Quiz created: 2021-08-29

Review Quiz (Parts IV-V: Classification of Experience, Language & Thought)

Instructions: Answer the multiple choice questions, guessing if necessary; then click on the "Process Questions" button at the end of the quiz to see your score in the adjacent message box. The program will not reveal which questions you got wrong, only how many points you have. Go back and change your answers until you get them all right. (The message box will rejoice at that point and the page will change color to show it is tickled pink.)

Points to note: (1) Questions with only one possible answer are one point each. (2) Questions with one or more possible answers (represented by check boxes) give a point for each correct answer, but also subtract a point for each wrong answer! (3) The program will not attempt to score your efforts at all if you have not tried at least half of the questions. (4) This quiz is for your own use only. No record of your progress is kept or reported to anyone.

1. Words may be single morphemes or may be compounds of many morphemes. This is not a matter of syllables, but of the structure of the word. Which TWO of the following polysyllabic English words are themselves single morphemes?
Mississippi 
agitated 
smashed 
rotating 
influenza 
eats 
2. Anthropologists have been interested in “polysemy,” that is
words with more than one meaning 
words derived from ancient Greek 
words shared by four or more languages 
words for numbers 
the use of a turn of phrase to mean more than the sum of its parts 
the linguistic study of profanity and obscenity 
No Answer
3. The essay argues that semantic change is a continuing process, and gives the modern examples of “drone,” “nest egg,” and “geek.” Obviously technology can produce a change in the primary semantic field of a word used for a new technological item, but another source of change mentioned is [SELECT TWO]
contamination of a term by its frequent application to something or someone disagreeable 
phonetic similarity to a word that is undesirable 
the specialized use of a word or phrase by a popular author 
the rise of a religious movement with a specialized meaning for the term 
borrowing of a homonymous word in a different language, causing the original word to be abandoned as confusing 
cute baby talk that gets picked up in a family and spreads to other people 
4. Zamenhof
was unaware of semantic evolution 
chose to ignore semantic evolution since Esperanto’s internationalism would mean gradual change would not obscure communication 
believed that a well constructed language would not be subject to semantic evolution 
No Answer
5. Anthropologists became interested in semantics specifically in the context of sets of related words, such as color terms, and it developed that
the number of primary color terms is identical in all languages 
people’s ability to perceive a color was a function of their ability to name it, so that people speaking “two-color languages” could effectively see only “in black and white” 
color terms do not align perfectly across languages 
No Answer
6. Some anthropologists tried to develop “decision trees” to identify the relations among related terms. An example in the text involved nine words for rice in Taiwan. The text argues that
this method shows an order and logic among the words, but not the mental process of a fluent speaker 
this method enables us to get “inside the mind” of a fluent speaker to see how rice is understood 
this method tells us nothing at all, since the category “rice” is imposed from English; for a speaker in Taiwan each of the terms applies to something entirely different from each other term and there is no such thing as “rice” as such. 
No Answer
7. A contrasting analysis used “components” to describe the differences between verbs meaning “to be” and “discovered” two binary contrasts: present/absent and desirable/undesirable. This method, like the decision tree, sought to predict (or retrodict) how a speaker would express or understand an idea. The essay argues that, unlike the words for rice, this example tells us something about
the speaker’s attitude 
the relativity of the ideas of good and bad 
the inadequacy of English as a translation language 
the inherent superiority of componential analysis over decision-tree analysis 
No Answer
8. Two different presentations of Esperanto kinship terms are provided, one a traditional “family tree” and one a componential analysis. The text notes that the Esperanto system
carefully distinguishes links through women from those through men and therefore has different words for “uncle” as a mother’s brother and “uncle” as a father’s brother 
would look far more complex if terms for in-laws were included, but the system is simple, and the complexity would be almost entirely because of the awkwardness of how componential analyses are displayed 
is ultimately based on Hebrew 
No Answer
9. The section concludes that componential analysis, which has largely been abandoned, has difficulty dealing with relations of inclusion (republic/state/county/city/ward) and with
verbs 
names of people 
polysemy 
pseudonyms 
No Answer
10. The name of Benjamin Lee Whorf has long been associated with the provocative possibility that
the language you speak influences the way you see the world 
there is no such thing as translation 
men and women perceive the world differently 
languages in which pronouns encode gender are generally spoken in the northern hemisphere 
No Answer
11. Experiments by Harold Bloom revealed startling language-based differences in the way that English and Chinese university students processed
statements about geography 
counterfactual statements 
color terms 
expressions about time and the sequencing of events 
No Answer

      Points out of 13:


Awesomeness
Score
Awesomeness Score: The following awesomeness score is a measure of how much guessing you did to get all items right. It is 100 if you got all questions right when you clicked the process button for the first time. It gets proportionately lower if it took more clicks, until it hits 0 if your clicks exceeded the number of questions.



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This consummately cool, pedagogically compelling, self-correcting,
multiple-choice quiz was produced automatically from
a simple text file of questions using D.K. Jordan's
dubiously original, but publicly accessible
Think Again Quiz Maker
of April 9, 2021.