English 256
Spring 2020

Announcements

13 May: Solutions to the three worksheets of the Lab Exam are now posted.

Course and final exam grade distributions are now posted under "Final Exam".

7 May: A solution to the "In-Class" Component of the Final Exam is now posted.

4 May: E-mail problems? At least one student is having e-mail problems. If you are having trouble communicating with me as the exam gets closer, do not hesitate to check in by telephone: 509-332-2591.

4 May: Final Exam and Lab Exam:

The final exam will be e-mailed to the class about 1 p.m. Wednesday 6 May, due four hours after the time on my e-mail. Three students have arranged to take the exam at different times to clear conflicts.

The lab exam is now posted at"Final Exam"; due 10 p.m. Wednesday 6 May.

2 May: Sample Lab Exam and Solution posted at "Final Exam"

Lab Exam posted at "Final Exam"; due 10 pm Wednesday 6 May.

Sample final exam - incomplete version posted at "Final Exam". (Complete version posted 5 May; no solution.)

1 May: PS-10 solutions posted. Separate solutions for English and Persian sections. See also "How to find PS rules for unfamiliar languages", a 4-page step-by-step procedure that walks you through the first steps of developing the Persian PS rules.

15 April: Quiz Alert!

Quiz 3 Morphology will take place in class Monday 20 April. A practice quiz is posted now. I will post a solution to the practice quiz tomorrow (Thursday) evening, and we will discuss the practice quiz in class Friday 17 April.

6 April: Zoom security changes

(a) Effective immediately, you will be blocked from entering our meetings by just putting the URL into a browser. You will need to go in via your regular myWSU sign-in. Reminder: MWF classes and office hours have ID # 277117160; Monday 3-5 review class has ID# 437600888.

(b) Beginning Wednesday 8 April, all our meetings will require the class password to enter.

31 March. Quiz alert! Quiz 2 - Phonology will happen during the class period 3 April. An information sheet and two sample/practice quizzes are now posted. We will go over the practice quizzes and answer questions in class Wednesday.

11 March. Revisions to syllabus – As announced by e-mail, Unit 4, Phonology, starts today.

(1) No quiz this Friday.

Since we haven’t started the phonology unit, we can’t have a quiz on phonology. I won’t be giving a quiz on acoustic phonetics, though the review in PS 6 serves a similar function in letting you show that you control the relevant analysis methods.

(2) PS-7 Phonology 1, will be handed out today, due the Wednesday after spring break (25 March).

The relevant readings (Odden Introducing Phonology Chapters 1 and 2) and various handouts are posted to this website.

28 Feb. PS-5 Part 2. Measure f0. Worksheet 2.2, analyse your own pitch glide, is due in class Monday 2 March. Worksheet 2.3, Cantonese tone, is cancelled.

22 Feb. PS5 - Acoustic Phonetics 2: Due dates

Part 1 -- Analyse "Show me a spectrogram." Due in class Wednesday 26 Feb.

Part 2 -- Measure f0. To be handed out Monday 24 Feb., due in class Monday 2 March.

18 Feb. Final Exam Schedule

Our final exam will be Wednesday 6 May, 1-3 p.m., in Avery 12

13 Feb. - Thursday. Extra Office Hours before Quiz 1

To help you prepare for the quiz, we'll have a one-time extra office hour Thursday 2:00-5:00, in Avery 224 as usual.

11 Feb. Practice Quiz 1

Practice Quiz 1 is now posted under Quizzes; three Modern Persian audio files are posted under Other Class Materials / Audio & Video Files.

We will go over the practice quiz in class tomorrow; I encourage you to work on the quiz and practice transcribing the Persian (GC's L2 Persian) before class. You will not turn in the practice quizzes; this is for practice only.

5 Feb. Readings

I've just posted a new item under Readings, a 6p discussion of our speech production and cleft palate material that is intended to help you with the problem set due in class tomorrow:

Phonetics 4 - Carden - How to Approach the Cleft Palate Problem

This is a required reading.

1 Feb. Readings:

I’ve just posted two items under Readings:

(1) A better scan of Ladefoged Chapter 2: “Phonetics 2 - Ladefoged Course Chap 2 - better scan”

(2) An optional reading to help put our Beowulf sample into context – 7 pages. Bright talks about the place of Old English in Proto-Indo-European, and then about the development from OE to modern English, looking mostly at which words survived and which did not, expanding on our examples like “ut” > “out” and “hyðe” (survives only in a few place names). “Historical 1 - Bright "The Place of Old English" - optional reading”

28 Jan.PS-1: Corrected problem sets were handed back in class yesterday. Four students did not pick up their problem sets. You can get your PS in class Wednesday, but if you'd like to see it before class (recommended), send me an e-mail and I'll send you a scan of your PS with my notes.

24 Jan. PS-1 due in class. Solution handed out in class and posted under "Assignments" here.

If you need to turn in an assignment by e-mail, see the directions under "Assignments".