Answer 1 (i). Compounding, as a word formation process. A compound is a word which is made up wholly of two or more parts which can also occur independently as words. Compounding can also be described as the process by which (usually two but sometimes more) words are combined to form another word. Just like derivation, compounding too is a process of word-formation. The words which result from compounding are ‘new’ words: Not only are they listed separately in the dictionary; they also take inflectional and derivational affixes, and have independent meanings. In every respect they behave as independent words and not merely as combinations of other words. When two words are combined to, form a compound, they lose their independent entities and become parts of the new word. The new word functions as a single word, even if sometimes it is written as two words. The unity of the compound is also the reason why we cannot speak of *a very blacklist or *a very black market. Blacklist and black market, being nouns, cannot be modified by the adverb very, though at heir first element, black, being an adjective, can be modified by very. We can, on the other hand, speak of a very black sky, or of a very black cat, which shows that black sky and black cat are not compounds, but adjective +noun sequences, i.e. Noun phrases. The part of the speech of the whole compound is the same as the part of the speech of the rightmost member of the compound, which is termed the head of the compound. For example, the rightmost member of the compound high chair is a noun (the noun chair); hence, the whole compound is a noun. Answer 1 (ii). Open questions and their structure. An open question is one that allows for many answers unlike closed questions that allows less scope of answering. For instance, to the question “What's it that you're doing?” The reply: I am reading Pride and Prejudice/ The Thakur's well / Oliver Twist; or even I am just counting the words/ sentences in this page or I am doing nothing in particular. The number of possible answers to such a question is open. We cannot answer such by saying yes or no. These questions demand some new information. Since they generally begin with a wh- word, they are called wh-questions. Wh- words include who, what, which, when, where, how, why, whom, and whose. The general structure pattern of such open question is like – wh- + be + Object + V + any part of speech (like noun, gerund etc and it is optional) as shown in examples below: - 1) Who broke the glass? 2) When will you return? 3) Where shall we go from here? 4) Why is she always complaining? 5) What did you buy yesterday? 6) How did you repair it? 7) Which/ Whose books have you given her? Answer 1 (iii). The importance of phonetic symbols. Bal for solution Answer 1 (iv). Stress and rhythm in connected speech. In connected speech we put words together to form phrases and sentences, but we do not stress all the words. As the stress has its own power to change the implied meaning of the sentence, we stress some words in each sentence and leave the others unstressed. Words that are important for the desired meaning of the sentence are only stressed. If the meaning of a sentence does not require any words to be specially stressed, then we stress the content words (like nouns, main verbs, adjectives, adverbs, question words, and demonstrative pronouns) and leave the grammatical words (like articles, prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, and conjunctions) unstressed. If a content word has more than one syllable, we stress only one of its syllables, and it is the syllable which has the stress when the word is said by itself, the rhythm of English speech depends on stressed syllables occurring at regular intervals of time, whatever be the number of unstressed syllables between two stressed syllables. In order to make this happen, we use short or contracted forms of a number of structure words, and these are called their weak forms. It is important to use the weak forms in English speech in order to maintain the rhythm of the speech.
