Pg42-45

Question 1

What type of evidence do linguists prefer? Why?

Answer 1

Distributional

It is the most reliable.

Question 2

Other types of evidence?

Answer 2

Morphological

Semantic

Question 3

Morphological evidence

Answer 3

consists primarily in detecting what kinds of inflections a word will take.

Question 4

One covert infection?

used when?

Answer 4

plain present

for first-person past tense

Question 5

plain form

Answer 5

used for commands, irrealis, and in combination with modal verbs

Question 6

NOTE: Altough the “plain” form is identical in form as the “plain present” form it is associated with different morphemes.

Answer 6

John is here -plain present
John should be here - plain
“be” fits in after the modal, because it is unconjugated.

Question 7

participial adjectives

Answer 7

adjectives derived from participle forms of verbs

Question 8

Problems with morphological tests (2)

Answer 8

1. inflectional morphemes often have a variant form (allomorph)
   (run-ran): employ vowel change for past tense
   (buy-bought) : change both very and final consonant
2. A more serious problem: the occurrence of identical forms that are not inflections at all
   (write-writer)

Question 9

derivational evidence

Answer 9

weakest and least reliable morphological evidence.

Question 10

Problems with derivational evidence (2)

Answer 10

1. there are a great many derivational morphemes, and some of them share the same forms, or sometimes part of the root morpheme may have the same form as a derivational morpheme.

Ex. -ish 
fish
finish
-not the adjective morpheme in words like 
selfish, foolish

2. conversion

Question 11

many adverbs are formed with a derivational suffix -ly usually attached to adjectives
however there are other -ly words that are not adverbs

Answer 11

chilly
silly
alley
sally

Question 12

what is conversion

Answer 12

change in syntactical category with no corresponding change in form

Question 13

Can morphological evidence stand alone as evidence of syntactic category?

Answer 13

NO