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LINGUISTICS 1030: LANGUAGE DIVERSITY

Practice Exam, Spring 2021

Name: _________________________________ Section #:___

Student ID # _____________________


About the the Midterm Exam:
A. Number of questions: 30 (This practice exam has 34)
B. Exactly one of the four alternatives is correct.
C. You will have 50 minutes to complete the exam.

1. The set of grammatical categories includes, among other:
a. tense, aspect, mood, verb.
b. tense, noun, mood, verb.
c. verb, noun, adjective, adverb.
d. number, tense, mood, gender.

Consider the following data from Persian:

maed ‘man’ maerdan ‘men’
geda ‘beggar’ gedayan ‘beggars'
gorbe ‘cat’ gobeha ‘cats'
ettefaq ‘incident’ ettefaqha ‘incidents’


2. What is the morpheme meaning plural?
a. an or da
b. da or e
c. ha or an
d. a or n

3. Which feature is responsible for the alternation in the plural morpheme?
a. plural vs. singular
b. human nouns vs. non-human nouns
c. nominative vs. genitive
d. nasal consonants vs. plosive consonants

4. What kind of affix is the morpheme marking plural in Persian?
a. infix
b. suffix
c. prefix
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d. infix

5. Which of the following words constitutes a simple word in English?
a. corner
b. ladylike
c. running
d. stapler

6. How many morphemes does the word dislocation have?
a. Three
b. Two
c. Five
d. Four

7. Which of the following statements about morphemes is true:

a. Morphemes are the smallest unit of a sound in a language
b. Function words like to, it, and be are bound morphemes.
c. Bound roots are morphemes that occur in isolation.
d. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful unit in a language

8. The Tiwa word inkhwianwiachebanseuanideba (meaning in English ‘The man gave
me the dog’) can be broken down into the following parts:

in -khwian -wia -che -ban seuanide-ba
AGR -dog -give -PASS -PST man -INST
‘The man gave me the dog’

This complex word contains multiple roots and a number of affixes. Besides, this
word also shows an example of noun-incorporation, where objects of a verb have
been incorporated into that verb. Which of the following type of language displays
such characteristics?

a. Fusional
b. Analytic
c. Polysynthetic
d. Agglutinative

9. Examine the following data from Esperanto and then answer the question below:


facila ‘easy' patrino ‘mother'
patro ‘father’ instruo ‘instruction’
granda big’ bona good’
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pura pure’ portistino female porter’


What is the morpheme that marks the syntactic category ‘adjectives’:
a. o
b. a
c. na
d. no



Use the chart below to help you answer the following questions on phonetics/phonology


10. Which of the following words begin with a voiced velar stop sound?
a. cat [kæt]
b. sing [sɪŋ]
c. general [ˈdʒɛnərəl]
d. girl [gɜrl]

11. What is the phonetic symbol for the voiceless alveolar-palatal fricative?
a. [tʃ]
b. [ʃ]
c. [dʒ]
d. [ʒ]

12. Which of the following sounds is produced with the tip of the tongue at the alveolar
ridge?
a. [d]
b. [w]
c. [j]
d. [ð]

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13. The picture shows the articulatory configuration of a
sound of English. What is it?


a. [n] as in ‘naïve’
b. [p] as in ‘pet’
c. [d] as in ‘dumb’
d. [k] as in ‘cute’





14. Examine the following data from Brazilian Portuguese (São Paulo dialect), showing
the environment where the sounds [d] and [dʒ] can appear:
words with [d]

[dẽjtʃɪ] ‘tooth’
[dadʊ] ‘dice’
[doɾ] ‘pain’
[dubju] ‘dubious’

words with [dʒ]

[dʒiɐ] ‘day’
[dʒividʒiɾ] ‘divide’
[dʒisɪ] ‘I /he/she/you said’
[kaɾdʒiakʊ] ‘cardiac’

In which phonetic environments the sounds [d] and [dʒ] appear?

a. [d] appears before a nasal vowel, [dʒ] appears everywhere else.
b. [d] and [dʒ] occur in the same phonetic environment.
c. [dʒ] occurs before the vowel [i], [d] occurs everywhere else.
d. [d] occurs before low vowels and [dʒ] after high vowels.

15. Given your answer for (14), the sounds [d] and [dʒ] are in:

a. free variation
b. contrastive distribution
c. vocalic distribution
d. complementary distribution

16. What happens when we produce a voiceless sound?

a. the vocal folds vibrate.
b. the sound is produced by the larynx.
c. the vocal folds do not vibrate.
d. there is an overall constriction of the larynx.



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17. Which of the following statements is FALSE:
a. Inflectional morphology can change the syntactic category of a word.
b. Adjectives can modify nouns.
c. Affixes may serve to create a new grammatical category of a word.
d. Derivational affixes may change the class to which a word belongs.

18. Read the following pairs in English and then decide which of them are minimal
pairs.
(i) /si/ ~ /ʃi/
(ii) /θɪn/ ~ /sɪn/
(iii) /wɪð/ ~ /wɪðɪn/
(iv) /fri/ ~ /θri/

The minimal pairs are

19. Which of the following anatomical parts is a passive articulator?
a. the nose
b. the upper teeth
c. the tong body
d. the lower lip

20. How many syllables are there in the word smarten
a. One
b. Two
c. Three
d. None of the alternatives above.

21. Identify the nucleus in the syllables of the word purposeful /pɜrpəsfəl/.
a. /r/, /d/, /l/
b. /u/, /o/, /e/, /u/
c. /pu/, /po/, /se/, /fu/
d. /ɜ/, /ə/, /ə/


22. Which of the following structures is the correct one for the word “disengagement” ?


see ~ she
thin ~ sin
with ~ within
free ~ three a. (i) and (ii) b. (ii), (iii), (iv)
c. (i), (ii), (iv)
d. (ii) and (iv)
a. c.
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All structures are correct.


23. The phenomenon where a linguistic rule can be applied to the result of the
application of the same rule is called:
a. principle
b. parameter
c. displaced reference
d. recursivity

24. In Classical Greek, the sentence meaning ‘The man loves the child’ is formed in the
following way:

hŏ anḗr tờn pẵida philéei
The man the child loves

What is the order word found in Classical Greek?
a. SOV
b. SVO
c. VSO
d. VOS

25. Which of the following can be generated by grammar X if this grammar has the
following set of rules?

S —> A B
A —> John
B —> C D
C —> to his office
D —> E F
E —> quickly
F —> came

a. John to his office came quickly.
b. John came quickly to his office.
c. John to his office quickly came.
d. To his office quickly came John.
b. d.
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26. What is syntax in Linguistics?

a. Syntax refers to the rules governing the behavior of formal languages used in logic.
b. Syntax refers to the set of rules, principles and processes that govern the structure of
sentences in a given language.
c. Syntax is the study of neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the
comprehension, production and acquisition of language.
d. Syntax is the linguistic study of meaning in language. It focuses on the relationship
between words, phrases, signs and symbols.

27. The sentence The woman held the baby in the green blanket is ambiguous. Why?

a. The sentence has only one meaning, but two structural representations.
b. The sentence has two meanings, but only one structural representation.
c. The sentence has three meanings and three structural representations.
d. The sentence has two meanings and two structural representations.

28. What is prescriptive grammar?

a. Prescriptive grammar is a set of rules about language based on how it is actually used.
b. Prescriptive grammar is a set of structural rules governing the composition on clauses
and words in a given natural language.
c. Prescriptive grammar is a set of phonemes present in a given language.
d. Prescriptive grammar is a set of rules about how people think a language should be used.

29. What is a linguistic parameter?

a. Rules that hold in the same way across all languages.
b. Statements of limited variation across languages.
c. Generalized phrases structure rules.
d. Statements about the limited meaning that a sentence can have in a given language.

30. What is the process involved in the formation of plural in Māori, an Eastern Polynesian
language spoken by an indigenous population of New Zealand?

wahine ‘woman’ —> waahine ‘women’
tangata ‘people’ —-> taangata ‘people’

a. recursivity
b. repeated use of a phrase structure rule
c. reduplication
d. circumfixation



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31. What are Proto-languages?

a. An ancestor of Dravidian languages.
b. A language reconstructed based on the descendant languages.
c. A language undergoing phonological change.
d. An ancestor of languages only spoken in Europe.

32. What are words with a common etymological origin called?

a. Proto-languages
b. Cognates
c. Loanwords
d. Neologisms

33. Consider the following process that occurred in the development from Proto-Indo-
European to Proto-Germanic:
p, t, k → f, θ, x
b, d, g → p, t, k
bʰ, dʰ, gʰ → b, d, g

The rule governing this change is known as:

a. Murphy’s Law
b. Verner’s Law
c. Grimm’s Law
d. Grassman’s Law

34. The study of a single stage of a language is referred to as:

a. diachronic
b. allochronic
c. bichronic
d. synchronic

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