 | English Linguistics - Assignment 10
James Madison University |
INSTRUCTIONS: You may earn one additional point on your midterm for each one of the questions below that you answer fully and correctly. Be slow and careful with your answers! This is a take-home assignment, and you may use your textbook and your class notes and assignments to help you understand the idea being tested. To find examples where required by a question, you should turn to non-academic language sources (actual conversations – on topics other than linguistics, TV shows, literary works, song lyrics, etc.) You are on your honor, however, not to use any other linguistics textbooks, dictionaries, or other sources of linguistic information, whether these sources are in print, on the web, or available in some other way, to help you find or understand examples. In addition, you must work alone.
- Find your own example of a sentence that is descriptively grammatical but that violates prescriptive grammar.
What is the sentence? _____________________________________________
Where did you find it? _____________________________________________
Name a prescriptive rule that the sentence violates:
_________________________________________________________________
- The verb “enthuse” was formed after the noun “enthusiasm” under the mistaken assumption that “–iasm” was a derivational suffix that turned verbs into nouns. Name the process of which this is an example ________________________, and name one inflectional affix that may be added to “enthuse” ________________.
- Create your own example of a sentence that is formed by the recursive use of the phrase structure rule VP --> VP PP.
What is your sentence? _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
- “Banjo” and “flute” share what relationship to the word “instrument?”
________________________ (Careful. Give the name of the relationship, not the name of a word that fits this relationship.)
- Give your own example of an English word that contains both an alveolar stop and a diphthong (order doesn’t matter, and you can have as many other sound segments as you need to make the word – but you’ll want to keep it as simple as you can!): _________________
Transcribe this word: ____________________
