Quiz 4

The use of more and most to form comparative and superlative adjectives can be considered a/n _________ way of forming them

• Synthetic

• Artificial

• Analytic

• Obsolete

The plural morpheme that generalized in ME originally comes from which OE paradigm?

• Strong masculine nouns

• Strong neuter nouns

• Weak nouns

• Athematic nouns

Choose the incorrect answer. Regarding OE pronouns…

• The dual distinction is only found for 1st and 2nd person pronouns

• There are gender distinctions in the dative plural for 3rd person pronouns

• The accusative-dative distinction is not maintained in the 1st and 2nd sing./pl. person pronoun

• The nominative-accusative distinction is maintained in the 1st and 2nd sing./pl. person pronouns

The morphological suffix for third person singular verbs in the present tense in Present-Day English originally comes from…

• West Saxon OE

• Northumbrian OE

• Mercian OE

• Kentish OE

The pronoun he…

• Is a borrowing from ON

• Developed either from hēo or the demonstrative sēo

• Was already used in OE

• Was first used as the default third person plural pronoun

What was the influence of French on the second personal pronouns in English?

• The pronouns were borrowed from French during the ME period

• Because of French, the OE pronoun Þu was lost in ME

• The T-V distinction in French influenced the reorganization of the system in ME

• There was no influence from French

The change whereby grammatical gender was replaced by semantic gender started in the South and spread to the North

• True

• False

Can you name a significant morphological change that occurred during the ME period?

• Increased of French syntax in sentences

• Reduction of inflectional endings in nouns and verbs

• Standardization of spelling across all dialects

• Introduction of new Latin-based vocabulary

What are inflectional morphemes, and how have they changed in English?

• Inflectional morphemes are unrelated to grammatical categories

• Inflectional morphemes are grammatical units that modify words to express different grammatical categories, and they have simplified in English over time

• They have become more complex in modern English

• Inflectional morphemes are only used in nouns

What factors contributed to the loss of grammatical gender and case in ME?

• Sound changes that made the morphological system unlearnable

• Language contact with other languages (e.g. ON and/or French)

• The standardization of the language

• Possibly, both sound changes and language contact