Meaning and Metaphor - Assignment 5 James Madison University

Instructions: Type or clearly write your answers to each of the following questions. [This assignment will be marked only as an acceptable or unacceptable effort.] **Remember that there is now no additional reading due this Thursday.

1. Write up your response to number 6 in the "Questions for Discussion" at the back of Chapter 2 in our text. We already talked about this example a little in class, and you should also refer back to the discussion of a "grammatical word" in the chapter. (FYI, you can safely ignore the description in the question of specific sounds and particularly the use of the strange word "diphthong," which is just a description of a type of vowel. :) )
2. Look at the "Question" on page 54 in our text and then come up with just two other examples of noun-noun compounds and try to describe for each exactly how the meaning of the whole compound might be compositional.
3. Based on the discussion of a "natural semantic metalanguage" (starting on page 71 in our text), give as much of a definition as you can manage for either the verb bite or the noun turtle in terms of the proposed semantic primitives (i.e., try to give a "reductive paraphrase").How satisfied are you with your definition?
4. Go to The Corpus of Contemporary American English website and look at collocations for the word skip. To do this, just change the "Display" feature from "list" to "KWIC" (Key Word in Context), type skip into the "Word(s)" entry field, and hit "search." A hundred random examples (out of several thousand total) should pop up on the right, with the words immediate collocated with your word as context. Then answer the following for your random examples:
   What repeating collocations, if any, did you get? Which, if any of these seemed idiomatic? What grammatical characteristics, if any, do you see in the use of skip in these different contexts? (You could review the different grammatical uses of pour discussed in our text for some ideas about this.) Did you notice anything else interesting or unexpected?