1.) Review the assigned textbook readings; pay attention to bold-faced words.

2.) Review your class notes, especially about the different types of words, phrases, and morphemes. (I will not ask impossibly picky questions like, "What is the meaning of the Swahili word kikapu?") Focus on basic concepts and terminology.

3.) To complement material given in the lectures but mostly lacking in your textbook, review the following points:

a.) Noted linguists:

      Edward Sapir and Franz Boas were Americans who described Native American peoples and languages; they are known as descriptivists.

      Benjamin Lee Whorf was the descriptive linguist who developed the idea that language structure deeply influences the way people think. This is called linguistic determinism and is sometimes also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. A milder version of the belief, known as linguistic relativity, holds that the form each different language influences thought in subtle but meaningful ways. Most linguists opposing any strong version of this hypothesis.

      Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure studied the dual nature of the sign, its division into form and meaning.

      American philologist Charles Pierce (pronounced like the word "purse") classified signs into icons (the form exactly resembles the meaning, such as a photo or a map), symbols (with an arbitrary connection between form and meaning, such as most words, or purple to signify royalty), and indexes (the meaning is naturally connected with the form in time and space, such as smoke and fire or noise and a lawn mower, or the signals of animal communication). Remember that either icons or symbols may also be used as indexes, such as a picture of a man over a men's bathroom, or the words PET STORE on the door of a pet store.

      American linguist Noam Chomsky who developed the theory of transformational generative grammar. He still lives and works in Massachusetts, at MIT. Know the basic rudiments of syntactic theory.

b.) Language typology, compares different languages according to their structure. 

i. Classification according to how morphemes build words.

Isolating languages--tend to have very few affixes of any kind; most words are simple or compound. Chinese and Vietnamese are among the most purely isolating languages.

Agglutinating languages--languages which build words by several affixes one after the other, especially several inflections on the same word.  Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, and Swahili are notable examples.  An English showing agglutination is anti-dis-establish-ment-ari-an-ism.

Fusional (or inflecting) languages--languages which build words by adding affixes, but usually not more than one or two suffixes or prefixes in a row. There is rarely more than a single inflection per word. Most Indo-European languages are examples of fusional languages.

Symbolic fusional languages--synthetic languages which build words by modifying the root vowels, such as tooth--teeth, or run-ran. Found mostly among Afroasiatic languages like Arabic, Hebrew, and Amharic.

ii. Classification according to whether words contain syntactic information.

Analytic languages--tend not to have grammatical affixes at all; may or may not have derivational affixes. Word order and function words convey syntactic information. Isolating languages are by definition also analytic; but fusional languages such as English may also be analytic (remember that English has only nine inflectional affixes.  

Synthetic languages--the main word type is the complex word (built by adding affixes to roots). Most words tend to have grammatical affixes. Most European languages are synthetic, as are Swahili and Navaho.

Polysynthetic (or incorporating) languages--the main word type is the complex word, but the words tend to be highly complex, with verb and object incorporated into a single word. Yupik Eskimo is a good example of a polysynthetic language.