UGC-NET (NTA) Linguistics, February-2023

The criterion of 'obligatoriness' to characterize inflection was proposed by Joseph H. Greenberg. This criterion defines inflection as a grammatical phenomenon that is obligatory in applicable contexts within a language. For example, in English, pluralization of nouns or past tense marking of verbs is obligatory in the right contexts. This separates it from derivational morphology which is not obligatory but can be used to create new words or alter word classes.

The seminal research article titled 'Two models of grammatical description' was written by Charles F. Hockett. In this work, Hockett compares two broad approaches to describing the structure of languages: the 'taxonomic' and the 'generative' models. The taxonomic model, influenced by the behaviorist psychology of the time, presents language as a system of habits, while the generative model, which was being developed by linguists like Noam Chomsky, treats language as a set of underlying rules or structures from which sentences are generated.

"Language and Brain" was not authored by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky, a noted linguist and cognitive scientist, has written extensively on language and cognition, with major works including "Syntactic Structures", "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax", and "Lectures on Government and Binding". However, while Chomsky's theories have significantly influenced our understanding of the language-brain relationship, he has not written a book titled "Language and Brain".

The change from the sentence 'Bresnan criticized Chomsky' to 'Bresnan's criticism of Chomsky' is correctly described as Nominalization. Nominalization is a process by which a verb or an adjective (or other parts of speech) is turned into a noun. In this case, the verb 'criticized' is transformed into the noun 'criticism'. This process can often involve a change in the grammatical structure of the sentence and is used to condense information and create more complex sentences.

Kurux, also known as Kurukh, is a language primarily spoken in the state of Jharkhand and belongs to the Dravidian language family. While the majority of Dravidian languages are spoken in Southern India (like Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam), Kurukh and a few other Dravidian languages are found in central and northern parts of India, providing evidence of the historical spread of the Dravidian language family.

In the sentence 'Chris told Lee [Kim couldn't swim]', the sentence within the brackets, 'Kim couldn't swim', is an example of embedding. This involves the insertion of one clause (the embedded clause) within another (the main clause), resulting in a complex sentence structure. In this case, the sentence 'Kim couldn't swim' is embedded within the larger sentence structure as the content of what Chris told Lee.

The statement 'Hari sings beautifully' entails 'Hari sings'. In linguistics, entailment refers to the relationship between two sentences where the truth of one (the entailment) is necessarily implied by the other (the entailing sentence). If 'Hari sings beautifully' is true, it must necessarily be true that 'Hari sings'. The additional information ('beautifully') in the entailing sentence does not affect the truth of the entailment.

Anandavardhana is considered the first major exponent of verbal symbolism, or dhvani, in Sanskrit poetics. He lived in India during the 9th century and wrote 'Dhvanyaloka', a landmark treatise on the aesthetics of poetry. Anandavardhana's dhvani theory proposed that the true essence of poetry lies not just in the apparent meaning of words, but also in the suggestive, symbolic, and emotional resonance that words can evoke.

The sentence "Walls have ears" is an example of Metaphor. Metaphor is a figure of speech that describes an object or action in a way that isn't literally true, but helps explain an idea or make a comparison. In this sentence, walls, which are inanimate, are metaphorically said to 'have ears', suggesting the idea that one's private conversations may be overheard, or that one is always being listened to.

Thematic roles express the kind of relation that holds between the arguments of the verb and the type of state or action that the verb describes. Also known as semantic roles, these are the roles that entities (like nouns) play in relation to the action or state described by the verb in a sentence. For example, in the sentence "John ate the apple", 'John' is playing the role of the 'agent' (the doer of the action) and 'the apple' is the 'patient' (the entity undergoing the action).