Linguistics 1AA3: Words, Sentences & Meaning
Take-home Final Exam December 2022
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start a fresh document and label each answer clearly.
In completing this takehome exam, you may consult your class notes, the textbook,
and any course material in Avenue. These sources do not need to be cited. It is not
necessary to consult any outside sources, but if you do, you must cite them in some
standard format (such as APA or MLA).
This takehome exam is to be your own work. You may consult the TAs or the
instructor, but not anyone else. Allowing anyone but yourself to use your McMaster
login credentials is a violation of the Academic Integrity Policy.
Question 1: TakeAways
What is the most interesting, important, or surprising thing you learned in this class
this semester? Write a short description that would be understandable by someone
who has not taken the course.
(5 points)
Question 2: Bats
In New Zealand’s “Bird of the Year”
competition, the endangered Kākāpō
is the only species to have won
more than once. But in 2021, the
winner of the popular vote was the
pekapeka-tou-roa bat (pictured
here). Do you think the result was
fair? Use concepts from the course
to explain your thinking.
(5 points)
Ling 1AA3 Take-home Final Exam
December 2022
"NZ Long-tailed Bat/Pekapeka-tou-roa,
Waikaia River, Piano Flat, Southland" by
Shellie is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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Question 3: Coffee
Canadian advertising law requires that if an advertisement makes a claim about the
performance of a product, the claim must be based on adequate evidence. A company
advertised its recyclable single use coffee pods.
(12 points)
a.
Use either a tree diagram or
brackets to illustrate the internal
organization of the linguistic expression
recyclable single use coffee pod. Your
illustrated structure should be consistent
with the meaning of the expression, and
should depict each morpheme in
multimorphemic words.
Photo by Karolina Grabowska on pexels.com
b.
In the expression recyclable
single use coffee pod, is the adjective
recyclable a gradable adjective? Show
the evidence that informs your answer.
c. Early in 2022, the Competition Bureau of Canada ruled that a manufacturer had
made false or misleading claims about its coffee pods being recyclable. The
Bureau’s analysis mentioned that the pods are marketed all across the country
but are not accepted in municipal recycling programs outside of British
Columbia and Quebec. Do you agree with this ruling? In other words, is it
accurate to describe the pods as recyclable? Use concepts from the course to
explain your thinking.
Question 4: Careers
In Avenue, navigate to Content | Extra Content for the Super-Keen | Linguistics
Careers and browse through the various sites in the list. Pick one that appeals to you,
then answer the following questions. (Alternatively, if you learn about a linguistics
career from some other site, or from a person you know, pick that one!)
(6 points)
a. What, specifically, is appealing to you about this job? What elements of this
person’s work sound like something you would like to do?
b. What linguistics skills does this person use in their job?
c. What other skills would you need to develop to do a job like that?
Ling 1AA3 Take-home Final Exam
December 2022
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Question 5: Functional Categories
Write a coherent paragraph, at least 100 words long, on a topic of your choosing.
Your paragraph should be grammatical in your variety of English. The challenge is that
your paragraph must contain no auxiliaries and no determiners!
Then reflect on your experience of writing
this paragraph, answering the following
questions:
a. What challenges did you encounter
in writing? Describe them using
linguistics vocabulary from this
course.
b. How did you have to restructure or
rephrase what you wanted to write
in order to exclude determiners and
auxiliaries?
(8 points)
Photo by Helena Lopes on pexels.com
Question 6: Clauses
Most of the examples of embedded clauses that we’ve considered this semester consist
of a clause that is the argument following a verb like know, think or believe. But
clauses can occupy other positions as well. For each of the following criteria, generate
a sentence that is grammatical in your variety of English.
a. a sentence with a question clause as the argument following an adjective
b. a sentence with a non-finite clause as the argument following an adjective
c. a sentence with a finite clause as the argument following a noun
d. a sentence with a non-finite clause as the subject
(8 points)
Ling 1AA3 Take-home Final Exam
December 2022
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Question 7: A Raucous School Board Meeting
The table below presents excerpts from two different news accounts of a school board
meeting that happened in Ottawa in November 2022. While the two accounts report on
the same event, there are some differences in how they describe it.
News Source A
News Source B
Trustees with Ottawa's largest school board
have postponed a vote on whether to
mandate masks in schools.
A meeting of the Ottawa-Carleton District
School Board Tuesday evening ended without
a vote on imposing mask rules.
Ottawa-Carleton District School Board
(OCDSB) board chair Lyra Evans repeatedly
chastised parents and other members of the
public for inappropriate screaming and
cheering throughout the evening.
Cheers and heckles from the crowd prompted
board chair Lyra Evans to warn that people
would be asked to leave if they kept causing
a ruckus.
Evans asked security to begin evicting people
from the room, just before the board's
livestream cut off for more than 30 minutes.
Police were called at one point and everyone
was asked to leave the school board building.
Evans announced the in-person meeting was
over and would resume virtually.
During a presentation by Dr. Lindy Samson,
chief of staff at Ottawa children's hospital
CHEO, people could be heard yelling in the
background when Samson explained that
evidence supports the effectiveness of
masking.
CHEO’s chief of staff, Lindy Samson, who
appeared virtually, was jeered at when she
explained that evidence supports the
effectiveness of wearing a mask.
Your job is to compare the excerpts from News Source A and News Source B and
comment on the linguistic differences between them. You may consider linguistic
concepts from any section of the course in your answer.
(16 points)
Ling 1AA3 Take-home Final Exam
December 2022
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