UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
EXAMINATION FOR INTERNAL STUDENTS
MODULE CODE : ENGL0075
ASSESSMENT : ENGL0075A7PD
PATTERN
MODULE NAME : ENGL0075 – Modern English Grammar
LEVEL: : Postgraduate
DATE : 12-May-2022
TIME : 10:00
Controlled Condition Exam: 4 Hours exam
You cannot submit your work after the date and time shown on
AssessmentUCL – you must ensure to allow sufficient time to upload
and hand in your work
This paper is suitable for candidates who attended classes for
this module in the following academic year(s):
Year
Suitable for all
Additional material
Special instructions
Exam paper word
count
The answer to each question should normally not be less than
1,000 words, and must not exceed 1,500 words; any words beyond
the 1,500-word limit will not be marked.
TURN OVER
MA in English Linguistics 2022
Paper 1: Modern English Grammar
Answer three questions.
The answer to each question should normally not be less than 1,000 words, and must not exceed 1,500
words; any words beyond the 1,500-word limit will not be marked.
Candidates must not present substantially the same material in any two answers, whether in this paper or
in other parts of the examination. Candidates must submit their three answers in the form of a single
Word document. No formal bibliographies are required, nor full publication references either in notes or
in parentheses, but candidates should identify the texts from which quotations are drawn.
The exam has a duration of four hours, plus 20 minutes for uploading the document and checking all
technical aspects. Candidates are urged to make use of the full 20 minutes for the uploading of the
document to ensure there are no technical problems with this process.
Candidates must not discuss the assessment with other students and all work submitted must be the
candidate’s own. All submitted work will be checked for similarity by Turnitin. Apart from quotations
from primary or secondary texts, no answer in the submission may replicate material from any tutorial
essay. Submissions will be checked against tutorial work. At particular points an answer may make use
of research and thinking that informed tutorial essays, and comments received in tutorials, but the general
design of the answer and most of the content thereof must amount to new work responding to the
question. Thus, candidates are reminded that they must not ‘cut and paste’ material from tutorial essays
(except quotations from primary and secondary texts) into work submitted for this assessment. It is also
forbidden to ‘cut and paste’ material from online teaching resources (this includes transcripts or audio
files of lectures and postings on Discussion Forums).
1 TURN OVER
1. How would you describe the difference between tense and aspect Use illustrative examples in
your answer.
2. Should the grammar of English allow for gradient phenomena Explain your answer.
3. Provide a motivated formal and functional analysis of the following sentence:
I want the house to be clean on my birthday.
4. EITHER (i):
How could corpora be used to inform our understanding of a speaker’s tendency to repeat or
more easily process a current sentence that is similar in structure to a previously presented
prime
OR (ii):
What do findings of syntactic priming tell us about the representation of language
5. Discuss Huddleston and Pullum’s description of the English noun phrase.
6. Write an essay on the distinction between fused relative clauses and interrogative content
clauses.
7. Does the grammar of English need the notion of ‘catenative verb’ Motivate your answer.
8. English main clauses have a neutral or unmarked word order (or constituent order):
Subject-Verb-Object. Any deviation from that order is marked and gives salience to
whatever constituent it out of its normal neutral position.
(Keith Brown and Jim Miller)
Discuss some examples of constituents which can be said to be out of ‘their normal neutral
position’.
9. Write an essay on adjuncts in English.
10. Write an essay on the distinction between ordinary and raised subjects.
2 CONTINUED
11. Discuss Chomsky’s (1965: 58) comment:
A consideration of the character of the grammar that is acquired, the degenerate quality
and narrowly limited extent of the available data, the striking uniformity of the resulting
grammars, and their independence of intelligence, motivation, and emotional state, over
wide ranges of variation, leave little hope that much of the structure of the language can
be learned by an organism initially uninformed as to its general character.
12. Discuss the features of the comparisons of equality or inequality in the following sentences:
a. Harry is as rude as Howard.
b. *He is as greedy as he is very sneaky.
c. Ellie is ruder than Jakob.
d. It wasn’t so delicious as the advert claimed it was.
e. *The weather wasn’t as hot as I had hoped it would be hot.
f. We all enjoyed it more than we expected to.
g. He predictably chose the same dish as he always did.
13. Describe and discuss the ways in which suffixes in English can be categorised.
3 END OF PAPER
