Sample Questions on Semantics, Pragmatics and Syntax

The questions on the second exam will be similar to the practice exercises. You should be familiar enough with the material that was presented in class to be able to work each problem without doing extensive searching in the text. I recommend looking over the following problems:

The exam will be an open book, open note exam. We will not test your ability to use linguistic methods to analyze examples from different languages.

Sample Problems

What are some problems with the Reference Theory of Meaning?

What is the Usage-based Theory of Meaning?

What is the relation between the semantic extension and semantic intension of break?

Does lying violate Grice’s Cooperative Principle?

What is the difference between presupposition and implicature?

Provide an example of a sentence with a presupposition and state what the presupposition is.

What is the complement of a preposition?

What is the head of a sentence?

Provide an example of syntactic recursion.

Use the movement test to show that a prepositional phrase is a constituent.

What is the difference between syntactic ambiguity and lexical ambiguity?