Modern Grammar - Assignment 8 James Madison University

Instructions: [This assignment will be marked only as an acceptable or unacceptable effort.]

1. Draw a morphological "tree" representing the right hierarchical morphological structure in each of the following words:
   1. nonsmoker
   2. impractical
   3. hopelessly
   4. presoaked
   5. rewrote
2. Create your own new word from the stem "spaghetti" by adding a suffix. Given the suffix you chose, what should your word mean? Ask a couple friends what they think the word would mean. Do they come up with a similar meaning?
3. Attempt Exercise 17 on page 99, which looks at an example of a set of allomorphs in English that we have not discussed. (You don't need to use formal notation; just describe what you see as the morphophonological change and the conditions underwhich that change occurs. :) )
4. Which of the following can be a noun? Give as many reasons why/why not for each as you can think of:
   1. margarine
   2. fantasy
   3. sure
   4. action
   5. driving
   6. finesse
   7. flashy
   8. under
   9. allow
   10. devastation
   11. craftiness
   12. greed
5. Next, find a very short paragraph from a literary work, a newspaper, or any other source for which you do not already have a grammatical analysis available. Make a list of all the words you are confident are nouns and of any words you are not sure about. Include the full paragraph with your assignment.
6. Re-read our textbook's discussions of verbs in Chapter 4. Which of the following can be a verb? Give as many reasons why/why not for each as you can think of:
   1. marinate
   2. fantastic
   3. sure
   4. event
   5. driving
   6. panic
   7. cleanse
   8. glove
   9. understand
   10. after