All Languages May Add Affixes To Free-Standing,

Assessment: Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics & Pragmatics

Instructions

There are three sections in this assessment: Structure;Meaning and Sound.You must answer questions from all three sections.

Morphology and Syntax

Choose two of the topics and write an 800 word essay +/- 10% on each.

Syntax

1. Simplifying slightly, what we hear when listening to an utterance, produce when making an utterance or see when an utterance is written down is a sequence of words and part of our implicit linguistic knowledge is that these words belong to different Parts of Speech (POS). However, linguists have argued that in addition to knowledge of POS, speakers of a language also have knowledge of more abstract categories or phrases above the level of the word. Give some arguments as to why linguists feel the need to do this.

2. It is common amongst non-linguists to define the major parts of speech in terms of their meaning. So a noun might be described as the name of a general person, place, thing or idea; a verb might be described as an action; a word that modifies a noun is an adjective and a preposition takes a noun complement/object and conveys a spatial or temporal meaning. Discuss some of the problems with this simple meaning-based approach and propose an alternative. You may, if you wish, concentrate on one particular part of speech.

Morphology

1. All languages may add affixes to free-standing, pronounceable roots to build new words. Discuss this claim using examples from different languages.

2. Morphologists have proposed that languages can be classified as belonging to a number of different types, such as ‘agglutinative` or ‘analytical`. Describe such a system of classification, giving examples. To what extent do languages fall neatly into such a system? Using examples, argue for or against.