LING 1010 UCONN EXAMINATION SET 2025/2026
QUESTIONS WITH ANSWERS RATED A+
✔✔Tacit - ✔✔rules are present in the speaker's mind and govern their linguistic
behavior, but they cannot state them by simple introspection; procedural, but not
explicit; not consciously acquired; more robust than declarative knowledge; holistic NOT
analytic (ex: you must know how explicitly how your bike works)
✔✔Conscious knowledge - ✔✔NOT language; tie shoes, make a sandwich, add two
numbers of any number of digits
✔✔Mental grammar - ✔✔a set of rules that generate the expressions of the speaker's
language
✔✔Corpus - ✔✔large collections of texts, speeches, and audio recording or video
✔✔Grammatical Judgements - ✔✔Native speakers' intuitions about the well-
formedness of possible expressions in their language
✔✔Judgements of ambiguity - ✔✔native speakers' intuitions that an expression has
more than one meaning
✔✔Noam Chomsky - ✔✔one of the founders of modern linguistics; emphasized that
human language use is fundamentally creative; everyday human language is
innovative, free of stimulus control, appropriate to new and ever-changing situations
✔✔Novel sentence - ✔✔sentences that someone has never encountered in prior
experience.
✔✔Recursion - ✔✔rules of mental grammar that generate linguistic units that contain
linguistic units of the same kind; ALL human languages ([S It snowed] (S stands for
"sentence")
✔✔Nominal compounds - ✔✔a noun that is composed of two nouns; ex: shark week; oil
spill; tea party; guitar hero, house dog vs doghouse
- nouns can be identified both by their distribution in grammatical sentences of English
and, loosely, by their meaning; recursive because it produces linguistic units that
contain units of the same kind
✔✔Head of a compound - ✔✔the noun that determines the basic meaning of the
compound (the head of house dog is dog)
, ✔✔Right Hand Head Rule - ✔✔the head of a compound is always the noun on the right.
In a compound of the form N1N2 the head compound is N2. This indicates that an
N1N2 is a kind of N2; ex: the doghouse is a house
✔✔RECURSIVE RULE - ✔✔2 parts of mental grammar= the basic building blocks and
the rules N -- N N recursive rule generates nominal compounds
✔✔Basic Building blocks - ✔✔the words we have stored in our mental lexicon with their
pronunciation, its meaning and its category (noun, adjective, verb, etc.)
1.A noun may be any of the nouns stored in our mental lexicon 2. a non (that is not pre-
stored) may be created by placing one noun in front of another noun (N- N N)
✔✔Apply to its own output - ✔✔every time the rule is applied it becomes applicable
again; there is no limit to the number of times it can be applies, and there is no limit on
the length of a nominal compound
✔✔Hierarchical structures - ✔✔complex objects whose parts are organizes into groups;
the parts do not form a simple sequence in which each part plays an equal role
✔✔Tree Diagrams - ✔✔Root: the start symbol at the top; Branches: lines;Node: each
point in the tree that is connected to another, repeat process until there are no rules
✔✔Structural Ambiguity - ✔✔when a single string of words can be analyzed as having 2
distinct hierarchical structures (the noun that is the head can be a compound)
✔✔Rationalists/ Nativists - ✔✔claim that some (or all) knowledge is independent of our
sensory experience. We must be innately endowed with such knowledge
✔✔Empiricists - ✔✔on the other hand, claim that all knowledge must ultimately derive
from our sensory experience
✔✔Plato's problem - ✔✔how is it possible to possess tacit knowledge? Plato thinks that
all knowledge is present unconsciously in our souls
✔✔Knowledge= innate - ✔✔inborn and carried over from previous existence; we gain
knowledge through anamnesis (recollection)
✔✔Rationalism - ✔✔humans have knowledge of concepts that are not available to
human sensory experience. These include the concepts of God, infinity, and necessary
truth; humans are endowed by God with a rational soul that comes equipped with
certain innate ideas; any human's sensory experience is only partial and contingent;
knowledge is necessary and universal
QUESTIONS WITH ANSWERS RATED A+
✔✔Tacit - ✔✔rules are present in the speaker's mind and govern their linguistic
behavior, but they cannot state them by simple introspection; procedural, but not
explicit; not consciously acquired; more robust than declarative knowledge; holistic NOT
analytic (ex: you must know how explicitly how your bike works)
✔✔Conscious knowledge - ✔✔NOT language; tie shoes, make a sandwich, add two
numbers of any number of digits
✔✔Mental grammar - ✔✔a set of rules that generate the expressions of the speaker's
language
✔✔Corpus - ✔✔large collections of texts, speeches, and audio recording or video
✔✔Grammatical Judgements - ✔✔Native speakers' intuitions about the well-
formedness of possible expressions in their language
✔✔Judgements of ambiguity - ✔✔native speakers' intuitions that an expression has
more than one meaning
✔✔Noam Chomsky - ✔✔one of the founders of modern linguistics; emphasized that
human language use is fundamentally creative; everyday human language is
innovative, free of stimulus control, appropriate to new and ever-changing situations
✔✔Novel sentence - ✔✔sentences that someone has never encountered in prior
experience.
✔✔Recursion - ✔✔rules of mental grammar that generate linguistic units that contain
linguistic units of the same kind; ALL human languages ([S It snowed] (S stands for
"sentence")
✔✔Nominal compounds - ✔✔a noun that is composed of two nouns; ex: shark week; oil
spill; tea party; guitar hero, house dog vs doghouse
- nouns can be identified both by their distribution in grammatical sentences of English
and, loosely, by their meaning; recursive because it produces linguistic units that
contain units of the same kind
✔✔Head of a compound - ✔✔the noun that determines the basic meaning of the
compound (the head of house dog is dog)
, ✔✔Right Hand Head Rule - ✔✔the head of a compound is always the noun on the right.
In a compound of the form N1N2 the head compound is N2. This indicates that an
N1N2 is a kind of N2; ex: the doghouse is a house
✔✔RECURSIVE RULE - ✔✔2 parts of mental grammar= the basic building blocks and
the rules N -- N N recursive rule generates nominal compounds
✔✔Basic Building blocks - ✔✔the words we have stored in our mental lexicon with their
pronunciation, its meaning and its category (noun, adjective, verb, etc.)
1.A noun may be any of the nouns stored in our mental lexicon 2. a non (that is not pre-
stored) may be created by placing one noun in front of another noun (N- N N)
✔✔Apply to its own output - ✔✔every time the rule is applied it becomes applicable
again; there is no limit to the number of times it can be applies, and there is no limit on
the length of a nominal compound
✔✔Hierarchical structures - ✔✔complex objects whose parts are organizes into groups;
the parts do not form a simple sequence in which each part plays an equal role
✔✔Tree Diagrams - ✔✔Root: the start symbol at the top; Branches: lines;Node: each
point in the tree that is connected to another, repeat process until there are no rules
✔✔Structural Ambiguity - ✔✔when a single string of words can be analyzed as having 2
distinct hierarchical structures (the noun that is the head can be a compound)
✔✔Rationalists/ Nativists - ✔✔claim that some (or all) knowledge is independent of our
sensory experience. We must be innately endowed with such knowledge
✔✔Empiricists - ✔✔on the other hand, claim that all knowledge must ultimately derive
from our sensory experience
✔✔Plato's problem - ✔✔how is it possible to possess tacit knowledge? Plato thinks that
all knowledge is present unconsciously in our souls
✔✔Knowledge= innate - ✔✔inborn and carried over from previous existence; we gain
knowledge through anamnesis (recollection)
✔✔Rationalism - ✔✔humans have knowledge of concepts that are not available to
human sensory experience. These include the concepts of God, infinity, and necessary
truth; humans are endowed by God with a rational soul that comes equipped with
certain innate ideas; any human's sensory experience is only partial and contingent;
knowledge is necessary and universal
