MA English Syntax BBK Spring 2014
Topics/terminology #1
(based on in-class discussions and Unit 5 in the Varga book)
grammar, morphology, syntax, phonology, semantics, the lexicon, structural ambiguity,
morpheme, free/bound, root/affix, prefix/suffix, derivational/inflectional, class-maintaining/
class-changing, lexeme, paradigm, word-form/syntactic word, compounding, blends, backformation, clipping, eponyms, acronyms, conversion, (expletive) infixation, isolating/
agglutinative/fusional languages
Sample questions
1. Compare the traditional (more narrow) and the contemporary generative linguistic (wider)
senses of grammar. List their components.
2. What is structural ambiguity, and how can bracketing (and tree diagrams) represent it?
Give 1-2 examples.
3. The phrase two women’s suits is structurally ambiguous. Specify the two meanings and use
bracketing to represent them. Remember to indicate which structure produces which
meaning.
4. Identify the component morphemes in the word untouchables, and classify them along the
following dimensions, wherever applicable: free/bound, root/affix, prefix/suffix,
derivational/inflectional, class-maintaining/class-changing.
5. Define inflection vs. word-formation/derivation, using terms like lexeme, paradigm, word
forms/syntactic words.
6. List all the word forms of the lexemes WRITE, WILL and MUST, and compare their
paradigms. What explains the differences?
7. List as many word-formation processes as you can. Give examples from both English and
Hungarian.
8. Identify the word-formation process(es) involved in producing the following words:
shamelessness, smog (from smoke + fog), YMCA, lab (from laboratory), green (as in They
moved to a house overlooking the green).
9. Identify the word-formation process(es) involved in producing the following Hungarian
words: rovar ‘insect’ (from rovátkolt + barom), szakdolgoz(ik) ‘write a university thesis’
(from szakdolgozat), madárijesztő ‘scarecrow’, tévéz(ik) ‘watch television’, garbó
‘poloneck’, sebváltó ‘gear lever’.
10. Identify the morphosyntactic change in each of the following examples of conversion, and
decide whether they exemplify full (category change) or partial (subcategory change)
conversion. What is the difference between (3) and (4)? (B=before conversion; A=after
conversion)
(1)
B: Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
A: He wolfed down his lunch.
(2)
B: Hamlet was written by William Shakespeare.
A: You are a new Shakespeare.
(3)
B: Jimmie, don't even worry about that.
A: Don’t Jimmie me!
(4)
B: This photocopier was produced by Xerox.
A: He xeroxed 3 pages.
11. Compare English and Hungarian wrt the language types they belong to. Explain briefly.
12. What morphological/morphosyntactic categories are there in Hungarian which are nonexistent in English? Give at least 2 examples and explain them briefly.