The purpose of this investigation was to examine the construct validity of a new test, which purports to measure morphology, entitled Test for Examining Expressive Morphology (TEEM) (Shipley, Stone and Sue, 1983). Additional tests of expressive morphology, the Bankson Language Screening Test (BLST) (Bankson, 1977) and the Test of Language Development-Primary (TOLD-P) (Newcomer and Hammill, 1982) were utilized to determine the association of the TEEM with two highly-researched instruments.

iv Abstract The MA thesis examines the word-formation potential of expletive insertion with simple and complex words in English. It represents a linguistic phenomenon that is commonly used by native speakers, shows a certain degree of regularity and has gained popularity with the rise of the Internet, social media and the movie industry. The theoretical part introduces the previous studies on the phenomenon and presents the basic features of the phenomenon, namely the categorization of inserts and the classification of their positions in terms of the structure of the base as outlined by McMillan (1980). The extraction of the sample is described in the methodology section. The empirical part examines the phenomenon's main principles of use governed by prosody and morphology and illustrates the properties and both regularities and irregularities that the process exhibits (predictable insert position, poly-syllabicity of the base, its unchanged meaning and syntactic category, alternative categories of input bases and morphematic discontinuity of bases). The analysis comprises of two main parts: the study of the inserted bases (word-class, type of base, simple vs. complex, and a number of syllables) and the study of the expletive insert (representation of individual inserts and their position relative to stress...

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal