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Daily Review 11/08/25

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  • Give one example of a word that has undergone semantic deterioration due to gender or social imbalance (disempowered groups).
    Hussy or Gossip; both shifted from neutral/positive to negative meanings.
  • Which famous linguist said, “The only languages that don’t change are dead ones”?
    David Crystal, a famous British linguist and descriptivist.
  • Which process is rarer: broadening or narrowing?
    Narrowing is less common than broadening.
  • A prescriptivist believes language change is generally...
    Negative and in need of control
  • By Middle English, what replaced case markers for expressing grammatical relationships?
    Word order; French syntax inspired reliance on word order instead of case markers.
  • In Early Modern English, reductions in what type of morphemes significantly impacted both nouns and verbs?
    Inflectional morphemes; their reduction affected verbs and nouns in Early Modern English.
  • What is one argument prescriptivists give against language change?
    Any one of: Causes confusion, makes older texts harder to read, reduces mutual intelligibility, makes language ‘lazier’, increases generational rifts.
  • Which semantic process causes a word’s connotations to become more negative over time?
    Deterioration; connotations become more negative over time.
  • True or False: Descriptivists try to enforce strict grammar and spelling rules.
    False; descriptivists describe how language is used, they don’t enforce rules.
  • What historical event and language most influenced Middle English syntax?
    The Norman Conquest and Old Norman French; French influence reshaped Middle English syntax.
  • Which of these is not a syntactic change in Middle English:
    Standardisation of present participle spelling
    Heavier reliance on prepositions
    Increase in inflectional endings
    Growth of standardised auxiliary verbs
  • Name one famous prescriptivist from the Early Modern English period or later.
    Examples: Sir John Cheke, Jonathan Swift, Dr. Samuel Johnson, George Orwell.
  • What is the difference between denotation and connotation?
    Denotation = literal meaning; Connotation = positive/negative associations.
  • Put these synonyms in order from oldest to most recent in English: scent, smell, stench, odour.
    Stench, Smell, Odour, Scent
  • Which modern European language still uses cases and flexible word order similar to Old English?
    German: Modern German still uses cases like nominative, accusative, and dative.
  • Narrowing refers to a lexeme’s meaning becoming more [blank].
    more specific
  • Over time, connotative changes can lead to what type of shift?
    Denotative shifts; changes in connotation can eventually alter the literal meaning.
  • Which of these is an example of broadening?
    "Tablet" shifting from an engraved block to a touch screen
    “Awful” shifting from “inspiring wonder” to “very bad”
    “Meat” shifting from “any food” to “animal flesh”
    “Google” becoming a verb for online searching
  • True or False: Old English relied heavily on word order to show grammatical relationships.
    False; Old English used inflections, not fixed word order, to show grammatical relationships.
  • What is the opposite of deterioration, where a word gains more positive connotations over time?
    Elevation; connotations become more positive over time.
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