TROPES
Using the classic boundaries established for the Four Master Tropes, select the master trope that is the best fit for the bolded phrase or word in the sentences below. In terms of ‘best fit’, there can be only one correct answer, so be sure to pay attention to the nuances of the possible boundaries between tropes.
Question 1 (1 point)
“An exasperated hand poured a saucer of tea for her little dog.”
Question 1 options:
metonymy
metaphor
irony
synecdoche
Question 2
“The Law, who was present, stood with the smile of an elder brother for the younger’s indiscretion.”
Question 2 options:
metonymy
metaphor
irony
synecdoche
Question 3
“She owns a Picasso.”
Question 3 options:
metonymy
metaphor
irony
synecdoche
Question 4
Interlocutor A: “This place is the absolute worst.”
Interlocutor B: “Ha! What could you possibly mean? I just love it here.”
Question 4 options:
metonymy
metaphor
irony
synecdoche
Question 5
“I don’t know about you, but I’m up shit’s creek without a paddle on this one!”
Question 5 options:
metonymy
metaphor
irony
synecdoche
General Questions
Follow the prompts for each question and select the best answer from among those provided.
Question 6
According to the metaphor identification procedure (MIP) proposed by the Pragglejazz Group, the metaphoricity of a lexical unit in a text may be established by
Question 6 options:
consulting a metaphor dictionary and triangulating it with search results generated from a dedicated literary corpus
researcher intiution and popular usage, checked against the dictionary and/or focus groups
creating a lexical set with nuanced categorizations based on semantic properties derived from immediate textual contexts
discerning its meaning in context, discovering its more basic contemporary meaning, and ascertaining the degree to which the more basic meaning compares and/or contrasts with the meaning in the text
selective mapping: not only does the target domain block certain elements of the source domain, but encoders make motivated choices in selecting particular aspects of the source domain, highlighting some features while ignoring others
Question 7
According to Halliday, what is the major difference between expansion and projection?
Question 7 options:
expansion relates phenomena as being of the same order of experience; projection relates phenomena of one order of experience to phenomena of a higher order
expansion is one of the rhetorical tropes that tends towards exaggeration; projection is an aspect of grammar that tends towards techniques of minimization
expansion divides parts of speech into separate categories and clauses; projection unites parts of speech without semantic confusion, enabling textuality
expansion draws things out in relation to fictional dialogues and monologues; projection creates targeted and factual dicourse without unnecessary rhetorical flourishes
Question 8
This screen-shot (below), of a section of a recipe for Rhubarb Coffee Cake from Canadian Living’s online magazine, illustrates some important interactive details. The text allows users to check off the ingredients as they go by clicking or touching the boxes to the left of each ingredient. This feature makes it possible for users to keep organized while in process and/or take inventory of what they need to make the recipe. The sans serif font is unmarked in the online context and is intended to be easy to read. Additionally, the ingredient quantities are bolded as a way to communicate the importance of the measurements, and make them easy to see. Users can toggle back and forth easily between “Ingredients” and “Method” by clicking or touching the title bars. The title bars stand out and invite interaction though use of contrastive highlighting, capital letters, and bold, serifed font. Taken together, these features act as a kind of stand-in for having a live expert or an assistant in the kitchen with the user, offering support to ensure best results. Were these observations to be written up in the context of a multimodal or graphological analysis of this text, which of the three metafunctions would they best fall under?

Question 8 options:
Textual
Experiential
Interpersonal
Question 9 (1 point)
The two paintings below depict the same imagined scene, the death of Jean-Paul Marat, in very different ways. Viewing them through the lens of the interpersonal metafunction within the graphological/multimodal approach, which of the two paintings would be considered of higher modality: the one on the left, Le mort de Marat (The Death of Marat), by Pablo Picasso, or the one on the right, Le mort de Marat (The Death of Marat), by Jacques-Louis David?

Question 9 options:
The one on the LEFT, Le mort de Marat, by Pablo Picasso
The one on the RIGHT, Le mort de Marat, by Jacques-Louis David
Question 10 (1 point)
Picasso’s twentieth-century painting of Jean-Paul Marat’s death-scene references that of Jacques-Louis David from the eighteenth century (see below). In multimodal analysis, this type of referencing, in which one text refers to another, is called

Question 10 options:
vertical reference
horizontal reference
intertextual reference
parallel reference
Question 11
The word ‘project’ can be either a noun or a verb. If the word were spoken aloud on its own, what would determine for the listener the syntactic class intended by the speaker?
Question 11 options:
syllabic stress
vowel length
gesture
falling or rising tone
Question 12
Phonological meaning is a part of the cumulative meaning of both written and spoken texts. In all forms of text, questions have a rising tone and answers have a falling tone. While answers typically follow questions, it is their phonological and structural correlation — rather than their topical content — that creates coherence between them in the text. This structural phenomenon is also observed in situations of greeting and invitation. In phonology/Conversation Analysis, these two-part structures are called
Question 12 options:
adjacency pairs
interactional responses
collocations
turn-taking
Question 13
In SFL and CL, which general term is used to refer to “the relationship between communicators and the experience they are representing in their discourse”?
Question 13 options:
field
mode
tenor
Question 14
In SFL and CL, which general term is used to refer to “the relationship between the interlocutors and ther chosen medium of transmission in the communicative event”?
Question 14 options:
field
mode
tenor
Question 15
In SFL and CL, which general term is used to refer both to “the [personal] relationship between the encoder and decoder involved in the communicative event”, as well as “the [functional] relationship between the interactants involved”?
Question 15 options:
field
mode
tenor
Question 16
In SFL, the term lexicogrammar refers to one of the strata of language that pertains to meaning flowing from the dynamics of organization at each structural level represented by the clause complex, the clause, the group or phrase, the word, and the morpheme as ranked units. As such, it most closely relates to the study of lexis and
Question 16 options:
semantics
graphology
phonology
syntax
Question 17
What functional role do conjunctive adjuncts and modal adjuncts play?
Question 17 options:
they guide speaker-listener interpretation of and relationship to the contents of the sentence nucleus (SPCA)
they add only inconsequential and formal peripheral information about the sentence nucleus (SPCA)
they tend to confuse the encoder/decoder relationship to the text as a whole
they only connect one proposition to another as conjoined independent clauses
Question 18
Syntactically, what constitutes a proposition as an element of sentence structure?
Question 18 options:
an independent clause
a dependent clause
a relative clause
a non-finite clause
Question 19
In the cognitive linguistics approach to textual analysis, the linguistic choices made in a text are thought to encode what have been termed ‘construal operations’. A number of these construal operations have been identified as relevant in the field and systematized. What is the system and associated strategy consistent with construals based in viewpoint or deixis?
Question 19 options:
perspective and positioning
attention and identification
comparison and framing
Gestalt and schematization
Question 20
Are the following lyrics to the song, “Bullet the Blue Sky”, by U2 (The Joshua Tree, 1987), an example of hypotaxis or parataxis?
In the locust wind comes a rattle and hum
Jacob wrestled the angel
And the angel was overcome
You plant a demon seed
You raise a flower of fire
See them burning crosses
See the flames higher and higher
Question 20 options:
hypotaxis
parataxis
Question 21
In order to create a more quantitatively meaningful study of a particular linguistic phenomenon, it’s best to use
Question 21 options:
a large collection of texts.
smaller amounts of data.
a limited scope and sample size.
a targeted corpus.
Question 22
From a methodological standpoint, a research project that relies solely on digitized texts which are fully machine readable and searchable at the level of the word can result in
Question 22 options:
an outcome more in step with the contemporary world.
the exclusion of key manuscriipt and print sources.
greater support for marginalized language users.
more all-round precision in data collection.
Question 23
Most databases, even academic article databases like ProQuest, can perform as what for the linguist doing textual analysis?
Question 23 options:
a corpus
an opus
a lab
a container
Question 24
There are times when digital texts which were once available ‘disappear’ or become otherwise inaccessible to the researcher. What is one strategy that should be used to mitigate this challenge when doing digitally mediated textual analysis?
Question 24 options:
avoid all presuppositions in research
make sure all user permissions are secured before proceeding with the study
always save data with all of its multimodal features
keep all subscriiptions to databases and social media platforms current
Question 25
Humour is created in this meme, pictured below, by way of a misinterpreted question. When the server asks the patron, “how did you find your steak, sir?, the question phrase, “how did you find …?”, is understood by the decoder in a way that is incongruent with the encoder’s intention. Part of the mix-up centres on the lexical verb find, which, in this episode, is taken to be representative of

Question 25 options:
an action process, when really it refers to a mental process.
a preposition, when really it’s a verb.
an adjunct or circumstance, when really it’s a predicate.
a relational process, when really it’s referring to a participant role.
Question 26
This question has two parts.
PART 1:
Watch the clip (link to YouTube below) of the so-called “Sandwiches” scene from the movie The Imitation Game (2014).
The Imitation Game (HD CLIP) | Sandwiches
PART 2:
In the scene you just watched, a series of humorous but frustrating misunderstandings arise in the exchange between Alan Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) and his workmates around the idea of going for lunch. What aspect of the interpersonal metafunction is exploited by the scriiptwriter to highlight Turing’s social isolation and awkwardness in this scene?
Question 26 options:
The system of transitivity as represented by actors, processes, goals, and circumstances: Turing ignores the meaning of the lexical verb in the sentence and thus misses the implications and circumstances of the invitation made by the decoder in his monotransitive statement.
The system of speech function as represented by the encoder’s choice of mood: Turing does not decode the initial declarative statement “the boys are going to get some lunch” as a question the way the encoder intends; he does not register the rising tone that signals transformation of a syntactically declarative statement into a question.
The evaluative words, slang, and metaphors embedded in the exchange: Turing misses the evaluative and emotional meanings in the statement “the boys are going to get some lunch”, setting up an asymmetrical relationship of authority between himself and the encoder.
Question 27
This question has two parts.
PART 1: read the following passage from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (Harmondsworth UK, 1972 [1931]).
The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.
As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle has sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.
PART 2: A potential conceptual lexical analysis of the passage above suggests the lexical set “fabric”, which includes the lexical items creased, cloth (2), wrinkles, veil, fibrous, tear, fibres (2), and woollen. Would this lexical set be considered experientially predictable or unpredictable in the descriiption of a seascape?
Question 27 options:
predictable
unpredictable
Question 28
The following sentence from the opening passage of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves serves as an example of overlap in the basic types of process in English as described by M. A. K. Halliday.
The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out.
According to the chart below, which two areas are implicated in this overlap?

Question 28 options:
behavioural and mental
behavioural and material
existential and material
existential and relational
verbal and relational
verbal and mental
Question 29
If the first sentence in the opening line of William Butler Yeats’ poem, “Sailing to Byzantium” (The Tower, 1928),
That is no country for old men.
were to be analysed in terms of linguistic choice in connection with conceptual structures, which of the construal operations would be considered most in evidence?
Question 29 options:
categorization
deixis
metonymy
schematization
Question 30
The utterance
Can you tell us about the political and cultural makeup of Nigeria?
is formed as a question, with the modal verb can preceding the lexical verb tell in the expected order. In what way does the modal can mediate the event?
Question 30 options:
It tempers the process by introducing ability.
It tempers the process by introducing intention.
It tempers the process by introducing possibility.
It tempers the process by introducing probability.
Question 31
Certain kinds of processes can mediate events when used as an auxiliary verb. For example, in the utterance
She keeps surprising me.
the verb keeps mediates the event by adding
Question 31 options:
closure
desire
attempt
duration
inception
Question 32
William Butler Yeats’ poem, “Sailing to Byzantium” (The Tower, 1928), begins with the sentence:
That is no country for old men.
That is acting as a demonstrative pronoun, a nominal substitute. Since it precedes its referential antecedent, that, as a cohesive device, would here be considered
Question 32 options:
anaphoric
cataphoric
endophoric
exophoric
Question 33
Does the bolded logical conjunction in the following passage indicate use of elaboration, enhancement, or extension to provide inter-sentential cohesion?
Toronto is in the Dish With One Spoon Territory. The Dish With One Spoon is a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas, and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land. Subsequent Indigenous Nations and Peoples, Europeans, and all newcomers have been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship, and respect. The territory it refers to — the Dish or, as it is sometimes called, the Bowl — represents what is now southern Ontario, from the Great Lakes to Quebec and from Lake Simcoe to the United States. We all eat out of the Dish, all of us that share this territory, with only one spoon. In other words, we have to share the responsibility of ensuring the Dish is never empty, which includes taking care of the land and the creatures we share it with. Importantly, there are no knives at the table, representing that we must keep peace.
Question 33 options:
elaboration
enhancement
extension
Question 34
According to Halliday, thematic structure allows a clause to be perceived as a “message”, with an internal organization that “fits in with, and contributes to, the flow of discourse”. Thematic structure is a clause-internal arrangement that gives status to one part (theme). When combined with the other part (rheme), it guides meaning. These two parts form the “message” as a whole. Halliday intended theme and rheme to be understood textually rather than experientially. In the following sentence, which part would be considered the theme?
This study is intended to provide a holistic look at the use of the arts in an exemplary elementary classroom.
Question 34 options:
This study
is intended to provide
a holistic look at
the use of the arts
in an exemplary elementary classroom
Question 35
Why can ‘textual analysis’ incorporate more than just written texts?
Question 35 options:
English Departments needed to make themselves more relevant and retain student interest, so they expanded the definition of ‘text’ to include things like film, theatre, and comic books.
Since the word ‘text’ comes from the idea of weaving, many cultural products can be examined as “that which is woven together” to make meaning by way of a coherent set of signs.
Linguists decided that it was time for print-culture to make way for the study of orality as ‘text’, thus allowing for a more diverse perspective in anthropological research.
