1. What do we mean by the active and passive voices of verbs? Analyse these sentences in this regard. ‘I kicked the boy’. And ‘The boy was kicked by me’. What is the difference in tone and approach?2. What do we mean by the affix, suffix, and prefix of a word?

3. What does ‘amelioration’ mean in the terminology of language change and give an example of it. What is perjoration? Give an example of it. What do we mean by narrowing?

4. What do we mean by cohesion, coherence, anaphoric, cataphoric references and deixis in a text? Explain all these phrases with reference to one another. Analyse this passage in this regard: TEACHER: ‘As I said previously, you need to make sure that you revise all your key terminology. In the next lesson, we will be doing exam questions…by the way did anyone watch ‘Eastenders’ last night?’

5. VERBS. What do we mean by a verb, an auxiliary verb, and dynamic and stative verbs? What is a modal verb? What is a phrasal verb? What is the difference between a transitive and intransitive verb?

Analyse this sentence in this regard: ‘I have done my best, but I am banging my head against a brick wall if no one listens. I will be listened to! You should all listen to me! I am talking now! You must listen to me! You should all be locked in a cage and electrocuted.’

6. What do we mean by co-ordination and subordination within a text? Analyse these sentences in this regard: ‘He was a marvellous speaker and produced a great speech, which expostulated upon the wonders of the vacuum cleaner, which manages to clean up a carpet without causing any noise…’

7. Pronouns. What do we mean by first person, second person and third person pronouns? What are demonstrative pronouns. Analyse the use of pronouns in this passage: ‘I really hate him, but you seem like to like him. You know, we really hate him, don’t you? He thinks he is marvellous because he has powerful friends. They say he deserves a break, but this is nonsense. Those people don’t know what they are talking about. I know better than that.’

8. What is diachronic variation? What is synchronic variation?

9. What do we mean by a morpheme, a phoneme, and a digraph? What is phonemic transcription?

10. What is phonics?

10. What is ellipsis?

11. What is etymology?

12. Child Language Acquisiton in a minute. What is a holophrase? What is telegraphic speech? What is an LAD? What is overextension? What is overgeneralisation?

13. What do we mean by subject, verb, object? Analyse this sentence in this regard. The wretched man groaned, put his hand to his leaky chest and then fell on the floor.’

14. What do we mean by tags?

ANSWERS

 

 

 

1. What do we mean by the active and passive voices of verbs? Analyse these sentences in this regard. ‘I kicked the boy’. And ‘The boy was kicked by me’. What is the difference in tone and approach?

I kicked the boy — active VERY DIRECT
The boy was kicked by me — passive LESS DIRECT AND MORE FORMAL
Active voice describes a direct action and states the verb subject and object, whereas in the passive voice the subject can be removed, creating a more anonymous and less dynamic, but more sophisticated tone.

2. What do we mean by the affix, suffix, and prefix of a word?

An affix is a morpheme that you add to a word to alter its meaning, a prefix is added to the beginning of the word, and a suffix to the end of a word.

3. What does ‘amelioration’ mean in the terminology of language change and give an example of it. What is perjoration? Give an example of it. What do we mean by narrowing?
Amelioration is when a word improves in meaning over time due to a semantic shift, and perjoration is the opposite i.e. a word becomes less desirable in meaning. For example, gay. Narrowing is when a word becomes more specific in meaning. E.G within the topic of LANGUAGE AND TECHNOLOGY, the word FILE has narrowed its meaning to refer exclusively to a document you are working on on the computer.

 

Cohesion — how clauses and sentences are linked together using conjunctives, demonstrative pronouns and/or punctuation to increase its fluency, which in turns contributes to the coherence of a text (how easily it is understood). An anaphoric reference is a demonstrative pronoun that refers to an event that has taken place BEFORE the time of the text, whereas a cataphoric reference refers to a future event that has not yet happened. Deixis, unlike cataphoric and anaphoric references refers to something that is going on at the same time as the text, but that which is outside of the context. Therefore it is often accompanied by paralinguistic features such as pointing and prosodic features such as an increase in pitch and volume. ‘As I said previously’and ‘last night’ are anaphoric references, and ‘in the next lesson’ is a cataphoric reference.  

5. VERBS. What do we mean by a verb, an auxiliary verb, and dynamic and stative verbs? What is a modal verb? What is a phrasal verb? Analyse this sentence in this regard: ‘I have done my best, but I am banging my head against a brick wall if no one listens. I will be listened to! You should all listen to me! I am talking now! You must listen to me! You should all be locked in a cage and electrocuted.’

A verb is an action word that describes that something that has been done, that is being done or that will be done. An auxiliary verb is one which carries a grammatical function only. For example ‘have’ in ‘I have done’ and ‘do’ in ‘Do you know?’ They are used mainly when forming interrogatives and when using the perfect tense.
A dynamic verb is one which describes an action, usually a lively one such as ‘dive’ or ‘jump’, whereas a stative verb is one that is more necessary than anything else, and describes something mundane such as ‘to be’ or ‘to have’.
A modal verb is one that indicates degress of certainty and other attitudes towards an action e.g. ‘will’ ‘would’.
A phrasal verb is one which consists of a main verb and a preposition e.g. ‘go under’ and ‘lift up’.

6. What do we mean by co-ordination and subordination within a text? Analyse these sentences in this regard: ‘He was a marvellous speaker and produced a great speech, which expostulated upon the wonders of the vacuum cleaner, which manages to clean up a carpet without causing any noise…’

Co-ordination is the linking of clauses together using conjunctions such as ‘and’ ‘but’ and ‘or’. Subordination is the liking of clauses together in such a way that it gives one clause more importance than the other, i.e. one can be used independently, and the other doesn’t make sense on its own. In this instance, conjunctions such as ‘which’ and ‘who’ are used.  

7. Pronouns. What do we mean by first person, second person and third person pronouns? What are demonstrative pronouns. Analyse the use of pronouns in this passage: ‘I really hate him, but you seem like to like him. You know, we really hate him, don’t you? He thinks he is marvellous because he has powerful friends. They say he deserves a break, but this is nonsense. Those people don’t know what they are talking about. I know better than that.’

Pronouns are words that replace nouns to avoid repetition and keep sentences compact. First person pronouns are ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘my’, second person pronouns are ‘you’, and ‘yours’ and third person pronouns are ‘he’ ‘she’ and ‘his’ etc. First person plural is ‘us/ours’ and third person plural is ‘them/they’.
Demonstrative pronouns are ‘this’ ‘that’ ‘them’ and ‘those’.

8. What is diachronic variation? What is synchronic variation?

Diachronic variation is the change in language over a period of time, whereas synchronic variation is variation, overlap or ambiguity in language at any one specific time.

9. What do we mean by a morpheme, a phoneme, and a digraph? What is phonemic transcription?

A morpheme is a unit of meaning, i.e. the stem of a word, a phoneme is an individual unit of sound, e.g. a consonant, a vowel or a diagraph. A diagraph is a combination of two vowel sounds together that make an entirely new sound e.g. ‘ou’ ‘ow’. A phonemic transcription is one which uses the IPA to make an almost exact written version of something that has been said.

10. What is phonics?

Phonics is the idea that children can learn language by learning individual phonemes and how they are written, and by then putting them together to form their own words. This is in opposition to the whole book strategy .

11. What is ellipsis?

An ellipsis is the omission of one or two words in a sentence.

12. What is etymology?

Etymology is the study of the history and roots of words.

12. Child Language Acquisiton in a minute. What is a holophrase? What is telegraphic speech? What is an LAD? What is overextension? What is overgeneralisation?

A holophrase is a one-word utterance. Telegraphic speech is a stage in CLA where a child can compose phrases of three or more morphemes. An LAD is a Language acquisition Device, a mechanism which Chomksy claims we are all born with and that helps us to understand the basic principles of grammar. Overextension is when a child overextends the semantic meaning of a word to more than one word, e.g. ‘daisy’ for all flowers. Over-generalisition is the over-use of a grammatical rule in cases where there are exceptions. For example applying the past participle rule to the verb ‘to fall’, resulting in ‘I fell’.

13. What do we mean by subject, verb, object? Analyse this sentence in this regard. The wretched man groaned, put his hand to his leaky chest and then fell on the floor.’

The subject of a sentence is the person who carries out the action, the verb is the action, and the object is the person/thing to which the action is done. ‘The wretched man’ is the subject, ‘groaned’ and ‘fell’ are the verbs, and ‘his leaky chest’ and ‘the floor’ are the objects. ‘Wretched’ and ‘leaky’ are adjectives, ‘his’ is a pronoun, ‘to’ and ‘on’ are prepositions, and ‘the’ is a definite article.

14. What do we mean by tags?

Tags are utterances added onto the end of sentences, often used by children to gain reassurance during acquisition e.g. ‘it’s raining, isn’t it?’

By Heather