ENG508 Midterm Past Papers Spring 2025

ENG508

Mid-Term

ABSTRACT This comprehensive collection of notes is accurately crafted to empower students to excel academically, ensuring they achieve a minimum of 80% marks in their examinations. The content is organized with clarity and precision, focusing on key concepts, critical analyses, and practical applications tailored to the syllabus. These notes serve as a reliable resource for both thorough preparation and last-minute revision. Designed to inspire confidence and mastery, this guide is an essential tool for students striving for academic excellence.

Maha Malik

Spring 2025

Q. Modality

Modality is a linguistic category that modifies the meaning of an event or action by expressing the speaker's attitude.

•  Epistemic Modality: Indicates the degree of certainty or belief (e.g., " He must be at home").
•  Deontic Modality: Relates to permission, obligation, and necessity (e.g., " You must finish your homework").

Q. Hyponyms

Hyponymy is a semantic relationship where the meaning of one word (the hyponym) is included in another (the superordinate).

Example: " Dog" is a hyponym of "animal"; "rose" is a hyponym of "flower".

Q. Leech’s Five Functions of Language

Leech proposed five functions of language:

•  Informational: Conveying content or factual information.
•  Expressive: Expressing the speaker's emotions or attitudes.
•  Directive: Influencing the behavior of others (commands, requests).
•  Aesthetic: Language used for its own sake (e.g., poetry).
•  Phatic: Maintaining social relationships (e.g., greetings).
•  Transitive Verbs: Require an object. E.g., " She ate an apple."
•  Intransitive Verbs: Do not require an object. E.g., " He laughed."

Causativity is related, where an agent causes an action (e.g., " He made her cry").

Q. Characteristics of Color Terms

Berlin and Kay (1969) outlined four criteria for basic color terms:

1. Monolexemic – Not compound (e.g., "blue", not "blue-grey").
2. Not a hyponym – Not a subtype of another color (e.g., "red" vs. "scarlet").
3. Wide applicability – Used across many contexts.
4. Not derived from an object – E.g., "turquoise" (from a stone) is not basic.

English has eleven basic color terms (e.g., red, blue, green).

Q. Utterance Semantics & Semantics in Model of Grammar

•  Utterance Semantics: Focuses on how meaning is constructed in actual speech, including context and speaker intention.
•  Semantics in a Model of Grammar: Semantics is one component of grammar, alongside syntax and phonology. It's responsible for assigning meaning to syntactic structures.

Q. Distinction between Grammar and Lexicon

•  Grammar: Concerns rules for combining words (syntax, morphology).
•  Lexicon: Deals with word meanings.

Chomsky’s sentence " Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is grammatically correct but lexically nonsensical—illustrating their separation.

Q. Idea Theory of Meaning

The Idea Theory (or Mentalist Theory) posits that meaning is a mental image or idea in the mind of the speaker or hearer. This view has been criticized for being too subjective and failing to explain how communication is successful when mental images vary.

Q. Hyponymy and Polysemy

•  Hyponymy: As noted, a "type-of" relationship (e.g., "rose" is a type of "flower").
•  Polysemy: A single word with multiple related meanings. E.g., "hook" can mean a curved object, a fish-hook, or a trap—all related in meaning.

Q. Berlin and Kay: Universal Inventory of Colors

Berlin and Kay (1969) proposed that:

•  Basic color terms are monolexemic, not hyponyms, have wide applicability, and are not derived from objects.
•  English has 11 basic color terms: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and grey.

Q. Presupposition

Presupposition is what a speaker assumes to be true before making an utterance.

Example: “The king of France is bald” presupposes that there is a king of France.

Types include: existential, factive, non-factive, lexical, structural, and counterfactual.

Presupposition failure leads to truth-value gaps.

•  Transitive: Requires an object (e.g., He ate food).