Introduction to Linguistics - Assignment 3 James Madison University

[This assignment will be marked only as an acceptable or unacceptable effort.] After reading Chapter 2, do your best with each of the following excercises.

1. Go to the online Oxford English Dictionary (aka OED) or find another good dictionary. (If you are in a campus lab or have your computer proxy set up to allow you to use JMU library resources, the OED link at the bottom of our syllabus should work for you.) Look at the information that dictionary provides about itself and its goals. Then answer the following two questions: What dictionary did you examine? In what ways does the information your dictionary contains obviously differ from the information in your own mental dictionary/lexicon?
2. List at least 5 content words in English (other than those examples mentioned in your text or in other such references) that you believe to be monomorphemic, including at least two that are multisyllabic.
3. List at least 5 content words in English that you believe to be polymorphemic, including at least two that are monosyllabic.
4. Find and write down a sentence at least 12 words long from a written source (a favorite novel or story?) and then remove all the words that you think are function words. To what exent is the basic meaning of the sentence still intact? What is lost?