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 prefix or a suffix. Given the affix 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. 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
  4. 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 a separate list of any words you are not sure about. Include the full paragraph with your assignment.
  5. 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

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