General Linguistics 2022

READING COMPREHENSION TEST

“THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE” by George Yule
“The sound patterns of language”, “Word formation” and “Morphology”

Name: _________________________ Section: ______ Date: ________________ Score: ________

PART I: THE SOUND PATTERNS OF LANGUAGE

1. What is phonology? What does it englobe?

2. What are phonemes? Explain why we use them and what they represent.

3. What is(are) the difference(s) between phonemes and allophones? How do minimal pairs relate
to this?

4. What are coarticulation effects and how do these relate to normal speech? Explain them.

PART II: WORD FORMATION

1. Is there any relationship between etymology and entomology?

2. Mention and briefly explain 5 processes of word formation.

3. Explain what Yule (2010) meant by stating: “There must be something about educational
environments that encourages clipping because so many words get reduced, as in
chem, exam, gym, lab, math, phys-ed, poly- sci, prof and typo” Which process did he refer
to?
General Linguistics 2022

4. Identify which processes of word formation are present in the following sentences:
a) Blondie should pick the phone ASAP, so she can babysit the kids before ‘Spanglish’ starts.

b) Okay, let me google wallpapers of a dirty piano.

PART III: MORPHOLOGY

1. What are morphemes? What is(are) its function(s) in morphology?

2. What is the main difference between free and bound morphemes? What are its sub-groups?
Provide 2 examples for derivational and inflectional morphemes, and 2 examples for lexical and
functional morphemes.

3. What are morphological descriptions and what is the discussion about it?

4. According to you, why did the author dedicated a whole section to examine other languages’
morphology?