the following are design features of human language in Charles Hockett's sense? Select all that apply.

   1. Arbitrariness: the link between a form and its meaning is conventional, not natural
   2. Duality of patterning: meaningless units combine into meaningful ones at two layers of structure
   3. Displacement: the ability to refer to things remote in time or space, or not real at all
   4. Genetic inheritance of one's specific vocabulary, passed down biologically rather than learned
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   Answer: A — Arbitrariness: the link between a form and its meaning is conventional, not natural; B — Duality of patterning: meaningless units combine into meaningful ones at two layers of structure; C — Displacement: the ability to refer to things remote in time or space, or not real at all

   Arbitrariness, duality of patterning and displacement are core Hockett design features. The option about genetic inheritance of vocabulary inverts the feature of cultural transmission: language, vocabulary included, is learned and not genetically inherited, so as stated it is not a design feature and is false.

5. A learner notices that the word for 'dog' is completely different in Hindi, English and Tamil, with nothing in the sounds that points to the animal. This most directly illustrates which design feature?

   1. Displacement, since the speakers are able to talk about a dog that is distant from them in time or space, or not even present
   2. Duality of patterning, since each word is built from separate sounds
   3. Cultural transmission, since each child learns the word from its community
   4. Arbitrariness, since the link between the form and the meaning is conventional, not natural
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   Answer: D — Arbitrariness, since the link between the form and the meaning is conventional, not natural

   Different, unrelated forms for the same meaning across languages, with nothing in the sounds resembling the referent, is the signature of arbitrariness — Saussure's arbitrariness of the sign. Cultural transmission is also true in general but is not what the sound-meaning mismatch demonstrates; the observation is specifically about the form-meaning link.

6. Which statement correctly distinguishes duality of patterning from productivity?

   1. Duality of patterning is the two-layer organisation in which meaningless units combine into meaningful ones; productivity is the open-ended capacity to form and understand novel messages
   2. Duality of patterning is the capacity to produce and understand infinitely many entirely new sentences, while productivity is merely the layering of individual sounds into larger units of meaning
   3. The two terms name exactly the same property under labels from different schools of thought
   4. Duality of patterning refers to being bilingual, and productivity refers to the size of a speaker's vocabulary
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   Answer: A — Duality of patterning is the two-layer organisation in which meaningless units combine into meaningful ones; productivity is the open-ended capacity to form and understand novel messages

   Duality (double articulation) is structural: a small set of meaningless phonemes recombine into a large set of meaningful words. Productivity (openness) is generative: speakers make and understand messages never heard before. The tempting distractor swaps the two definitions; bilingualism and vocabulary size are unrelated to either feature.

7. A grammar reaches descriptive adequacy when it does what?

   1. It correctly lists only the sentences that happen to appear in the particular finite corpus it was originally built from, and nothing further
   2. It matches the data and also captures native speakers' intuitions, assigning the right structures and ambiguities
   3. It is selected by a general theory explaining how a child acquires exactly that grammar
   4. It is written entirely in formal mathematical notation
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   Answer: B — It matches the data and also captures native speakers' intuitions, assigning the right structures and ambiguities

   Descriptive adequacy goes beyond merely covering the data (observational adequacy) to capturing the native speaker's intuitions — assigning correct structures, predicting ambiguity, and sorting grammatical from ungrammatical strings beyond the sample. Listing only the corpus is observational adequacy; being selected by an acquisition theory is explanatory adequacy; notation is irrelevant.

8. Grammar G generates every sentence in its training corpus and no others, but it assigns a single structure to sentences that native speakers hear as ambiguous, and it cannot predict speakers' intuitions about new sentences. At best, G has reached which level?

   1. Explanatory adequacy
   2. Descriptive adequacy
   3. Observational adequacy
   4. No level of adequacy at all, since it misses some corpus sentences
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   Answer: C — Observational adequacy

   G covers its corpus exactly, so it has observational adequacy. But because it fails to capture speakers' intuitions — missing ambiguity and not predicting judgements on new sentences — it does not reach descriptive adequacy, and so cannot reach explanatory adequacy either. The claim that G has no adequacy at all is wrong, because G does generate all and only the corpus sentences.

9. Which statements about grammars and the goals of linguistics are correct? Select all that apply.

   1. Every explanatorily adequate grammar is also descriptively adequate
   2. Observational adequacy entails descriptive adequacy
   3. Explanatory adequacy is tied to explaining how a child could acquire the grammar, and to Universal Grammar
   4. A descriptively adequate grammar captures native-speaker intuitions, not just the corpus
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   Answer: A — Every explanatorily adequate grammar is also descriptively adequate; C — Explanatory adequacy is tied to explaining how a child could acquire the grammar, and to Universal Grammar; D — A descriptively adequate grammar captures native-speaker intuitions, not just the corpus

   The levels are cumulative upward: explanatory implies descriptive implies observational. So an explanatorily adequate grammar is descriptively adequate, descriptive adequacy captures intuitions beyond the corpus, and explanatory adequacy concerns acquisition and Universal Grammar. The false option reverses the implication: observational adequacy is the weakest level and does not entail descriptive adequacy.

10. The distinction between competence and performance, as Chomsky draws it, is the distinction between which two things?

    1. A speaker's regional dialect and wider social background, as opposed to the personal idiolect that they happen to use at home
    2. The written form of a language as opposed to its spoken form
    3. The lexicon of a language as opposed to its syntactic rules
    4. A speaker's internalised knowledge of the grammar as opposed to their actual, error-prone use of language
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    Answer: D — A speaker's internalised knowledge of the grammar as opposed to their actual, error-prone use of language

    Competence is the tacit, internalised knowledge of the grammar; performance is its actual use in real time, shaped by memory limits, slips and hesitation. A speaker who stumbles has not lost competence — performance simply failed to realise it cleanly. Dialect/idiolect, writing/speech and lexicon/syntax are different distinctions altogether.

11. Both Saussure's langue/parole and Chomsky's competence/performance oppose knowledge to use. A key difference between the two pairs is that:

    1. langue is a social system shared by a community, whereas competence is grammatical knowledge in an individual mind
    2. langue is a purely psychological and individual capacity, whereas competence is a shared social institution belonging to the whole community
    3. parole and performance both refer to writing, while langue and competence refer to speech
    4. there is no real difference, since the two pairs are exact synonyms coined independently
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    Answer: A — langue is a social system shared by a community, whereas competence is grammatical knowledge in an individual mind

    Saussure's langue is a social fact — the sign system shared by a community — while Chomsky's competence is psychological, the knowledge in an individual mind. The option that calls langue psychological and competence a social institution reverses exactly this emphasis. The pairs run roughly parallel (knowledge versus use) but are not exact synonyms, and neither distinction is about writing versus speech.

12. The hypothesis that the language one speaks shapes or influences habitual thought is most closely associated with which pair of scholars?

    1. Leonard Bloomfield and Franz Boas
    2. Pāṇini and Patañjali
    3. Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf
    4. Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy
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    Answer: C — Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf

    The idea that language shapes thought is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, named for Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf. Boas and Bloomfield were American structuralists; Jakobson and Trubetzkoy founded Prague-School phonology; Pāṇini and Patañjali belong to the Sanskrit grammatical tradition.

13. Regarding linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity, which statements are correct? Select all that apply.

    1. Strong linguistic determinism, that language determines and limits what can be thought, is now widely rejected
    2. Weak linguistic relativity, that language influences habitual thought and attention, has some experimental support
    3. The strong deterministic version is the current scientific consensus
    4. Relativity effects have been studied in areas such as colour categorisation and spatial frames of reference
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    Answer: A — Strong linguistic determinism, that language determines and limits what can be thought, is now widely rejected; B — Weak linguistic relativity, that language influences habitual thought and attention, has some experimental support; D — Relativity effects have been studied in areas such as colour categorisation and spatial frames of reference

    The strong form (determinism) is discredited because speakers can grasp distinctions their language does not grammaticalise; the weak form (relativity) is defensible and has modest experimental support in domains like colour and spatial reference. The claim that strong determinism is the consensus is false — it is exactly the version linguists reject.

14. Modern European structuralism, including the langue/parole and synchronic/diachronic distinctions, is founded on the work of which scholar?

    1. Leonard Bloomfield
    2. Noam Chomsky
    3. Roman Jakobson
    4. Ferdinand de Saussure
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    Answer: D — Ferdinand de Saussure

    Saussure's posthumous Cours de linguistique générale (1916) framed language as a system of relational signs and set the langue/parole and synchronic/diachronic distinctions, founding European structuralism. Bloomfield led American structuralism, Chomsky founded generative grammar, and Jakobson belonged to the Prague School.

15. Which of the following attributions in the history of linguistics are correct? Select all that apply.

    1. Leonard Bloomfield — American distributional structuralism
    2. Noam Chomsky — generative grammar and the competence / Universal Grammar programme
    3. The Prague School (Jakobson, Trubetzkoy) — functional phonology and distinctive features
    4. Ferdinand de Saussure — the Mahābhāṣya, the great commentary on Sanskrit grammar
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    Answer: A — Leonard Bloomfield — American distributional structuralism; B — Noam Chomsky — generative grammar and the competence / Universal Grammar programme; C — The Prague School (Jakobson, Trubetzkoy) — functional phonology and distinctive features

    Bloomfield's distributional structuralism, Chomsky's generative programme, and the Prague School's functional phonology with distinctive features are all correctly attributed. The false pairing assigns the Mahābhāṣya to Saussure; the Mahābhāṣya is Patañjali's commentary in the Sanskrit grammatical tradition.

16. Within the Indian grammatical tradition, which of the following attributions is correct?

    1. Pāṇini composed the Mahābhāṣya, which is the great and highly influential commentary on the grammar of the Sanskrit language written centuries after him
    2. Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī describes Sanskrit through ordered sūtras, while Bhartṛhari's Vākyapadīya develops the philosophy of language and the sphoṭa theory
    3. Bhartṛhari composed the Aṣṭādhyāyī, the rule-based grammar of Sanskrit
    4. Yāska's Vākyapadīya first introduced the sphoṭa theory of linguistic meaning
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    Answer: B — Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī describes Sanskrit through ordered sūtras, while Bhartṛhari's Vākyapadīya develops the philosophy of language and the sphoṭa theory

    Pāṇini wrote the Aṣṭādhyāyī, the ordered sūtra-based grammar of Sanskrit; Bhartṛhari wrote the Vākyapadīya, which develops the sphoṭa theory. The Mahābhāṣya is Patañjali's commentary, not Pāṇini's, and the Nirukta (etymology) is Yāska's, not a Vākyapadīya — so the other options misattribute the works.