Linguistics Olympiad Training Material

8/10/2019 Linguistics Olympiad Training Material

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Linguistics Pictures, [Online], Available: http://www.walkinthewords.blogspot.com[Accessed 12 September2011]

Linguistics (liNG-gwi-stiks) Training Material

-By Sagar Sarda


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Table of Contents

1. A sample Linguistics Problem... -------------------------------------------------------------- 1

1.1 So how to solve it? .......................................................................... 2

1.3 Answers to the Sample Linguistics Problem: ............................................ 5

1.3.1 Answers to Slovenian-English: ............................................................................. 5

1.3.2 Answers to English to Slovenian: .......................................................................... 5

2. Introduction: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6

3. Phonetics: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8

3.1 Phonetics of Consonants ................................................................... 8

Figure 1 ................................................................................................................ 8

3.2 Phonetics of vowels ....................................................................... 12

Figure 2 .............................................................................................................. 13

Figure 3 .............................................................................................................. 13

4. Morphology -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 15

5. Syntax --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 17

5.1 SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OVS, OSV .......................................................... 18

5.2 Transitive and Intransitive verbs ........................................................ 19

6 Bibliography: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 211

6.1 Books ...................................................................................... 211

6.2 Websites ................................................................................... 211


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1. A sample Linguistics Problem...

Read the following sentences in Slovenian and their translations in English. Thenanswer the questions that follow:

1.

Fant me je udaril.

2.Ubil si ival.

3.ival me in ga je pojedel.

4.Fant je spustil aj.

5.Pojedel si duhovnikov brezsrno.

6.Pismonoa ga je ubil neusmiljeno.

7.Policist je brezsren.

8.On je nesmiseln.

9.Pobral sem policistov.

10.Pojedel si se.

Trnaslate the following sentences from Slovenian to English:

1.Ubil si ga nemiselno.

2.Udaril si fanta brezsrno.

3.Duhovnik te je pobral.

4.Pojedel sem ival neusmiljeno.

5.Spustil sem se.

6.Fant se je ubil.

Translate the following sentences from English to Slovenian:

7.I ate myself pointlessly.

8.You are merciless.

9.A priest dropped a policeman and an animal and a boy.

10.He picked you up.

11.A postman and a boy hit me and you.

12.

He is pointlessly merciless and heartless.

-By Sagar Sarda

A boy hit me

You killed an animal.

An animal ate me and him.

A boy dropped tea.

You ate priests heartlessly.

A postman killed him mercilessly.

A police officer is heartless.

He is pointless.

I picked up police officers.


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1.1 So how to solve it?

Try solving it yourself first, then go through the material on morphology and syntax and

attempt it again. After that, compare your answers here.

So, letsbegin with the verbs, since theyre often the most susceptible to change in anylanguage (depending on the subject, object, tense, mood, etc.). Here, eating seems to

be the most repeated verb, so note down all the cases of its appearance:

ival me in ga je pojedla = An animal ate me and him.

Pojedel si duhovnika brezsrno = You ate priests heartlessly.

Pojedel si se = You ate yourself.

Common words? Pojed + el/la. Any other appearances of pojed? No, so lets move to thenext verb - to kill:

Ubil si ival = You killed an animal.

Pismonoa ga je ubil neusmiljeno = A postman killed him mercilessly.

Ubil = kill (past tense). No other appearances of ubil. Moving on:

Policist je brezsren = The policeman is heartless.

On je nesmiseln = He is pointless.

Je = to be. However, there are other appearances of this word, which need to be kept inmind. The verb to be often serves the purpose of an auxiliary verb (used to conjugateverbs in different tenses; to beand to haveare the most common of such verbs, forexample: I wasgoing home)

The other verbs can be deduced similarly: udaril=to hit; spustil=to pick up; pobral=topick up.

Nouns too can be deduced in a similar fashion: fant=boy; ival=animal; duhovnik=priest;

policist/ov=police officer/s (-ov=plural, so duhovnik=priest); pismonoa=postman;aj=tea (note, pronounced much the same way as the Hindi chai!)

That leaves si, se, ga, me, on, sem, in, and the scary big-looking words.

So, lets deal with si:

Ubil si ival = You killed an animal

Pojedel si duhovnikov brezsrno = You ate priests heartlessly.

Pojedel si se= You ate yourself.

Common features? Thats right, they all have you as the subject of the sentence.


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Next, se. Where does it occur? only one instance:

Pojedel si se= You ate yourself.

We already know that pojedelis the verb, meaning to eat, si provides the subjectyou, so whats left? The object. So, either se means the object is 2ndperson (you)

or that the subject and object are identical (in either case the meaning of the sentencewould not change). Since we do not have any additional information, we will have toleave it at that (there are no more reflexive sentences-same subject and object-orsentences with you as the object).

Next, ga:

Pismonoa ga je ubil neusmiljeno =A postman killed him mercilessly

ival me in ga je pojedla = An animal ate me and him

They both have him as an object in the sentence, but the evidence is still not entirelyconclusive, given that the second sentence has so many unknown words.

So, we move on to me:

ival me in ga je pojedla = An animal ate me and him.

Fant me je udaril = A boy hit me.

Here, me is the common object, so me=me (though both are pronounced differently!).Knowing this word enables us to conclusively say that ga = 3rdperson object, as earlierwe did not know the meaning of me, but since that is now resolved, it makes sense to

conclude that ga=him.

This even gives us the meaning of in to be and.

So, we have on and sem left:

On je nesmiseln is the only example of on. It means He is pointless, and is also theonly occasion where he is the subject of the sentence in the corpus (set of predefinedinformation).

Sem, too, has only one appearance, in the 9th sentence, where it signifies that the

subject is the first person (I...). So sem=I.

That leaves the adjectives and adverbs. Brezsrno = heartlessly; neusmiljeno =mercilessly; brezsren = heartless (-no = -ly); nesmiseln = pointless.

You do not need to provide elaborate explanations as are provided above for themeaning of each word and how that was deduced. It will suffice to simply list out thesemeanings in an actual problem, and then list out the rules of syntax and morphology.However, if you feel more comfortable with it, then you can answer the problem innarrative style showing exactly how you arrived to your answer (saying I did this, thenthis was apparent to me, so I deduced this and conclude this...), however, the narrative

approach is usually lengthier. All that you really need to provide is enough informationabout the language for any layman (like a computer!) to reach the exact same answersyou did with just your rule set.


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Lastly, to translate English into Slovenian, we will need to know rules of syntax and theapplication of je. NOTE:Many people think that since they have obtained the meaningof all individual words, the problem is mostly over and that they will score highly even iftranslations are not entirely accurate. This is not at all true. If the rules of syntax andmorphology are not elaborately explained, even completely correct solutions will notscore highly. However, if rules of syntax are mostly explained, even if one translation is

not entirely correct, or the explanation contains an inaccurate rule, it is still possible toobtain a high number of points. Syntax and morphology form the main part of theproblem, and the rules MUST satisfy EVERY sentence WITHOUT exception (this is theonly way to ensure that the rules are correct; they must also make intuitive sense, asthe unknown language is still a real one, spoken by real people, who would favorchoosing the simplest explanation).

As you might have noticed, sentences 2, 5, 9 and 10 begin with verbs, unlike the others,and have the syntactic structure VSO (verb-subject-object), unlike the others, which areSOV (subject-object-verb). So whats common to all these sentences?

Ubil si ival. = You killed an animal

Pojedel si duhovnikov brezsrno. = You ate priests heartlessly

Pobral sem policistov. = I picked up police officers

Pojedel si se. = You ate yourself

So whats common between these sentences? 3 of them have you as the subject of thesentence. The last has I. But that is the only incidence of I as a subject inthe entirecorpus, and every sentence in the corpus not listed here has the subject as 3 rdperson

(he or some noun-like animal or boy or priest or police officer). That is their commonlink, which means it is safe to assume that the sentences that are thus structured (VSO)are the sentences that use the personal pronouns for first and second person subjects(ie. the subject is either first or second person).

So what else is left unexplained? The use of je in sentences with other verbs as well(sentences 1, 3, 4, 6; sentences 7 and 8 have je as the primary verb-there is no otherverb in the sentence):

Fant me je udaril. = A boy hit me.

ival me in ga je pojedla. = An animal eat me and him.Fant je spustil aj. = A boy dropped tea.

Pismonoa ga je ubil neusmiljeno. = A postman killed him mercilessly.

So, we have a rule to identify a first or second person subject (using VSO), and clearlyall these cases have third person subject, and all the sentences not here either havefirst or second person subjects or have the normal use of je (but they still have it inthe sentence), to mean is. Clearly, so, it is appearing specially in cases where thesubject is third person. So, with this, knowledge, it may even be concluded that je is

not the word for is at all, and that to be is implied when there is no verb present.So, you should provide both possible answers in such cases, with explanations. Theanswers are given on the following page.


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1.3 Answers to the Sample Linguistics Problem:

1.3.1 Answers to Slovenian-English:

1.You killed him pointlessly.

2.

You hit a boy heartlessly.

3.For this problem, we encounter a word we never have before, te, but it would

make sense given its placement and morphological similarity to me, that this

signifies that the object is the second person, or you, which is not encountered in

the corpus, except when the reflexive se is present. So, A priest picked you up

4.I ate an animal mercilessly.

5.I dropped myself.

6.A boy killed himself.

1.3.2 Answers to English to Slovenian:

7.

Pojedel sem se nesmiljeno.

8.Si neusmiljen OR si je neusmiljen. There is some ambiguity to the exact meaning of

je. It could be the primary verb in sentences 7 and 8, meaning is and an auxiliary

in all other cases where it appears, indicating 3rdperson subject.

9.Duhovnik je spustil policist in ival in fant.

10.On te je pobral.

11.Pismonoa in fant me in te je udaril.

12.On je neusmiljen in brezsrennesmiselno.


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2. Introduction:

A linguist, contrary to popular belief, is not someone who speaks many languages and acts as a

translator, though this is often a bye-product of his job. A linguist is someone who studies how

language works, and makes rules for the operation of languages that are as universal as possible.

In a sense, he deciphers languages. As a result, knowledge of one language is sufficient to be a

linguist, though knowing more does give a more intuitive feeling of the subject.

As far as the International Olympiad in Linguistics is concerned, it is meant to be completely

theory-free, solvable through clever deduction and reasoning. However, this is not always

possible. Often, the problems demand knowledge of phenomena that are performed

subconsciously. For example, the s in pots is pronounced differently from the s in pods.

This difference is made subconsciously by the brain, and we may not be aware of a rule through

which it does this, even though such a rule does exist. Even more strangely, the brain can correctly

pronounce the plural form of words it has never encountered before, based on this same rule that

the person subconsciously knows, but cant quite describe. The rule is as follows: s and z are

practically the same letter, as are f and v, p and b, etc. with one important difference. Z,

v and b make use of the voice box, the larynx, which vibrates to produce a heavier, voiced

sound, whereas, the larynx is not used at all in pronouncing s, f and p, which are known as

voicelesssounds. They are relatively simple to distinguish-just place 2 fingers on your throat while

pronouncing zzzzzzzzzzzzzz and sssssssssss- in the first case, the vibration is prominent, in the

second, it is absent. When making plurals, the brain looks at the last sound of the word,

determines whether or not it is voiced, and accordingly changes the pronunciation of the s. So,

d and t in pods and pots are related in the same way-d is the voiced form of t.

The study of such rules is a part of linguistics. However, linguistics is far broader than just this. Any

word that a person knows consists of 5 pieces of information1:

-Phonetic information:how to pronounce the word;

-Morphological structure: details all the smaller bits it can be broken into, for example,

disassembled can be broken into 3 smaller parts-dis-assemble-d, each part containing a

specific meaning-dis- means undo or opposite; -assemble- means to put together; -d

indicates that the verb is in past tense;

1Akmajian, A.A., Demers, R.A., Farmer, A.K., Harnish, R.M. (2010) Linguistics: An Introduction to Language

and Communication, 6thEdition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Page 14.


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-Syntactic structure: where and how the word would appear in a sentence-for example, in Hindi,

main paani pita hoon would translate into English as I water drink; the languages follow

different sentence structures - Hindi follows Subject-Object-Verb (SOV), while English follows

Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), and instinctively, a bilingual person would translate main paani pita

hoon as I drink water, not I water drink, based on the syntactic informationhe or she knows

about nouns and verbs in each language.

-Semantic information: words often have specific, distinct meanings (or denotations), but often

they are used to refer to the connotations of the word itself, rather than its denotations. For

example, the denotation of blacksmith is someone who works with metals like iron and

produces armor, weapons, etc, and repairs such objects. However, the connotations of

blacksmith include whatever you would normally associate with a blacksmith -for example, a

blacksmith is commonly huge, robust and unhygienic, with black hands from beating metal. So, if

someone were to say that John has a blacksmiths hands, it would mean that Johns hands are

black and dirty, even though blacksmiths hands need not necessarily be black and dirty; a

particular blacksmiths hands may be cleaner than most, but what is commonly associated with

blacksmith is dirty hands. Similarly, the connotations of brother include comrade,

friend, helpful, and, more recently, irritant & mean; mother would connote

protection, affection, care, etc., while it denotes female biological parent. Meaningof

words is divided into 2 categories - denotations and connotations, and semantics is the study of

this extended meaning and the natureof meaning itself.

-Pragmatic information: many words we know have several meanings-for example bat has 2

meanings - it could refer to the mammal that flies and hangs upside down during the day in dark

caves, or it could refer to the instrument used in cricket to hit balls, or even to the act of

batting. However, we can tell the difference intuitively. When we say the bat is emitting

ultrasonic waves, we understand that the bat being referred to here is probably the mammal,

even though syntactically, there is nothing wrong with the cricket bat producing ultrasonic

waves, logically, we assume that the bat must be the mammal, which is known to produce such

sounds.


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3. Phonetics:

3.1 Phonetics of Consonants

Phonetics of vowels and consonants are very different. Since there are more consonants, and

consonants interchange with clearer patterns, well concentrate on them first.

The key ways in which consonants differ from each other are in:

a)Place of pronunciation

b)Method of articulation

c)Voicing (use of larynx)

d)Use of nose

A phonetic chart can summarize this effectively:

Figure 12

2Acosta, F.F. (2008) 26 September, English Consonants Chart,[Online], Available:http://fajardo-

acosta.com/worldlit/language/phonology.htm[Accessed 1 September 2011]

Figure 1. English Consonants Chart 2. NOTbased on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
http://fajardo-acosta.com/worldlit/language/phonology.htmhttp://fajardo-acosta.com/worldlit/language/phonology.htmhttp://fajardo-acosta.com/worldlit/language/phonology.htmhttp://fajardo-acosta.com/worldlit/language/phonology.htmhttp://fajardo-acosta.com/worldlit/language/phonology.htmhttp://fajardo-acosta.com/worldlit/language/phonology.htm


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The voiceless affricate, , is similar to ch in church in English; the voiced affricate, j is the

j sound in judge in English.

The palatal voiceless fricative is the sh sound; the palatal voiced fricative, , is a sound similar to

the s sound in measure or fusion, while the voiceless palatal fricative, , (also represented

by , the integral sign), represents the sh sound in shoulder in English.

The is the th sound in thing or thin or through whereas it is the th sound in

this or that or the.

The liquid flap r is the r in general American or British English, while the retroflex liquid r is

the r in other European Languages, like Spanish. The velar nasal, , is pronounced as ng, as

in sing. It is more prominent in African languages, and some Eastern European languages.

The nasals, liquids and semivowels are all voiced, and together, are known as the sonorants, due

to their resonating quality. They are not true consonants, as airflow, though somewhat restricted,

remains largely open (consonants allow a significantly smaller volume of air through

unobstructed).

The glottal stop is something that appears primarily in British English, in place of t , for example,

Briish (British).

While it is not necessary to know the names of the various places of articulation and various types

of consonants, it is important to be able to identify similarities between different sounds-like the

fact that p and t are stops/plosives; p, b, m and w are all articulated at the same place

in the mouth. For instance, a particular problem listed the names of Burmese children and their

dates of birth. Then, another set of birth dates was given, along with another set of childrens

names, and the task was to match the birth dates to the names. The solution entailed discovering

that the place of articulation of the first sound of the name was decided by the day of the week on

which the child was born. As is evident, there are 6 distinct sites for 6 different days, and the

seventh, Sunday, was a vowel.


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So, to summarize:

1.Four main types of consonants:

a. Stops/plosives: Entail a complete halt in airflow for a fraction of a second. For this

reason, they cant even be extended, like s or z (which entail continuous exhalation).

{p, b, t, d, k, g}

b. Fricatives: entail a partialblock in airflow for the duration of pronunciation (air still

continues to leave the mouth, but the tongue/teeth/lips partially obstruct it to produce

friction, and hence sound). {f, v, s, z, , , , }

c. Affricates:the sound beginsas a stop, but endsas a fricative. Only 2 in English. {, j}

d. Sonorants: a psuedo-consonant class of sounds, further divided into nasals, liquids,

and semi-vowels.

i.Nasals: stop sounds elongated by exhaling through the nose. As a result, when

people have a blocked nose, nasals begin sounding like their corresponding

voiced stop (m --> b; n --> d; --> g). Also, it is difficult to make the transition from

a nasal to consonants other than the corresponding voiced stop, so many

languages transition out of nasals by either placing a vowel after the nasal, or the

corresponding stop consonant. Interestingly, many languages do not distinguish

between the nasals, especially African ones (for example, m and n are

perceived to be the same). For instance, they will have conjugations where the

first sound changes accordingly: _ _ xxxxxxx, where the Xs are permanent and the

dashes are the variable letters. So, if the second variable is d, then the first is n

by default; if the second is g, then again the first is n, and if the second is b,

then the first is m. In a sense, m is not a different character in its own right,

rather, mb, nd, and ng are the 3 distinct letters.

For a specific example, the Malagasy Language provides an ideal case of such

nasal-morphing. Many words are formed by adding prefixes to existing words, and

the prefix zafi+(nasal) is the example of such a prefix in Malagasy. It is important

to note that the prefix itself differs in spelling based on the following consonant.

For instance, hafaladia is a word that needs prefixing, and the beginning two


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letters of this word ha- are just placeholders because in this language, the word

needs a prefix in any form, so ha- provides an empty, or meaningless prefix.

When this is eliminated, the morphemeszafi+(nasal) and faladia need to be

combined. This is done by altering the last character of the first morpheme and

first character of the second morpheme, and accordingly, (nasal) --> m and f --> p,

fs corresponding stop sound, since it is easier to transition from a nasal to a stop,

than nasal to fricative while enunciating. So, the word becomes zafim-paladia, or

zafimpaladia. In another case, when the same prefix is added to kitrokely, the

new word is zafin-kitrokely, since it is easier to transition from to k than

from any other nasal. Though the nasal is written as n in the latin transcription,

this is because there is no distinction between n and in this script, though in

fact the word is pronounced with .

Another example is found in English itself. The prefix in- stands for opposite, or

contrary, like decent and indecent. Yet, this prefix is sometimes spelt

differently based on the next letter, as in proper and improper, where it is

spelt as im- because m is easier to pronounce here than n. M and p are

pronounced in the same place, while n and d are pronounced in the same

place.

ii.Liquids:these are an important class, as many languages differentiate between

this class and others. Often, the two sounds in the class, l and r sound

absolutely identicalto lots of people, especially in Africa and Japan, both of which

contain only one liquid, and they interpret any liquid sound they hear as the liquid

they know. As a consequence, they often mispronounce l and r; they would

say: liver instead of river or berry instead of belly. What exacerbates the

problem is that in half of the cases they will preserve the correct liquid, while in

the other half, they will change it.

Additionally, many languages treat liquids differently. Romansch, a Romance

language (like French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese) spoken in Italy and

Switzerland, is an example. There was a question one year (Stockholm, 2010,

problem 5) concerning two dialects of Romansch and with different the vowel


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sounds in certain cases, for which rules needed to be deciphered. The solution

entailed discovering that u in the first dialect remained u in the second dialect

if the next letter was a liquid and the liquid was not followed by another

consonant. If either of these conditions were violated, then the u in the first

dialect would be pronounced as uoin the other dialect.

iii. Semi-vowels:also known as glides, these are mainly a class that do not really

perform functions of vowels or consonants. All that is needed to be known about

them is that they are voiced, and w is pronounced at the lips, while y is

pronounced at the back of the mouth, at the palate. Again, while it is not

necessary to know the technical names of these places, it is important to know

that they are different, and it is important to be able to identify consonants with

similar places or manners of articulation.

One last piece of information concerning consonants is about consonant clusters. There is a lot to

know about consonant clusters, but whats important to know that languages have predefined

possibilities of consonant clusters, and native speakers of a language that does not contain certain

consonant clusters will experience great difficulty in pronouncing them. For example, Punjabi does

not contain the consonant clusterst, and native Punjabi speakers will insert a vowel in between

the two consonants in order to pronounce the cluster. For example, when they try to say

station, (IPA: sten) instead they would say s-uh-tation(sten).

3.2 Phonetics of vowels

Moving on, the phonetics of vowels is not integral to the IOL as such, so this section is mainly for

additional interesting information.

Vowels are classified by the position of the tongue when pronouncing the vowel, and the shape of

the mouth (rounded or unrounded), and length (which can be changed for all vowels).

Figures 2 & 3 summarize all information about vowels.


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This is a simplified

chart with examples:

Figure 23

Figure 34

This is a more accurate and

complex chart:

3Simplified English Vowels Chart, [Online], Available:http://people.umass.edu/neb/VowelChart.GIF[Accessed 2 September 2011]4Complete English Vowels Chart, [Online], Available:http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/138/sec5/vow-

ipa.gif[Accessed 2 September 2011]

Figure 2. Simplified English Vowels Chart3.

Figure 3. Complete English Vowels Chart4.
http://people.umass.edu/neb/VowelChart.GIFhttp://people.umass.edu/neb/VowelChart.GIFhttp://people.umass.edu/neb/VowelChart.GIFhttp://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/138/sec5/vow-ipa.gifhttp://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/138/sec5/vow-ipa.gifhttp://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/138/sec5/vow-ipa.gifhttp://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/138/sec5/vow-ipa.gifhttp://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/138/sec5/vow-ipa.gifhttp://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/138/sec5/vow-ipa.gifhttp://people.umass.edu/neb/VowelChart.GIF


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These charts only display the set of simple vowels. Vowels can often be combined together to give

rise to new vowel sounds, known as diphthongs. The i in fight is an example of such a

diphthong, which combines the low (open) back vowel, a in palm and the front (closed) high

vowel, i, the vowel sound in sheep. Other examples of diphthongs include spout and boy.

A particular property of diphthongs is that they are always long. Languages sometimes

differentiate between long and short vowels, like Faroese does (Problem 2, IOL at Pittsburgh,

2011). Most vowels will also have long and short versions, and commonly, the colon symbol (:, for

example, cream would be transcribed as kri:m) indicates a single vowel elongated. Any place

where a word is transcribed either with the colon or two vowel sounds (a diphthong), the vowel

sound there is long.


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4. Morphology

Morphology refers to the study of how words change, or are morphed to add meaning or

compound meanings or create entirely new words. Morphemes are parts of words that constitute

the smallest recognizable or meaningful parts of words5.

Most morphemes contain some sort of meaning to themselves, even if they cant exist as words,

like in- or dis- which mean opposite, or -ed (past tense), -s (plural), etc. When a word

contains more than one morpheme, the meaning of the word is a combination at an intuitive

level, of the meaning of the two words themselves6.

Morphemes can be divided into 2 broad categories:

1.Free morphemes: Most words in English would come under this category; this category

contains morphemes that can exist independently as words, without any morpheme attached

to them. All free morphemes in English have specific meanings; they do not modify other nouns

or verbs by making them plural or changing their tense or subject or object. However, this is not

true of all languages. Take, for instance, Hindi, which has the word hai (), which does not

meaning anything but present tense. All it does is indicate that the sentence is in present

tense. English does not have such words that markthe tense or case or plurality, such words

form a part of the word to be modified itself in English (like -ingin English).

2.Bound morphemes:Obviously, these are the opposite of bound morphemes, and cannot form

words on their own. Often, they contain tense markers, mood markers, singular/plural markers,

or any such modifier that only modifies the meaning of the base morpheme, which is usually a

free morpheme, but can also sometimes be a bound morpheme itself. So, bound morphemes

are also divided into more categories:

a.Affixes: these are the most common type of free morphemes, and they include prefixes,

infixes and suffixes (depending on where they are inserted in the base morpheme). Affixes

ordinarily comprise of all the various markers that exist - like tense markers, mood markers

(especially in Romance languages), plural markers, singular markers, subject markers (again,

very prominent in Romance languages, where verbs are conjugated and suffixed depending

5Akmajian, A.A., Demers, R.A., Farmer, A.K., Harnish, R.M. (2010) Linguistics: An Introduction to Languageand Communication, 6

thEdition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Page 19


and Communication, 6thEdition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Page 19


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on the subject of the sentence - depending on whether it is first/second/third person

singular/plural, male/female, etc.) and all other types of markers. Examples include, as

previously stated, in-, dis-, mis-, -ed, -s, -ity, -ate, -ant, etc., with the -

indicating the place where the base morpheme would be attached in the word. There are, in

certain languages, affixes attached in the middle of the word as well, known as infixes. This

happens very frequently in Native American languages, and also in some Austronesian

languages (Indonesia and its surrounding islands, and the Australian-Indonesian islands in

general). For example, in Bonto Igorot, a language of the Phillipines, the infix -in-signifies

that the noun being described is the product of a complete action7. For example, the word

kayu means wood, and with the infix -in- added, kinayu refers to gathered wood. This

action, inserting a morpheme after the first letter, is the most common way infixes are

added.

b.Bound base morphemes: there are some base morphemes that cannot exist individually as

well. Such morphemes are extremely uncommon in English, though not entirely absent.

Examples include cran-, a base morpheme that never exists on its own, referring to a

specific fruit only if it is attached to -berryand to an amalgamation of fruits if attached to

another fruit, like -apple or -grape8. Other examples include malle-andfeas-, derived from

malleableand feasibleand malfeasance. Feas-and malle-themselves cannot form words,

but with suffixes like -ableand -ance, they do form words.

It is necessary to understand the role of morphemes in altering words and also and to develop the

ability to recognize morphemes in various forms in different languages. The same morpheme

could appear in multiple ways in the same language-like im-and in-in English, which are identical,

but vary depending on the first letter of the base morpheme. It is advisable to attempt a few

problems concerning complex morphology to better understand how to deal with morphology.

Morphology is key in almost half of the questions in the IOL. Past years questions include:

2011: 1, 3, 4 2010: 1 2009: 5 2008: 3, 4, 5

2007: 2, 3 2006: 1, 4 2005: 1 2004: 1, 5.9


and Communication, 6thEdition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Page 20.

8Akmajian, A.A., Demers, R.A., Farmer, A.K., Harnish, R.M. (2010) Linguistics: An Introduction to Languageand Communication, 6

thEdition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Page 20

9All problems published by The International Olympiad in Linguistics, [Online], Available:

http://www.ioling.org/problems/[Accessed 8 September 2011]
http://www.ioling.org/problems/http://www.ioling.org/problems/http://www.ioling.org/problems/


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5. Syntax

Syntax is the part of linguistics that deals not with the microscopic level of language (words), but

with the macroscopic level (sentences). Syntax is probably the place where non-native speakers of

a language make the most mistakes, through word for word or literal translations. All languages

are governed by an arbitrary set of grammatical rules that are almost never identical for

languages. Take an example of a simple English sentence: John hit the big ball. If you were to

translate this sentence correctly (not word for word) into another language and then translate

wrongly (word for word) back into English, it is very likely that the words would be very jumbled. If

the other language were:

Hindi:John big ball hit.

French:John hit the ball big.

Spanish and most Romance languages would follow the same structure as French, while most

languages evolved from Sanskrit would follow the same pattern as Hindi, and most Germanic

languages would yield the same result as the original English sentence (without any error!).

These deviations from the original are the main task and problem that computerized translators

face - language is so vast that it is nearly impossible to produce rules that govern the language inits entirety, especially when so many words, especially in English could represent multiple parts of

speech (they could be verbs or nouns or adjectives, etc.-the word that falls under 4 separate

parts of speech!).

Computers parse information by breaking the sentence down into smaller phrases, making them

agree with regular sentences. An ordinary, simple sentence would contain 3 parts - a subject

phrase, verb phrase and object phrase, in certain orders. Note, this is just a standardsentence, in

many cases, it is possible to make sentences without a subject or object as well. Each phrase

within itself could also contain various modifiers and sub-clauses and sub-phrases. For example, in

the sentence: A panicked John hurriedly ran from the enormous labrador, the subject phrase, A

panicked John, contains an article and anadjective besides the principle noun, which forms the

head of this noun phrase. The verb phrase, hurriedly ran contains an adverb as well as a verb,

and, then there is a preposition, from, followed by the object phrase which is another noun

phrase, the enormous labrador. This sentence itself could be handled by a computer, though

with some difficulty, but if you were to add to this sentence, the phrase that was giving chase


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furiously, now you have a very ambiguous word, that (which belongs to at least 4 different

parts of speech-it is a pronoun, adverb, conjunction and determinant, and each one might be

translated differently in another language) coupled with a 3-word long verb in the past continuous

tense, and an adverb. If the computer was meant to decipher all of this accurately, and translate it

correctly into another language, the rules describing each language would have to be extremely

detailed and specific, and this is why syntax is such a big problem that requires a brain fluent in

either language to translate, with only a subconscious understanding of syntactic rules.

5.1 SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OVS, OSV

This list of abbreviations indicates all the possibilities of language subject-verb-object phrase

orders. English is an SVO language (its order is Subject-Verb-Object), while Hindi is SOV (woh paani

pita hai = I (Subject) water (Object) drink (Verb) hai (tense marker; tense = present).

Examples:

SVO: Most Romance and Germanic languages, Mandarin, Russian, Slavic languages.

SOV: Sanskrit-derived languages, Japanese, Latin etc. Over 75% of all languages fall under SVO or

SOV.

VSO: Welsh & Irish (Gaelic)10

, Hebrew, some Austronesian languages.

VOS: Malagasy (from Madagascar)11

is the best documented example. Others include Tzotzil and

Fijian. Mainly Austronesian languages (including Malagasy).

OVS: Hixkarayana12

(a Carib language spoken in Brazil), and Tamil, in some forms and cases.

OSV: This is one of the rarest forms, and occurs mainly in special cases of other languages. For

example, in English, I hate tennis, but cricket I like. Rare examples include Nadb13

, another

language spoken by a small minority in Brazil.

Lastly, it is important to know that there are many languages with multiple structures in different

tenses or moods or free form structures-where two or more of the subject, verb and object can be

freely interchanged. Examples of the cases with multiple structures include English in passive voice

(the lion was shot by the hunter = OVS) or French and most Romance languages with personal

10VSO and Master Yoda, [Online], Available:

http://www.akerbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_VSO.htm,[Accessed 9 September 2011]11

VSO and Master Yoda, [Online], Available:http://www.akerbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_VSO.htm,[Accessed 9 September 2011]

12Dryer, M.S., Order of Subject, Object and Verb, [Online], Available:http://wals.info/chapter/81,[Accessed9 September 2011]13

Dryer, M.S., Order of Subject, Object and Verb, [Online], Available:http://wals.info/chapter/81,[Accessed9 September 2011]
http://www.akerbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_VSO.htmhttp://www.akerbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_VSO.htmhttp://www.akerbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_VSO.htmhttp://www.akerbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_VSO.htmhttp://wals.info/chapter/81http://wals.info/chapter/81http://wals.info/chapter/81http://wals.info/chapter/81http://wals.info/chapter/81http://wals.info/chapter/81http://wals.info/chapter/81http://wals.info/chapter/81http://www.akerbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_VSO.htmhttp://www.akerbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_VSO.htm


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pronouns (in which case it would be SOV, not SVO), Spanish in half the cases lacks a subject, and

many more. Examples of a free structure (also, No Dominant Order-NDO) include many

Austronesian, African and American languages. Some linguists classify German, Greek and Dutch,

among others, as having a free structure, though this is still debated.14

Discussions about word order are not limited to the orders of the Subject, Verb and Object. The

grammar of a language also specifies how pre/post positions would come in a sentence (name

depends on whether the words come before or after the word they modify/govern). For example,

English widely uses prepositions, while Hindi primarily uses postpositions. It is important to

understand that prepositional/postpositional morphemes can come in many forms-they can even

be suffixed or prefixed besides being positioned before or after the word they govern. For

example, English, a predominantly prepositional language that reserves special prepositional

words (like from, above, under, about, with, over), does contain some bound postpositions, like -

wardin homeward.

Even the positioning of adjectives can vary from language to language. In English, adjectives and adverbs

always come before the noun / verb they are describing, and it would be very unnatural to say I ate

hungrily the fish salty. However, in Spanish and other Romance languages, this would precisely be the

word order, and this is what led to the word order being jumbled above, when translating word for word

from French to English. Additionally, some words are even allowed to break the rules. For example, in

French, some qualitative adjectives are allowed to precede the noun, whereas other qualitative adjectives

and all quantitative adjectives must come after the noun. So, if the adjective above had been beautiful

instead of big, the sentence would have been translated properly into English, without any error. Another

example is evident in English, where adverbs can come on either side of a verb, but when adverbs describe

a noun, they must precede the adjective (you would say extraordinarily red rose, not red extraordinarily

rose, but I frequently eat Chinese and I eat Chinese frequently are both accepted). In contrast,

adjectives must alwaysprecede a noun in English.

5.2 Transitive and Intransitive verbs

This is probably the most important topic within syntax as far as the Olympiad is concerned.

Knowing the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs is crucial, especially where Aztec

and Mayan languages are concerned. The rules for both types of verbs in such languages are very

different in such languages, and this is something that really needs to be stressed - how to

distinguish the two types of verbs.

14Pagel, M., (June 2009), Evolution of Word Order Changes, [Online], Available:

http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v10/n6/fig_tab/nrg2560_F5.html,[Accessed 10 September 2011]
http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v10/n6/fig_tab/nrg2560_F5.htmlhttp://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v10/n6/fig_tab/nrg2560_F5.htmlhttp://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v10/n6/fig_tab/nrg2560_F5.html


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An intransitive verb is a verb that does not have an object. In English, it is often grammatically

correct, and in fact even expected in some cases, to not have an object in a sentence. For

example, the sentence John went to the pizzeria does not have a traditional object. There is a

preposition placed before the place that John visited (to), and in this case, it could have sufficed

to say John went, where went is an intransitive verb. An intransitive verb is a verb that does

not have an object. Other examples of sentences with intransitive verbs include I fall, you

sleep, we dream, they drink, he eats, I joke, and many more. However, many of these

verbs could also have a transitive form, for example, they drink water and he eats biscuits. It is

essential that caution regarding the type of verb is exercised in dealing with Mayan and Aztec

languages, and indeed most Indian languages native to the Americas. Problem 5 of the IOL 200915

,

in Nahuatl, the language of the Ancient Aztec Empire, intransitive and transitive verbs had

different suffixes to indicate the same thing (to make someone do the verb instead of simply

doing it: like, The postman makeshim drinkas opposed to The postman drinks). The suffix tia

indicated this for an intransitive verb, while the suffix ltiaindicated this for transitive verbs, and

hence it was very easy to either confuse the extra -L as a part of the verb itself, or view it as a

separate morpheme.

15The International Olympiad in Linguistics, Poland 2009, Problem 5 - Nahuatl[Online], Available:

http://www.ioling.org/booklets/iol-2009-indiv-prob.en-gb.pdf[Accessed 8 September 2011].
http://www.ioling.org/booklets/iol-2009-indiv-prob.en-gb.pdfhttp://www.ioling.org/booklets/iol-2009-indiv-prob.en-gb.pdfhttp://www.ioling.org/booklets/iol-2009-indiv-prob.en-gb.pdf


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6 Bibliography:

6.1 Books

Akmajian, A.A., Demers, R.A., Farmer, A.K., Harnish, R.M. (2010) Linguistics: An

Introduction to Language and Communication, 6th

Edition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The

MIT Press.

Finegan, E. (2008) Language: Its Structure and Use, 5th

Edition, Boston: Thomson Higher

Education.

6.2 Websites

Linguistics Pictures, [Online], Available: http://www.walkinthewords.blogspot.com

[Accessed 12 September 2011].

Acosta, F.F. (26 September 2008), English Consonants Chart, [Online], Available:

http://fajardo-acosta.com/worldlit/language/phonology.htm [Accessed 1 September

2011].

Simplified English Vowels Chart, [Online], Available:

http://people.umass.edu/neb/VowelChart.GIF[Accessed 2 September 2011].

Complete English Vowels Chart, [Online], Available:

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/138/sec5/vow-ipa.gif[Accessed 2 September 2011].

The International Olympiad in Linguistics, [Online], Available:

http://www.ioling.org/problems/[Accessed 8 September 2011].

VSO and Master Yoda, [Online], Available:

http://www.akerbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_VSO.htm,[Accessed 9

September 2011].

Dryer, M.S., Order of Subject, Object and Verb, [Online], Available:

http://wals.info/chapter/81,[Accessed 9 September 2011].

Pagel, M., (June 2009), Evolution of Word Order Changes, [Online], Available:

http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v10/n6/fig_tab/nrg2560_F5.html, [Accessed 10

September 2011].
http://www.walkinthewords.blogspot.com/http://www.walkinthewords.blogspot.com/http://fajardo-acosta.com/worldlit/language/phonology.htmhttp://fajardo-acosta.com/worldlit/language/phonology.htmhttp://people.umass.edu/neb/VowelChart.GIFhttp://people.umass.edu/neb/VowelChart.GIFhttp://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/138/sec5/vow-ipa.gifhttp://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/138/sec5/vow-ipa.gifhttp://www.ioling.org/problems/http://www.ioling.org/problems/http://www.akerbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_VSO.htmhttp://www.akerbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_VSO.htmhttp://wals.info/chapter/81http://wals.info/chapter/81http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v10/n6/fig_tab/nrg2560_F5.htmlhttp://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v10/n6/fig_tab/nrg2560_F5.htmlhttp://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v10/n6/fig_tab/nrg2560_F5.htmlhttp://wals.info/chapter/81http://www.akerbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_VSO.htmhttp://www.ioling.org/problems/http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/138/sec5/vow-ipa.gifhttp://people.umass.edu/neb/VowelChart.GIFhttp://fajardo-acosta.com/worldlit/language/phonology.htmhttp://www.walkinthewords.blogspot.com/

Documents

Linguistics Olympiad Training Material