Spa 2225-F08

Guide to Exam 1

  1. What are the rules for dividing a word into syllables? How do you find the naturally accented syllable of a word? (Review)
  2. Are you able to describe the grammatical components (parts of speech) and grammatical structure (morphology) of a sentence in Spanish?
  3. Can you distinguish between simple, compound, and complex sentences?
  4. Can you diagram sentences? Are you able to recognize the different phrase structures of a sentence (for example, adjective clauses, adverbial clauses, noun clauses, and prepositional phrases)?  What is the defining difference between complex clauses and prepositional phrases?  How can you test your conclusions?
  5. What special rules and relationships have you learned about adjectives and nouns as they are used in context in Spanish?  In particular, how important is agreement in Spanish and how does it work?  What editing methods have you learned that are geared to finding agreement errors?  Where do you place adjectives and why? Does the placement of an adjective carry any ideological message?  Which adjectives have special shortened forms and how does placement affect them?  Which adjectives have genderless forms?  Have you studied all the common adjective suffixes used to indicate nationality?  Can you create an adjective from a verb (review the formation of regular and irregular past participles)?
  6. Have you been drilling your present tense verbs?  Does this include all of the stem-changing and irregular verbs?  Can yon create a noun from a verb?  When do you use a “gerund” in Spanish versus English?  How do you use the gerund in sentences with simultaneous actions?
  7. Can you to spell any number between 1 and a billion? What special rules apply to numbers when we use them as adjectives?
  8. How many question words are there?  Which question words in English have more than one equivalent in Spanish?  How do you distinguish between these multiple equivalencies?
  9. How do you designate possession in Spanish besides using the preposition “de”?  Which of the two methods places extra “subjective emphasis” on the possession?  How do possessive adjectives work in terms of gender and number agreement?