Morphology Questions and Answers

Answer: A

A word gets its principal meaning from the base or root of its morphemes. In a word such as unhappiness, the root happy carries the core sense, while the prefix un- and the suffix -ness only modify it or change its class.

The second option describes a lexeme or a phrase, a unit of vocabulary, and does not say where the main meaning comes from. The third and fourth options talk about written or phonographic forms. Only the root morpheme is the carrier of the basic meaning, so the first option is the answer.

Answer: D

A lexeme is a language unit consisting of one word or several words. It is the abstract unit of vocabulary behind a set of forms: run, runs, running and ran are forms of one lexeme, and a fixed phrase such as "kick the bucket" can also be a single lexeme.

The other options describe different things. Words with similar meaning are synonyms, words with similar sounds are homophones or rhymes, and words with similar phonetic script do not name any standard linguistic unit. So the fourth option is correct.

Answer: A

Orthographic words are the representative words of phonographic words, that is, the written units of a language set between spaces. A written word may stand for one or more spoken forms.

The phonic representation relates to sounds, and the graphic or pictorial representation of words would describe writing and pictures in general, so the keyed definition is preferred.

Answer: B

Morphology deals with the words in a language: their structure and formation, and the way they are built from morphemes such as roots, prefixes and suffixes. It studies how words like "unhappiness" are put together.

Phonology studies the sound system of a language and phonetics studies the production of speech sounds, so neither deals with words as units of structure. Linguistics is the whole scientific study of language, and it is too wide an answer for a field that deals with words.

Answer: A

A formal process by which word forms are derived from stems or roots, such as affixation, reduplication, compounding or internal change, is a morphological process. Morphology is the study of word structure, and these operations create inflected and derived forms.

A phonological process changes sounds in a context (for example assimilation) and a phonetic process concerns the production or acoustics of speech sounds. A morpho-phonemic process is a sound change triggered by a morphological context, such as the plural alternation in 'knife, knives', not the derivation of the word form itself.

Answer: A

A unit of grammar smaller than a word is the morpheme, the smallest meaningful unit, such as un-, happy and -ness in 'unhappiness'. Words are built from morphemes.

An allophone and a phoneme are units of phonology and not of grammar, and neither carries meaning on its own in the grammatical sense. An allomorph is a variant form of a morpheme and is a variant of the unit in question, not the unit of grammar itself, so the morpheme is the correct answer.

Answer: B

The word-and-paradigm model of morphology was introduced by Charles F. Hockett in his 1954 paper 'Two models of grammatical description', where he contrasted item-and-arrangement and item-and-process with word-and-paradigm, which takes the word and its inflectional paradigm as basic.

H.A. Gleason wrote a well-known introduction to descriptive linguistics. David Abercrombie worked in phonetics, and Kenneth Pike developed tagmemics. None of them is credited with the word-and-paradigm model, so option B is right.

Answer: B

Both statements are true. Reduplication often has an augmentative meaning, signalling an increase in size, frequency or intensity, as in plurals, repeated actions and intensive forms in many languages.

The first statement says what the meaning often is, and the second spells out what it conveys, so both are correct and the options calling either false are wrong. Examples are the repetition of a word in Hindi to give 'each' or 'many', and intensive forms like 'big big' in Indian English.

Answer: B

The stratum-1 affix is '-ive'. In lexical phonology the level one (stratum 1) affixes are the Latinate ones, such as -ive, -ity and -ion, which cause stress shift and sound changes in the base, as in compete to competitive.

The shapes '-ve', '-tive' and '-iv' do not make the affix as it appears in the word 'competitive', which is compet + ive, so these are rejected. Stratum two affixes such as -ness and -less are neutral, do not change the stress and attach to words that have already taken stratum one affixes.

Answer: A

The key takes both statements as true. Some lexical morphologists claim that stems and roots belong to different strata, and some propose that homophonous affixes have different origins and so belong to different levels.

The options calling either statement false are rejected by the key. Level ordering in lexical phonology and morphology is the source of the idea of strata for affixes, stems and roots.