1. State the difference between linguistic competence and linguistic performance.

Competence - idealized capacity for language, underlying grammatical architecture

in the mind
Performance - actual production of utterances

2. Explain with examples two basic properties of human of language.

- Displacement is the property of human language that allows language users to talk
about things and events not present in the immediate moment. Humans can use language
to refer to the past, present and future e.g.last night, now, next week or can even talk about
things and places whose existence we cannot be sure of. e.g. angels, fairies, Superman,
Santa Claus, heaven, hell

- Productivity(creativity/ open-endlessness): The capability of humans to

continually create new expressions and utterances to describe new objects and
situations

- Arbitrariness: Generally, there is no natural connection between a linguistic form

and its meaning.
e.g: Dog in English and in Arabic or Anjing in Malay.

- Cultural transmission: The process whereby a language is passed on from one

generation to the next.
e.g: Acquiring 1st language as children in a culture.

- Duality is one of the most economical featuresof human language (with a limited
set of discrete sounds, we are capable of producing a very large number of sound
combinations (e.g. words))
e.g: individual discrete sounds (e.g. g, d,& o) mean nothing separately but
they take on meaning only when they are combined together in various
ways (e.g. god/dog)

3. Identify the place of articulation for the following sounds.

a. // dental

b. // velar

4. Give the phonetic symbols representing the following descriptions and provide one word to
illustrate the sound.

a. A voiceless alveolar fricative: [s] eg: has, soon

b. A voiced bilabial stop: [b] eg: bin, bun

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5. Transcribe the following sentences using phonetic alphabets.

a. Sometimes we go for a walk on a Sunday.

smtamz wi fr wk n snde

b. Last September we decided to do the canal walk.

lst septemb wi dsadd t d knl wk

Question 6, 7 and 8 are based on Text 1.

Text 1

The shop smelt of musty old clothes and you had to push past nylon minidresses

and moth-eaten fur coats to get to the mens section, which was much smaller

than the womens and right at the back. The assistant looked as though she lived

there, getting up every morning and deciding which of the clothes in the shop to

wear. Today it was the purple taffeta dress with a thick grey cardigan and a beige

felt hat. She was friendly: How old is your son? Seventeen? I get a lot of mothers

in here. Is he like you in size? There was a slight accent. German, maybe, or

Polish. The assistant made her try on the jacket it was an old one, she said,

woollen rather than polyester, and double-breasted. Nicer than the James Bond

style dinner jacket theyd seen in the window. She liked it, though it looked silly

on her. Emily got the giggles when the assistant said Remember there will be no

bust. She didnt need reminding!

6. Identify two free and two bound morphemes from the given text.

Free morpheme shop, slight, remind.

Bound morpheme -ing, -en, -ly.

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7. Define the given terms and cite two examples from the given text.

a. Inflections

- a process of word formation in which items are added to the base form of a word to
express grammatical meanings
- is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as
tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, and mood.
e.g: clothes, mens, looked, smaller.

b. Compounding
- when two or more words are joined to make one longer word.
- the process of combining two words to create a new word

e.g: moth-eaten, mini-dresses, double-breasted.

8. Identify a phrase from the text for the following phrasal categories.

a. noun phrase grey cardigan, musty old clothes

b. adjective phrase friendly, much smaller

c. prepositional phrase in the window, in the shop

d. verb phrase looked silly

9. Draw phrase structure trees that represent the two different meanings of the given sentence.

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The man attacked the girl with a knife.

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10. Name the structural/sense relation expressed by each of the following pairs of words

a. employ/use synonymy

b. glass/tumbler superordinate-hyponym

c. predator/prey converseness

11. Explain with an example the concept of lexical field.

-The vocabulary of a language is not simply a listing of independent items, but is

organized into areas or fields.
- The members of a list of vocabulary which are joined together by some common
semantic component.
- The whole vocabulary can be divided up into fields.
- Words in each field are semantically related and define one another. Vocabulary is
seen as an integrated system of lexemes interrelated in sense.

Eg: street, alley, lane, path, avenue