ENG502 Midterm Quiz from Assessments

ENG502

ABSTRACT This comprehensive collection of notes is accurately crafted to empower students to excel academically, ensuring they achieve a minimum of 80% marks in their examinations. The content is organized with clarity and precision, focusing on key concepts, critical analyses, and practical applications tailored to the syllabus. These notes serve as a reliable resource for both thorough preparation and last-minute revision. Designed to inspire confidence and mastery, this guide is an essential tool for students striving for academic excellence.

Maha Malik Introduction to Linguistics

1. According to Sapir, language is a purely human and ___________ method of communicating ideas, desires and emotions. (correct)
2. Language is described as a learnt behavior by the ___________ involving a stimulus and a response. (structuralists, anthropologist, linguists, behaviourists)
3. According to Sapir’s definition of language; ‘language is not inherited from the parents by the child’. (correct)
4. According to Hall, 'language symbols' are the vocal signals that are actually transmitted from the sender to receiver in the process of communication and interaction. (correct)
5. It is the job of a _____________ to differentiate between sentence and non sentence sequences. (Educationist, Socialist, Capitalist, Linguist)
6. Communication is a process whereby there is an exchange of information between the sender and the encoder. (Incorrect)
7. Chomsky is a rationalist rather than empiricist. (correct)
8. According to Chomsky’s belief, a child is born with an ________ capacity to learn a language. (organic, genetic, environmental, innate)
9. The scientific study of language and its structure is called _________. (Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, Linguistics, Neurolinguistics)
10. Bloch and Trager’s definition of language focuses on the property of __________ in language while having no appeal to its communication system. (agreement, organization, structure, arbitrariness)
11. In linguistics, __________ communication refers to the fact that some chemicals are emitted from the bodies of animals in order to communicate. (elemental, natural, chemo, material)
12. A classification of a language is based on ___________________ and dissimilarities in words and grammatical elements. (deformity, depravity, similarities, mutation)
13. ‘Bekos’ is a Phrygian word which means ____________________. (egg, bread, banana, butter)
14. If great apes had physically been able to speak, their ‘speech’ would have been similar to how we understand today. (Incorrect)
15. There are three reasons for linguistic similarity: genealogical sharing, areal diffusion and chance typological commonality. (correct)
16. The three general classes of script include_________, syllabic and alphabetic. (sequential, logographic, polygraphic, serial)
17. When was the first Chinese dictionary compiled? (1100-900 BC, 700 500 BC, 1400-1200 BC, 900-700 BC)
18. Bipedals were the type of apes that could not talk but were able to __________. (speak, fight, struggle, walk)
19. Initially, _________________ grammarians discussed word as a linguistic unit of sentence and also studied form versus substance. (American, Indian, African, Russian)
20. The world’s earliest known linguistic studies were produced in China between around 800 and 150 BC in an attempt to preserve the oral literature of India’s much earlier Vedic period. (Incorrect)
21. The most basic model of written language acknowledges three general classes of scripts, with many transitional variants and combinations. (correct)
22. Most other creatures appear to communicate both below and above the range which humans consider normal. (correct)
23. One of the Internet’s most widely used resources is language teaching and learning. (correct)
24. The airstream which originates in the lungs is called a___________________ airstream. (pentimento, glottal, cuchifrito, pulmonic)
25. According to researchers, primitive words could have been imitation of the__________________ sounds. (natural, aprotic, artifical, mechanical)
26. ‘Innateness hypothesis’ means language capacity is __________________ hard-wired in the newborn human. (mechanically, artificially, genetically, instrumentally)
27. At birth, the baby’s brain is only a _____________ of its eventual weight. (quarter, one third, ounce, half)
28. How many million years ago did humans develop right-handedness and became capable of making stone tools? (Four, One, Three, Two)
29. Human sounds may not have had any principled use within the life and social interaction of early human groups. (Incorrect)
30. Even children who are born deaf become fluent sign language users given appropriate circumstances. (correct)
31. All languages do not require the organizing and combining of sounds or signs in specific arrangements. (Incorrect)
32. Another theory called ‘Bow-wow theory’ claims that languages have some words with pronunciations that seem to echo naturally occurring sounds. (correct)
33. We have to wait until about 35,000 years ago for features in reconstructions of fossilized skeletal structures that begin to resemble those of modern humans. (correct)
34. Sounds of a person involved in ________________ effort could be the source of our language. (physical, illusive, mechanical, perfunctory)
35. Animals do inherit communication calls from their parents. (correct)
36. How many other properties does ‘reflexivity’ have? (Six, Four, Seven, Five)
37. At physical level, we cannot produce individual sounds, like n, b, i; none of these discrete forms have any intrinsic meaning. (Incorrect)
38. Cicadas have ___________ signals to choose from and vervet monkeys shave thirty-six vocal calls. (five, four, seven, six)
39. ‘Humans can refer to past and future time.’ What is this property of human language called? (Arbitrariness, Productivity, Displacement, None of the given)
40. Animal message is not produced according to immediate time and place. (Incorrect)