Linguistics | 151 Questions and Answers

Linguistics Questions and Answers

Q.1. What is Psycholinguistics?

Ans. Psycholinguistics is the study of the understanding and production of language in its spoken and written forms. It covers the thought processes that make it possible to create a meaningful sentence out of words and the processes that make it possible to understand words.

Q.2. What are the similarities between sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics?

Ans. Socio-linguistics: studies the relation of language to society

Psycho-linguistics: studies the relation of language to psychology.

Q.3. What is Sociolinguistics?

Ans. Sociolinguistics is the study of all aspects of society. It studies the relationship between language and different social factors such as class, sex, age and ethnicity.

Q.4. What are the goals of Sociolinguistics?

Ans. The goals of Sociolinguistics are:

1. the social as well as the linguistic
2. socially realistic linguistics
3. socially constituted linguistics

Q.5. What is the purpose of Sociolinguistics?

Ans. Sociolinguistics is the study of the way culture and society affect the way language is used. Aspects of sociolinguistics include slang, vernacular, local dialect, etc.

Q.6. What does Syntax Mean?

Ans. Syntax is basically a particular pattern of the formation of sentences, or phrases in any given language. It deals with the grammatical arrangement of words.

Q.7. What is a Syntax Error?

Ans. A syntax error is used to refer to an error in the sequence of characters in coding. Programs will not compile languages until all syntax errors are corrected.

Q.8. What is Phonetics?

Ans. Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech.

Q.9. What is Morphology?

Ans. Morphology is the study of formation and functions of words.

Q.10. Is abbreviation a long word?

Ans. Abbreviation, in itself, is not an abbreviation, so obviously it is not going to be small, and concise, but more of a broad word. The long word “abbreviation” starts from the short word ‘brevis’ meaning ‘brief’.

Q.11. What are some disadvantages of the English language?

Ans. A much more serious disadvantage for learners of English is the extent of the vocabulary. we often have many words for the same concept. Another disadvantage of English is its reliance on rigid word order for meaning.

Q.12. What Is the Difference between Descriptive and Prescriptive Grammar?

Ans. Both kinds of grammar are concerned with rules- but in different ways. Specialists in descriptive grammar study the rules or patterns that underlie our use of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. On the other hand, prescriptive grammarians lay out rules about what they believe to be the “correct” or “incorrect” use of language.

Q.13. What are phonemes?

Ans. Phonemes include all significant differences of sound, including features of voicing, place and manner of articulation, accent, and secondary features of nasalization, glottalization, labialization, and the like.

Q.14. What is auditory phonetics?

Ans. Phonetics studies speech sounds according to their production in the vocal organs (articulatory phonetics), their physical properties (acoustic phonetics), or their effect on the ear (auditory phonetics)

Q.15. What are articulatory phonetics?

Ans. Phonetics studies speech sounds according to their production in the vocal organs (articulatory phonetics), their physical properties (acoustic phonetics), or their effect on the ear (auditory phonetics)

Q.16. What is acoustic phonetics?

Ans. Phonetics studies speech sounds according to their production in the vocal organs (articulatory phonetics), their physical properties (acoustic phonetics), or their effect on the ear (auditory phonetics)

Q.17. What is the International Phonetic Alphabet?

Ans. Systems of phonetic writing are aimed at the accurate transcription of any sequence of speech sounds; the best known is the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Q.18. What is stylistics?

Ans. Stylistics is the study of style and the methods used in written and spoken languages.

Q.19. What is Graphology?

Ans. Graphology is the study of handwriting. Graphology usually focuses on determining a person’s mood or personality based on the way they write.

Q.20. What influence has Noam Chomsky had on psycholinguistics?

Ans. The work of Noam Chomsky and other proponents of transformational grammar have had a marked influence on the field.

Q.21. What additional studies are involved in psycholinguistics?

Ans. Most problems in psycholinguistics are more concrete, involving the study of linguistic performance and language acquisition, especially in children.

Q.22. What relationship is of particular importance to psycholinguists?

Ans. Psycholinguists investigate the relationship between language and thought, a perennial subject of debate being whether language is a function of thinking or thought a function of the use of language.

Q.23. What does psycholinguistics focus on?

Ans. An important focus of psycholinguistics is the largely unconscious application of grammatical rules that enable people to produce and comprehend intelligible sentences.

Q.24. What is difference between linguistic and psycholinguistic?

Ans. Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc. Linguistics is the scientific study of language.

Q.25. How would you describe dialect?

Ans. Dialects reflect and may reinforce class, ethnic, or regional differences among speakers of the same language.

Q.26. What are some specific areas of study within sociolinguistics?

Ans. Sociolinguists also examine different dialects, accents, and levels of diction in light of social distinctions among people.

Q.27. What is Descriptive linguistics?

Ans. Descriptive linguistics is the branch of linguistics which describes the structure of a language or languages as they exist, without reference to their histories or to comparison with other languages

Q.28. What is comparative linguistics?

Ans. Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness.

Q.29. What is historical linguistics?

Ans. Historical linguistics is the branch of linguistics that focuses on the interconnections between different languages in the world and/or their historical development.

Q.30. What is language?

Ans. Language is the expression of human communication through which knowledge, belief, and behavior can be experienced, explained, and shared.

Q.31. What is content?

Ans. Sounds produced by human speech organs are called the substance or content.

Q.32. Is voice always produce as speech?

Ans. No. It is not always produced as speech. Infants babble and coo; animals bark, moo, whinny, growl, and meow; and adult humans laugh, sing, and cry.

Q.33. What do you understand by the term Applied Linguistics?

Ans. Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems.

Q.34. How would you define “cognitive grammar”?

Ans. Cognitive grammar is a cognitive approach to language which considers the basic units of language to be symbols or conventional pairings of a semantic structure with a phonological label.

Q.35. What is the educative value of applied linguistics?

Ans. Different academic issues can be resolved with reference to applied linguistics.

Q.36. How many functions of language are?

Ans. There are three functions of language:

1. informative function
2. expressive function
3. directive function

Q.37. Enumerate different functions of language.

Ans. The functions of language fall into two broad categories:

1. Micro Function
2. Macro Function

Q.38. What are the causes of language change?

Ans. There are many causes of language change:

1. economy
2. analogy
3. language contact
4. the medium of communication
5. cultural environment

Q.39. How is a sign language different from an oral language?

Ans. Sign language is as rich as any oral language. It has its own written forms and rules which differ it from any oral language.

Q.40. What does syllable mean?

Ans. Syllable is a unit in which the word is divided while pronouncing it.

Q.41. What is a vowel?

Ans. A vowel is a sound produced by the unimpeded passage of the breath through the mouth.

Q.49. What is a consonant?

Ans. A consonant is a speech sound in which the breath is at least partly obstructed and which forms a syllable combined with a vowel.

Q.43. What do you mean by Phonetic transcription?

Ans. Phonetic transcription is a technique which enables us to identify different sounds through several symbols.

Q.44. How would you define “Auditory phonetics”?

Ans. Auditory phonetics is that branch of linguistics which studies the process of the perception of the speech sound.

Q.45. How many kinds of plosives are?

Ans. There are three kinds of plosives:

1. Bilabial plosives (p,b)
2. Alveolar plosives (t,d)
3. Velar plosives (k,g)

Q.46. Describe the numbers of phonemes in English.

Ans. In English, there are 44 distinctive speech sounds or phonems. 20 sounds are vowel sounds, while the remaining 24 sounds are consonant sounds.

Q.47. What does “consonant clusters” mean?

Ans. The sequence of two or more consonants are called consonant clusters.

Q.48. Describe the supra-segmental features.

Ans. Features of speech which extend over more than one sound are called supra-segmental features; supra-segmental features include loudness, intonation, stress and speed of utterance.

Q.49. What is stress?

Ans. Stress is the degree of prominence a syllable receives. Stress is either primary or secondary.

Q.50. What does morphology study?

Ans. A systematic study of morphemes is known as morphology.

Q.51. What does ‘morpheme’ mean?

Ans. A morpheme is a minimal, meaningful unit in grammatical system of a language.

Q.52. What are free morphemes?

Ans. Some morphemes can stand on their own as independent morphemes. Such morphemes are called free morphemes.

Q.53. What are bound morphemes?

Ans. The morphemes which cannot stand on their own as independent words are known as bound morphemes.

Q.54. What do you understand by affixation?

Ans. Affixation is the morphological process whereby an affix is attached to a root or stem.

Q.55. What are the different ways of word formation?

Ans. Some other methods of word formation are reduplication, clipping, acronyms, blend formation.

Q.56. What is Immediate Constituent Analysis?

Ans. Immediate Constituent Analysis deals with the immediate binary division of a sentence.

Q.57 What is phrase structure grammar?

Ans. The analysis of a sentence into different constitutes is called phrase structure grammar.

Q.58. What is transformational grammar?

Ans. A transformational grammar or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Chomskyan tradition.

Q.59. What is syntactic analysis?

Ans. Syntactic analysis is an area of linguistics which studies the syntactic models.

Q.60. What is lexis?

Ans. A lexis is the total word-stock or lexicon having items of lexical rather than grammatical, meaning,

Q.61. Discuss the stratification grammar?

Ans. Stratification grammar is a system of grammar that analyzes language as systems of strata, including phonemic, morphemic, lexemic, and semantic strata.

Q.62. What is a grammatical category?

Ans: A grammatical category is a set of syntactic features that

• express meanings from the same conceptual domain
• occur in contrast to each other, and
• are typically expressed in the same fashion.

Q.63. What is semantics?

Ans. Semantics is the study of the meaning of words and phrase in a language.

Q.64. What is meaning?

Ans. Meaning, what is expressed by the writer or speaker, and what is conveyed to the reader or listener.

Q.65. How many kinds “meaning” have?

Ans. There are seven kinds of meaning:

1. Conceptual meaning
2. Cultural meaning
3. Individual meaning
4. The logical or denotative meaning
5. The connotative meaning
6. The social meaning
7. The thematic meaning

Q.66. What is sentence meaning?

Ans. Sentence meaning is a combination of lexical and grammatical meaning.

Q.67. What is difference between Collocation and Set?

Ans. Collocation is outside grammar; it had no connection with the classes of the word, it is syntahmatic. Set is the closest analogy to the grammatical system.

Q.68. What is difference between Semantics and Pragmatics?

Ans. Semantics is concerned with word and sentence meaning, while pragmatics entails utterance meaning.

Q.69. What is Discourse Analysis?

Ans. Discourse analysis is a qualitative method that has been adopted and developed by social constructionists.

Q.70. What is a Cohesion?

Ans. Cohesion is the grammatical and lexical relationship within a text or sentence. Cohesion can be defined as the links that hold a text together and give it meaning.

 Q.71. How many types of Cohesion are?

Ans. There are two main types of cohesion: grammatical, referring to the structural Content, and lexical, referring to the language content of the piece.

Q.72. What is the difference between coherence and cohesion?

Ans. Cohesion is a mix of pragmatic & semantic meaning. It depends on linguistic expressions. Coherence is a clearly pragmatic notion. It concerns logical thinking.

Q.73. What does Lexicon mean?

Ans. In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. More formally, it is a language’s inventory of lexemes.

Q.74. What is a register?

Ans. A register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting.

Q.75. What is Parataxis?

Ans. Parataxis is a literary technique, in writing or speaking, that favors short, simple sentences, without the use of coordinating or subordinating conjunctions. It can be contrasted with hypotaxis.

Q.76. What does Hypotaxis mean?

Ans. Hypotaxis is the grammatical arrangement of functionally similar but “unequal” constructs, i.e., constructs playing an unequal role in a sentence.

Q.77. What does Pidgin language mean?

Ans. A pidgin language is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common.

Q.78. What is Creole?

Ans. A Creole is a well-defined and stable language that originated from a non-trivial combination of two or more languages, typically with many distinctive features that are not inherited from either parent.

Q.79. What is difference between Creole and pidgin language?

Ans. Pidgin is a language made up of elements of two or more other languages and weed for contacts between the speakers of other languages. Creole is a language that has its origin in extended contact between two language communities.

Q.80. What do you mean by lingua franca?

Ans. A lingua franca is a language systematically used to communicate between persons not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both persons’ mother tongues.

Q.81. What is a dialect?

Ans. A dialect is a regional variant of a language distinguished by minimal lexical. grammatical, or phonological (pronunciation) differences from variants of the same language.

Q.82. What is diglossia?

Ans. Diglossia refers to a situation in which two dialects or languages are used by a single language community.

Q.83. What do you mean by code switching?

Ans. Code-switching is a linguistics term denoting the concurrent use of more than one language, or language variety, in conversation.

Q.84. What do you understand by Isogloss?

Ans. An isogloss is the geographical boundary of a certain linguistic feature, such as the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or use of some syntactic feature.

Q.85. How would you define the idiolect?

Ans. In linguistics, an idiolect is a variety of a language unique to an individual. It is manifested by patterns of vocabulary or idiom selection, grammar, or pronunciations that are unique to the individual.

Q.86. How many types of discourse are?

Ans. There are different types of discourse:

1. Informative
2. Narrative
3. Argumentative

Q.87. What is the aim of discourse analysis?

Ans. The aim of discourse analysis is the investigation of language functions along with its forms.

Q.88. What are the links within discourse?

Ans. Links in discourse analysis are divided into two groups:

1. formal
2. contextual

Q.89. What does Grammar mean?

Ans. In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of sentences, phrases, and words in any given natural language.

Q.90. How many types of grammar are?

Ans. There are different types of grammar:

1. Formal grammar
2. Generative grammar
3. Systematic functional grammar
4. Lexical functional grammar

Q.91. What is generative grammar?

Ans. Generative grammar is a branch of theoretical linguistics that works to provide a set of rules that can accurately predict which combinations of words are able to make grammatically correct sentences.

Q.92. What is a noun phrase?

Ans. In grammar, a noun phrase is a phrase whose head is a noun or a pronoun, optionally accompanied by a modifier set.

Q.93. How would you define verb phrase?

Ans. A verb phrase is a syntactic structure composed of the predicative elements of a sentence and its function is to provide information about the subject of the sentence.

Q.94. What is an adverb phrase?

Ans. An adverbial, or adverbial phrase is a linguistic term for a group of two or more words operating adverbially, when viewed in terms of their syntactic function.

Q.95. What is an adjective phrase?

Ans. An adjectival phrase or adjective phrase is a group of words in a sentence with an adjective which describes the noun.

Q.96. What are conjunctions?

Ans. In grammar, á conjunction is a part of speech that connects two words, phrases or clauses together.

Q.97. What are determiners?

Ans. A determiner is a noun-modifier that expresses the reference of a noun or noun-phrase in the context, rather than attributes expressed by adjectives.

Q.98. What is micro-sociolinguistics?

Ans. Micro-sociolinguistics explores the ways in which society influences à speaker’s idiolect – meaning the specific language of a person – and how people communicate with one another in line with different social variables/factors.

Q.99. What is the relationship between language and culture?

Ans. Language is the verbal expression of culture. A culture’s language contains everything its speakers can think about and every way they have of thinking about things.

Q.100. What does psycholinguistics focus on?

Ans. An important focus of psycholinguistics is the largely unconscious application of grammatical rules that enable people to produce and comprehend intelligible sentences.

Q.101. What is Language Acquisition?

Ans. Language acquisition is the study of how a person learns a language. Sometimes it can refer to second language acquisition, which means how a person learns a second language.

Q.102. How does Children Acquire Language?

Ans. Children acquire their language skills from parents and other people around them.

Q.103. What is Bilingualism?

Ans. Bilingualism means, when a person can speak more than one language. Many people have learned other languages that they can speak on a daily basis.

Q.104. What is the difference between applied linguistics and descriptive linguistics?

Ans. Applied linguistics is the application of linguistics theories and findings in order to solve the language related problems while, descriptive linguistics is the field of linguistics that is concern with the description of two languages.

Q.105. What are the four language skills in English?

Ans. 1. Speaking

2. Listening comprehension
3. Reading
4. Writing

Q.106. What is the importance of listening and speaking skills?

Ans. Speaking and Listening are the two essential language skills. Without a speaker and a listener, there can be no language at all.

Q.107. What is the importance of reading and writing skills?

Ans. Reading and Writing allow us to preserve and archive language. If you are able to speak and listen, you can communicate – but you have no way to preserve such communication.

Q.108. What is linguistics?

Ans. Linguistics is the scientific study of language. There are three aspects to this study: language form, language meaning, and language in context.

Q.109. What is Phonetics?

Ans. Phonetics studies acoustic and articulatory properties of the production and perception of speech sounds and non-speech sounds.

Q.110. What is lexicon?

Ans. The lexicon is a catalogue of words and terms that are stored in a speaker’s mind. The lexicon consists of words and bound morphemes, which are words that can’t stand alone, like affixes.

Q.111. What do you know about lexicography?

Ans. Lexicography, closely linked with the domain of semantics, is the science of mapping the words into an encyclopedia or a dictionary.

Q.112. What is discourse?

Ans. A discourse is a way of speaking that emerges within a certain social setting and is based on a certain subject matter. A particular discourse becomes a language variety when it is used in this way for a particular purpose, and is referred to as a register.

Q.113. What do you know about dialect?

Ans. A dialect is a variety of language that is characteristic of a particular group among the language speakers. The group of people who are the speakers of a dialect are usually bound to each other by social identity.

Q.114. Phonology deals which field of linguistics?

Ans. It is the study of sounds as abstract elements in the speaker’s mind that distinguish meaning (phonemes).

Q.115. What is Morphology?

Ans. Morphology is the study of morphemes, or the internal structures of words and how they can be modified.

Q.116. What is syntax?

Ans. It is the study of how words combine to form grammatical phrases and sentences

Q.117. What do you know about Semantics?

Ans. It is the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics) and fixed word combinations (phraseology), and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences.

Q.118. What is Pragmatics?

Ans. It is the study of how utterances are used in communicative acts, and the role played by context and non-linguistic knowledge in the transmission of meaning

Q.119. What is discourse analysis?

Ans. It is the analysis of language use in texts (spoken, written, or signed)

Q.120. What is Stylistics?

Ans. It is the study of linguistic factors (rhetoric, diction, stress) that place a discourse in context.

Q.121. What is Semiotics?

Ans. It is the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication.

Q.122. How many stylistic features are?

Ans. Stylistic features include rhetoric, diction, stress, satire, irony, dialogue, and other forms of phonetic variations. Stylistic analysis can also include the study of language in canonical works of literature, popular fiction, news, advertisements, and other forms of communication in popular culture as well.

Q.123. How does anthropology effect linguistics?

Ans. The use of anthropological methods of investigation on linguistic sources leads to the discovery of certain cultural traits among a speech community through its linguistic features.

Q.124. What does the functional theories of language propose?

Ans. Functional theories of language propose that since language is fundamentally a tool, it is reasonable to assume that its structures are best analyzed and understood with, reference to the functions they carry out.

Q.125. What is the phonological function?

Ans. Phonological function is the function of the phoneme is to distinguish between different lexical material.

Q.126. What is syntactic function?

Ans. This function defines different perspectives in the presentation of a linguistic expression.

Q.127. What do you know about pragmatic functions?

Ans. Pragmatic functions defining the informational status of constituents, determined by the pragmatic context of the verbal interaction. Functional descriptions of grammar strive to explain how linguistic functions are performed in communication through the use of linguistic forms.

Q.128. What does the historical linguistics teach us?

Ans. Historical linguists study the history of specific languages as well as general characteristics of language change. The study of language change is also referred to as “diachronic linguistics” (the study of how one particular language has changed over time), which can be distinguished from “synchronic linguistics”.

Q.129. What do you understand by Sociolinguistics?

Ans. Sociolinguistics is the study of how language is shaped by social factors. This sub-discipline focuses on the synchronic approach of linguistics, and looks at how a language in general, or a set of languages, display variation and varieties at a given point in time.

Q.130. What is the role of Applied Linguistics?

Ans. Applied linguistics takes the results of those findings and “applies” them to other areas. Linguistic research is commonly applied to areas such as language education, lexicography, translation, language planning, which involves governmental policy implementation related to language use, and natural language processing.

Q.131. What do you understand by the term Articulatory phonetics?

Ans. Articulatory phonetics is concerned with the articulation of speech: The position shape, and movement of articulators or speech organs, such as the lips, tongue, and vocal folds.

Q.132. What is Acoustic phonetics?

Ans. Acoustic phonetics is concerned with acoustics of speech: The spectro-temporal properties of the sound waves produced by speech, such as their frequency, amplitude, and harmonic structure.

Q.133. Discuss briefly Auditory phonetics.

Ans. Auditory phonetics is concerned with speech perception: the perception categorization, and recognition of speech sounds and the role of the auditory system and the brain in the same.

Q.134. What do you understand by Phonetic transcription?

Ans. Phonetic transcription is a system for transcribing sounds that occur in a language, whether oral or sign. The most widely known system of phonetic transcription, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), provides a standardized set of symbols for oral phones.

Q.135. What is stop in Phonetics?

Ans. It is an oral occlusive, where there is occlusion (blocking) of the oral vocal tract, and no nasal air flow, so the air flow stops completely. Examples include English /p t k/ (voiceless) and /b d g/ (voiced). If the consonant is voiced, the voicing is the only sound made during occlusion; if it is voiceless, a stop is completely silent.

Q.136. What is nasal in Phonetics?

Ans. a nasal occlusive, where there is occlusion of the oral tract, but air passes through the nose. The shape and position of the tongue determine the resonant cavity that gives different nasals their characteristic sounds.

Examples include English /m, n/.

Q.137. What are Fricatives?

Ans. sometimes called spirant, where there is continuous frication (turbulent and noisy airflow) at the place of articulation. Examples include English /f, s/ (voiceless), /v, z/ (voiced), etc. Most languages have fricatives, though many have only an /s/.

Q.138. How many types of Fricatives are?

Ans. Sibilants are a type of fricative where the airflow is guided by a groove in the tongue toward the teeth, creating a high-pitched and very distinctive sound. These are by far the most common fricatives. Fricatives at coronal (front of tongue) places of articulation are usually, though not always, sibilants. English sibilants include /s/ and /z/.

Lateral fricatives are a rare type of fricative, where the frication occurs on one or both sides of the edge of the tongue. The “ll” of Welsh and the “hl” of Zulu are lateral fricatives.

Q.139. What is Affricate?

Ans. It begins like a stop, but this releases into a fricative rather than having a separate release of its own. The English letters “ch” (tS) and “j” (d3) represent affricates. Affricates are quite common around the world, though less common than fricatives.

Q.140. What is Approximant?

Ans. Approximant, where there is very little obstruction. Examples include English /w/ and /r/. In some languages, such as Spanish, there are sounds that seem to fall between fricative and approximant.

Q.141. What are vocal cords?

Ans. thin strips of muscle in the larynx which can be open, in voiceless sounds, or close together, creating vibration in voiced sounds.

Q.142. What are voiceless words?

Ans. When the vocal folds are spread apart, the air from the lungs passes between them unimpeded. Sounds produced in this way are described as voiceless.

Q.143. What are voiced words?

Ans. When the vocal folds are drawn together, the air from the lungs rep pushes them apart as it passes through, creating a vibration effect. Sounds produced in way are described as voiced.

Q.144. What do you understand by the term Eponyms?

Ans. New words based on the name of a person or a place are called eponyms.

Q.145. What do you understand by the term hypocorisms?

Ans. In this process, a longer word is reduced to a single syllable, then -y or -je is added to the end. This is the process that results in movie (“moving pictures”) and telly (“television”).

Q.146. What are Acronyms?

Ans. Acronyms are new words formed from the initial letters of a set of other words These can be forms such as CD (“compact disk”) or VCR (“video cassette recorder”) where the pronunciation consists of saying each separate letter.

Q.147. What is analogy?

Ans. whereby new words are formed to be similar in some way to existing words.

Q.148. Which morphemes are free?

Ans. Free morphemes can function independently as words (e.g. town, dog) and can appear with other lexemes (e.g. town hall, doghouse).

Q.149. Which morphemes are called Bound?

Ans. Bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, always in conjunction with a root and sometimes with other bound morphemes. For example, un-appears only accompanied by other morphemes to form a word.

Q.150. What morphemes are called Derivational?

Ans. Derivational morphemes, when combined with a root, change either semantic meaning or part of speech of the affected word. For example, in word happiness, the addition of the bound morpheme -ness to the root happy changes the word from an adjective (happy) to a noun (happiness). In the word unkind, un- functions as a derivational morpheme, for it inverts the meaning of the word formed by the root kind

Q.151. What are Inflectional morphemes?

Ans. Inflectional morphemes modify a verb’s tense or a noun’s number without affecting the word’s meaning or class. Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to the root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited. In English, there are eight inflections.