Download TAM seminar I

Dr. R. Vișan
TAM seminar I
Word/lexical item
1. Which of the following words may not deserve to be regarded as lexical items, and so may not be listed
in a dictionary of Modern English? Why?
a.
b.
c.
d.
read, reading, readable
punish, punishing, punishable, punishment
conceive, conceivable, conception
high, highness, highly (Carstairs)
2. Which of the following phrases may deserve to be regarded as lexical items? Why?
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
They put the cat among the hamsters.
They put the cat among the pigeons.
They put out the cat before going to bed.
They put out the light before going to bed.
Roger is a man who keeps his promises.
Roger is a man of his word. (Carstairs)
Taking words apart. Morphemes, affixes, inflections
3. Consider the following words:
tigers, lioness, consumed, untimely, wholesome, gruesome, consumption, speaks, decorating, stopped,
lovelier, strikingly
a. Divide them into morphemes, noting any instances where you are unsure.
b. Which of these morphemes are free and which are bound?
c. Which of the morphemes can be identified as grammatical inflections and why?
(Carstairs)
4. In each of the following groups of word forms, identify those that are forms of the same word (lexeme)
and those that are separate words (lexemes).
a. woman, woman’s, women, womanly, girl
b. greenish, greener, green, greens
c. written, wrote, writer, rewrites, writing
(Carstairs)
5. What form represents each of the following grammatical words?
a. the plural of the noun NOOSE
b. the plural of the noun GOOSE
c. the past tense of the verb PLAY
d. the past tense of the verb LAY
e. the past tense of the verb LIE (rest horizontally)
f. the past participle of the verb STRIVE
g. the accusative of the pronoun YOU
h. the perfect participle of the verb RIDE
(Carstairs)
Functional versus Lexical categories
6. List distinctions that oppose functional categories to lexical categories. Which of the words below can be
included in the list of functional categories:
chair, the, white, alimony, that, and, they, strike, skip, more, on, greedily
7. Identify the criteria used by grammarians to identify parts of speech, relying on the definitions below:
a.
b.
c.
nouns are words used as the name of a living being or lifeless things: Mary, John, horse, tree, virtue
substantivul este partea de vorbire care se declina si denumeste obiecte in sens foarte larg, adica fiinte,
lucruri, fenomene, actiuni, etc. (Gramatica Academiei)
the part of speech noun in English is inflected for case and number, the primary and most characteristic
use is to express substances; the secondary use of the nouns as regards their meaning is to express
attributes and phenomena....The primary grammatical function is to serve as head nouns; melting
snow, a generous action, a long ride. The secondary function is to modify other nouns or verbs: gold
chain, I saw a man. Of the relations in which a verb modifying noun stands to its verb the most
important are those of direct and indirect object (Sweet) (based on Baciu 1999, curs)
8. Identify the categories (parts of speech) the underlined words belong to. State the criteria you adopt in
identifying them:
“Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy whe the borrogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe” (Jabberwocky by L. Carroll) (based on Baciu 1999, curs)
Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. (Tolkien, Lord
of The Rings).
9. Identify which category (part of speech) the word “round”/the word “like” belongs to in the S’s below:
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
(iv)
(v)
Let us make our rounds.
Who told you that the Earth isn’t round?
Round your lips when you say “oh’!
Drake sailed round the world.
Don’t turn round!
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
He grew up with the LIKES of the company of all great fighters.
It looks LIKE a snail; it just is a snail.
It felt LIKE everything had dropped away.
I don’t want to talk LIKE that.
He said I went “(mumbling)” or something like stroke-LIKE.
Winston takes good LIKE a cigarette should.
Maya’s LIKE, „I don’t ever want to talk to these people”.
10. Correct and/ or complete:
a. Morphology deals with......................................
b. Derivational morphology deals with functional categories
c. Inflectional operations create a new word of a different lexical class
d. Nouns and inflections belong to the class of functional categories
(based on Baciu 1999, curs)
11. Answer the following questions:
a. Define the following concepts: (i) MORPHEME; (ii) ALLOMORPH. Provide examples.
b. Give examples of : (i) free morphemes, and (ii) bound morphemes
(based on Avram 2007, curs)