Lexical relationships

Multiple-choice exercise
ELT Concourse home page

Choose the best answer.

  1. The relationship between cheap and expensive is that they are:
    1.   complementary antonyms
    2.   gradable antonyms
    3.   converse antonyms
    4.   contronyms
  2. In this sentence, He baked a cake, the relationship between He and baked is:
    1.   syntagmatic
    2.   paradigmatic
    3.   lexical
    4.   semantic
  3. The fact that desert can be a verb and a noun (with a stress shift) is an example of:
    1.   homophones
    2.   homonyms
    3.   word building
    4.   homographs
  4. In the sentence, She sold the car, we can replace sold with lost, drove, bought, wrecked etc. but not with words like red, happily, arrive and but.
    This is because the replacement word must:
    1.   be transitive
    2.   be a synonym of sold
    3.   be in the same paradigmatic relationship as sold
    4.   be in the same syntagmatic relationship as sold
  5. The relationship between grinding and poverty is one of:
    1.   binomiality
    2.   strong collocation
    3.   textual collocation
    4.   idiomaticity
  6. The word level can mean many things - a step, a part of a process, a tool for finding horizontal and so on. What is this phenomenon?
    1.   homographs
    2.   polysemy
    3.   synonymy
    4.   homophones
  7. The relationship between house and words such as doors, windows, roof, wall, kitchen, garden, living room, chimney and so on is one of:
    1.   antonymy
    2.   hyponymy
    3.   meronymy
    4.   synecdoche
  8. The lexical set derived from a hypernym such as metal object is probably an unusable concept pedagogically because:
    1.   there aren't enough items to include in the set of hyponyms
    2.   some objects can look the same but be made of a different material
    3.   it will exclude too many common items
    4.   the lexical set which is derived is too large and amorphous
  9. The difference in meaning between pass it to me and fling it over is to do with:
    1.   connotation
    2.   dialect
    3.   style
    4.   register
  10. The words nation, nationalise, nationality, international form part of:
    1.   a word family
    2.   a lexical set
    3.   a shared set of hyponyms
    4.   a lexical field
  11. Which of the following is a hypernym of these hyponyms?
    child, adult, adolescent, youth, teenager, pensioner
    1.   life style
    2.   person
    3.   stage
    4.   age
  12. The words shine, shone, shined, shining, shines form part of:
    1.   a lemma
    2.   a single word
    3.   a lexical set
    4.   a single lexeme
  13. The word read can mean study (as at university) or make sounds from written words (as in reading aloud). This is an example of:
    1.   homography
    2.   polysemy
    3.   hyponymy
    4.   synonymy
  14. The word quarry can mean a place for getting stone or a hunted animal.
    The two instances of the word are:
    1.   homophones
    2.   synonyms
    3.   homonyms
    4.   homographs
  15. Which of the following is a binomial?
    1.   hale and hearty
    2.   out and out
    3.   hook, line and sinker
    4.   as sick as a parrot
  16. the black sheep (of the family) is:
    1.   a lexeme
    2.   a euphemism
    3.   a simile
    4.   a proverb