MH Language and Linguistics 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: In morphology, what is the difference between an inflectional morpheme and a derivational morpheme?
- Inflectional morphemes create new words; derivational morphemes change grammatical category
- Derivational morphemes create new words or change category; inflectional morphemes mark grammatical features (Correct answer)
- Both perform identical grammatical functions
- Inflectional morphemes only appear in verb forms
Correct answer: Derivational morphemes create new words or change category; inflectional morphemes mark grammatical features
Derivational morphemes create new lexical items or change grammatical category (e.g., 'happi-ness'), while inflectional morphemes mark grammatical relationships like tense or number.
Question 2: Which language acquisition theory holds that children are born with a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) containing universal grammar?
- Behaviorist theory
- Connectionist theory
- Nativist (innateness) theory (Correct answer)
- Interactionist theory
Correct answer: Nativist (innateness) theory
Noam Chomsky's nativist theory proposes that humans are biologically predisposed to acquire language via an innate LAD containing principles of universal grammar.
Question 3: What is codeswitching in sociolinguistics?
- Adopting a new language and abandoning the first
- Alternating between two or more languages within a conversation (Correct answer)
- Translating a text word for word
- The process of language death in a community
Correct answer: Alternating between two or more languages within a conversation
Codeswitching is the practice of alternating between two or more languages or dialects within a single conversation, often reflecting social identity and context.
Question 4: Which phonological process refers to a sound becoming more like a neighboring sound?
- Dissimilation
- Metathesis
- Assimilation (Correct answer)
- Epenthesis
Correct answer: Assimilation
Assimilation is the phonological process where a sound takes on features of an adjacent sound, increasing phonetic similarity for ease of articulation.
Question 5: What does the term 'diglossia' refer to in sociolinguistics?
- A speaker who is fluent in two unrelated languages
- The coexistence of two varieties of a language with distinct social functions (Correct answer)
- A language that has borrowed heavily from another
- A dialect that has evolved independently from its parent language
Correct answer: The coexistence of two varieties of a language with distinct social functions
Diglossia, introduced by Charles Ferguson, describes a situation where two language varieties coexist in a community with different social registers or domains.
Question 6: In discourse analysis, what is a 'speech act' as defined by Austin and Searle?
- The physical sound waves produced during speech
- An utterance that performs a social action such as promising, requesting, or declaring (Correct answer)
- The grammatical parsing of a spoken sentence
- A scripted dialogue used in language teaching
Correct answer: An utterance that performs a social action such as promising, requesting, or declaring
Speech act theory holds that utterances do more than convey information; they perform actions (illocutionary acts) like promising, warning, and requesting.
Question 7: What is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) primarily used for?
- Standardizing spelling across all languages
- Providing a universal system for transcribing the sounds of any language (Correct answer)
- Translating texts between related languages
- Coding signed languages into written form
Correct answer: Providing a universal system for transcribing the sounds of any language
The IPA is a standardized notation system developed by linguists to represent the phonetic sounds of all human languages consistently.
MH Language and Linguistics 3
In morphology, what is the difference between an inflectional morpheme and a derivational morpheme?