Section 4: Practice Exercises

The practice exercises on this page are designed to help you understand the concepts in this section more fully. These include a set of interactive exercises and a set of more complex exercises. For those looking for more samples to review, you can go to the ANALYZING EXAMPLES page.

The table below contains the interactive exercises for Section 4, covering the key concepts. Each exercise will open a new tab.

Inflectional Morphemes

  1. Inflectional
  2. Inflectional
  3. Inflectional
  4. Inflectional
  5. Inflectional
  6. Inflectional
  7. Inflectional
  8. Inflectional
  9. Inflectional
  10. Inflectional
  11. Inflectional
  12. Inflectional

Form-Class
Words

  1. Form Class
  2. Form Class
  3. Form Class
  4. Form Class
  5. Form Class
  6. Form Class
  7. Form Class
  8. Form Class
  9. Form Class
  10. Form Class
  11. Form Class
  12. Form Class

Structure-Class Words

  1. Structure Class
  2. Structure Class
  3. Structure Class
  4. Structure Class
  5. Structure Class
  6. Structure Class
  7. Structure Class
  8. Structure Class
  9. Structure Class
  10. Structure Class
  11. Structure Class
  12. Structure Class

All Words in the Sentence

  1. Each Word
  2. Each Word
  3. Each Word
  4. Each Word
  5. Each Word
  6. Each Word
  7. Each Word
  8. Each Word
  9. Each Word
  10. Each Word
  11. Each Word
  12. Each Word

Please review the INTERACTIVE ANSWERS page for explanations of select interactive exercises.

Below are three practice exercises that are more complex:

Exercise 1

Analyze the following sentences from The Argument Culture by Deborah Tannen:

    1. The increasingly adversarial spirit of our contemporary lives is fundamentally related to a phenomenon that has been much remarked upon in recent years: the breakdown of a sense of community.
    2. Distinguished journalist Orville Schell points out that in his day journalists routinely based their writing on a sense of connection to their subjects, and that this sense of connection is missing from much that is written by journalists today.
    3. Community norms and pressures exercise a restraint on the expression of hostility and destruction.
  • Identify all inflectional morphemes in Sentence 1, Sentence 2, and Sentence 3
  • Identify all structure-class words in Sentence 1 and Sentence 2

Exercise 2

Analyze the following sentences from Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand:

Over the telephone late that night, Riddle and Swope talked it out. Riddle had a habit of raising his voice to a blasting volume when on the phone. He was booming so loudly that a man in the room with Swope said he would have had to leap out the window to avoid hearing every word. Riddle barked his assent. After having demanded, and received, the concession that the race be held in the spring, Riddle grumbled that his horse would really do better against an older horse in the fall. Nevertheless, he said, he was willing to go ahead with a spring race.

Howard picked up the telephone at his Burlingame home and gave Swopes his acceptance. The Arlington officials bowed out gracefully. The news rippled over the world. The race, anticipated to be the greatest in the sport’s history, was on.

  • List and identify all structure-class words in the passage

Exercise 3

Analyze the following sentence adapted from Supersizing the MInd by Andy Clark:

There is thus ample and mounting evidence for preserved representations of rather more information than the work on change blindness might initially have seemed to suggest.

  • Identify each word in the sentence by its form-class or structure-class designation.
  • Identify each form-class word’s function if it differs from the form.

Consult the COMPLEX ANSWERS page to review your understanding of the concepts in this sections.