28 tips for doing better in your Intro Linguistics course

Just in time for back to school, here are some tips for doing better on your linguistics assignments from someone who’s marked a few hundred of them over the years. 

General:

1. Read the question. The easiest mistake to fix: if the question says circle the error and fix it, make sure you do both, or if the question asks for three examples, make sure you give three and not two or four. If the question asks for a transcription, don’t give a translation, and so on. Before you pass something in, read it over to make sure the question and the answer match. 

2. Use only the necessary words. In grade school, you may have been asked to answer in complete sentences. That doesn’t really matter anymore: what matters is that you show that you understand the material. Linguistics problem sets aren’t essay questions, so a short phrase may be totally sufficient. 

3. Use the technical words that you’ve been learning (but don’t use the other ones you found on Wikipedia). Part of what you’re being tested on is your ability to use technical vocabulary, so you should say “transitive verb” instead of “an action word that has both a person who did the thing and a person who the thing is done to”. 

4. Ask yourself: “what knowledge is this question trying to measure and have I demonstrated it?” A one-point question is looking for less detail than a ten-point one. Generally, markschemes allot a point or half-point per thing you say, so a three-point question is probably looking for three or six things (e.g. technical term, definition, example). If you stop at just the term, that may not be enough. 

5. Take notes by hand. Figuring out how to insert IPA and logical symbols and tree diagrams on your computer is quite complicated and better saved for times when you aren’t trying to process new material. If you really can’t do handwriting, explore alternative solutions before class, including keeping a piece of paper by your computer for diagrams, learning LaTeX or other typing input methods beforehand (some examples here), or getting notes from a classmate. 

6. Start all assignments MORE than the night before. It’s very useful to be able to sleep on it and come up with the thing that was puzzling you at first try. Also, it gives you time to go to office hours to ask questions about where you’re stuck rather than desperately emailing your prof or TA less than 24 hours before it’s due.

7. Work with other people, if you’re allowed. Many ling profs will let you do some sort of group work, and it’s very useful to take advantage of the opportunity to discuss the assignments. 

8. Assume that the data you’re given is fully representative of the language in question. It may not be, but your job is to account for whatever is going on in all and only the data you’re given. Even if you speak the language and can come up with extra examples, don’t do it unless maybe the data is in English unmarked for any specific dialect. 

Phono:

9. Learn the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) really well as soon as possible. It’ll save you tons of stress later. 

10. For IPA characters that you’re finding more difficult, it’s useful to associate a keyword with them. For example, learning that /æ/ is the sound in cat may be easier than learning that /æ/ is some sound. See also: How to remember the IPA vowel chart and How to remember the IPA consonant chart. 

11. The common IPA charts used for vowels and consonants have an internal logic to them: they’re both based off the abstract idea of a cross-section of a head turning left. So symbols on the left are more towards the front of the mouth, while those on the right are towards the back or even the throat, and symbols at the top are produced with the jaw and/or tongue more closed than those at the bottom. It is probably helpful to learn the location of symbols at the same time as what they stand for. Practising filling out a blank IPA chart can be useful here. 

12. The most common transcription errors that people make are vowels and stress. A trick for finding the primary stress in a word: call the word in a sing-song voice like it’s the name of a person or a pet. The syllable that gets the highest pitch is the primary stressed one. 

13. If you’re doing narrow/phonetic transcription, make a list of the phonological processes you’re responsible for and check to make sure you’ve done them all before passing it in. Forgetting to mark, say, aspiration, can take off a huge chunk of marks for what feels like a single mistake. 

14. Examine your own accent (everyone has one). If it’s not the same as the one assumed by the textbook, you may want to seek out extra advice from the prof or TA to make sure you’re understanding the IPA correctly. If you have to do narrow transcriptions of your own speech, it’s probable that a range of answers will be accepted to account for dialect differences, but if you have an accent that is very different from your classmates, you may want to make a little note of this on your assignment so whoever’s grading your transcriptions can understand why certain things might be different. (When I used to mark transcription assignments, I’d restore points if anyone could come up to me and pronounce the words the way they’d transcribed them. Hopefully your course makes a similar offer or has other assignment methods that take into account accent variation.) 

15. The IPA has a standardized one-to-one correspondence between symbols and sounds, which is what makes it so awesome. However, this also means that it’s not the place to display your originality in handwriting. ɑ and a are different sounds, as are e and ɛ and ɜ and ə and ɚ, as are r and ɾ and ɹ and ɻ and ʀ and ʁ, and so on. IPA capitals either don’t exist or stand for different sounds, and random curlicues or script versus print matters a lot. 

16. Try to write the most general phonological rules or processes that fully account for the data. For example, instead of writing /p, t, k/ become /b, d, g/ respectively between two vowels, write that stops become voiced (+voice) in this context, unless you have an example of a stop (such as /q/) that doesn’t. If you don’t have any evidence for whether /q/ becomes voiced intervocalically, write the more general rule as a means of predicting what would happen if a relevant example did show up.  

17. When you’re writing a phonological rule or process, it may help to think about what could be the easiest way to pronounce something. Generally, sounds change in order to become easier to pronounce, so if you have a really specific rule that seems to account for the data but is otherwise pretty bizarre, then there may be a more elegant solution. However, your sense of naturalness will develop the more exposure you have, so don’t worry overmuch about this. An unnatural rule that accounts for the data is much better than no rule at all! 

Morphology: 

18. When referring to a word or morpheme in another language, always use both the language’s term and the English gloss. For example, “the Spanish word amigas 'friends (f)’ has the morphemes -a 'feminine’ and -s ‘plural’.” Not: the Spanish word amigas, Not: the Spanish word for female friends. 

19. Morphemes are not etymology. If you look up “telephone” in an etymology dictionary, you’ll find that it comes from the Greek tele "far" and phone  “sound”, but you don’t have to know this in order to be a perfectly good English speaker, so these aren’t English morphemes. On the other hand, any English speaker could tell you without looking it up that the un- in  unimportant  or  uninteresting means 'not’, so this is a morpheme.  

20. Other languages may have different ways of categorizing things than you’re used to, especially if you only speak English or Indo-European languages. For example, a language may have no gender or 22 noun classes, a distant past tense and a near-past tense, inclusive and exclusive “we”, no present progressive, not use “do” for negation and questions, and so on. Beware that English glosses may not represent all of the possible details or may represent details that aren’t present in the other language, so you should use the other language as the primary authority on which distinctions are relevant. 

21. Don’t look up other sources for an unfamiliar language in a morphology problem. You’re likely to find traditional dictionaries, which may not separate by morphemes anyway, and morphology problems may simplify the language data in order to make it easier for an intro class. Which relates to…

22. If you actually speak a language used in a problem set, and you notice that it doesn’t totally match what you’d say as a speaker, answer the question as presented, not by changing the data so that it sounds better for you. The data may have come from a different dialect or may have been simplified for the purposes of the course. Simplification is probably annoying to you as a speaker, but it’s kind of like an intro physics course assuming that friction doesn’t exist and that a cow is basically like a sphere: eventually you’ll have to discard the simplifications but if you don’t assume them for a while you end up with a more boring course with only made-up examples that is harder to connect to real life. 

Syntax: 

23. If you’re drawing a tree of a sentence, make sure that the (surface structure) tree reads the same left-to-right as the original sentence you were told to draw. It’s possible for a tree to still be wrong and read correctly left-to-right, but it’s not possible for a (surface structure) tree to be correct and NOT read correctly left-to-right. If you don’t know what “surface structure” is, then assume the left-to-right test works for all trees.

24. If you’re working with an unfamiliar language, draw the tree for that language, not for the English gloss that you were given.

25. Many English words can have multiple lexical categories depending on context, so make sure you’re using the right one for the specific example you’re working with. A commonly confused one is that, which is a determiner in “that book”, a complementizer in “I said that you would come”, and a pronoun in “I didn’t know that”. 

26. If you’re not comfortable with basic descriptive grammatical terms like subject, pronoun, preposition, transitive, etc., it’s a much better idea to look them up and learn them rather than guessing or floundering. Resources.

27. Think through a sentence before drawing a tree for it. Identify verb(s), subject(s), object(s), adjunct(s). What are each of the adjuncts modifying? Make sure your tree diagram reflects this. Here are the steps to go through when drawing a syntax tree, with gifs. 

28. Be very cautious about using other sources in addition to your course material: most introductory courses make some simplifications to how they present syntax, but they may make different ones so what you find on the internet may not be what your course is doing. If you really need to seek resources outside your class, here’s a guide to figuring out how to compare different kinds of syntax resources. 

Bonus tips! 

Go to your prof’s or TA’s office hours! It’s okay, you’re not bothering them, this is what office hours are for! At the beginning of the semester, not very many people come, and your instructor is probably just sitting there bored answering emails and looking up every time someone walks by. They’d love to see a student who’s genuinely excited about their class, and it’s nice to start getting to know them a bit if you need to ask for help later. 

This blog has an extensive archive of resources which can help you as you learn more linguistics. Start with How to teach yourself linguistics online for free.