The Theory of Sense—Why No One Should Bother To Find Out If It Works—Prof. Trent Slater SpecGram Vol CLVIII, No 1 Contents Palindromic Passivization—Overcoming the Computational Cost of So-Called “Center-Embedding” Passives—Albrecht Brechtal, Fortuna de Sadamente, and Jonathan van der Meer
Another Bunch of Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know
(because they aren’t actually true)

gathered at great personal risk of
psycholinguistic harm from actual student tests
by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira

This fifth collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written test answers, demonstrates once again how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers think they have taught them.

Test questionCompounds and hyponymy

Question.

Headed compounds can be described as hyponyms of their head stem. Do you agree with this description? Explain your answer with examples.

Answers.


Test questionNon-native pronunciations

Question.

In the speech of some non-native speakers of English, the following pronunciations are found:

full[pʊl]          graph[grɑːp]
feel[piːl]roof[ruːp]
farm   [pɑːm]cliff[klɪp]
fan[pæn]tough   [tʌp]

Question 1. According to the data, describe what characterises the pronunciation of these speakers.

Question 2. Given what you know about natural classes of sounds, explain whether these non-native pronunciations are natural in any way.

AnswersQuestion 1.

AnswersQuestion 2.

More to come...

The Theory of Sense—Why No One Should Bother To Find Out If It Works—Prof. Trent Slater
Palindromic Passivization—Overcoming the Computational Cost of So-Called “Center-Embedding” Passives—Albrecht Brechtal, Fortuna de Sadamente, and Jonathan van der Meer
SpecGram Vol CLVIII, No 1 Contents