Linguistics 1AA3: Words, Sentences & Meaning Take-home Final Exam December 2022 There is no need to copy and paste this document or the questions. Instead, please 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 Page 1 of 4 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 Page 2 of 4 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 Page 3 of 4 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 Page 4 of 4