Nonliteral Meaning - Assignment 4 James Madison University

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

For both of the following exercises, you will need to choose one of these word-shapes (or get an alternative approved by Saturday :) ): awful clue, hound, meat, nasty, nice, or silly
1. How many lexemes do you percieve yourself as having in your personal lexicon for the word-shape you chose? Attempt simple definitions for each of these lexemes (again, based on your own knowledge/usage). What inflected word-shapes do you have as alternatives for each lexeme?
2. Look your chosen word-shape up in the Oxford English Dictionary (oed.com -- JMU access, including off-campus if you're set up for it), look at each of the separate entries (click on "full entry" to look at each in detail) and answer the following questions:
   
   1. Are your senses included in the OED's defintions?
   2. What other senses, if any are included?
   3. Which of these senses, if any, are obsolete (obs.), rare, colloquial, and/or regional?
   4. How far back does the OED trace the etymology for various entries for this word shape? Do they all have the same etymology? What were the original meanings in the source languages?
   5. What are the oldest meanings in English and which ones still exist (according to the OED)?
   6. What connections, if any do you see between various contemporary meanings?
   7. What connections, if any, do you see between newer (it's all relative; they could still be meanings we've had for centuries) contemporary meanings and older archaic ones?