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Daily Review 11/08/25

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  • What historical event and language most influenced Middle English syntax?
    The Norman Conquest and Old Norman French; French influence reshaped Middle English syntax.
  • What is the opposite of deterioration, where a word gains more positive connotations over time?
    Elevation; connotations become more positive over time.
  • Which process is rarer: broadening or narrowing?
    Narrowing is less common than broadening.
  • Which famous linguist said, “The only languages that don’t change are dead ones”?
    David Crystal, a famous British linguist and descriptivist.
  • Which of these is not a syntactic change in Middle English:
    Growth of standardised auxiliary verbs
    Heavier reliance on prepositions
    Standardisation of present participle spelling
    Increase in inflectional endings
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Over time, connotative changes can lead to what type of shift?
    Denotative shifts; changes in connotation can eventually alter the literal meaning.
  • True or False: Descriptivists try to enforce strict grammar and spelling rules.
    False; descriptivists describe how language is used, they don’t enforce rules.
  • Narrowing refers to a lexeme’s meaning becoming more [blank].
    more specific
  • A prescriptivist believes language change is generally...
    Negative and in need of control
  • What is the difference between denotation and connotation?
    Denotation = literal meaning; Connotation = positive/negative associations.
  • Which semantic process causes a word’s connotations to become more negative over time?
    Deterioration; connotations become more negative over time.
  • 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.
  • By Middle English, what replaced case markers for expressing grammatical relationships?
    Word order; French syntax inspired reliance on word order instead of case markers.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Name one famous prescriptivist from the Early Modern English period or later.
    Examples: Sir John Cheke, Jonathan Swift, Dr. Samuel Johnson, George Orwell.
  • Which of these is an example of broadening?
    “Meat” shifting from “any food” to “animal flesh”
    “Awful” shifting from “inspiring wonder” to “very bad”
    "Tablet" shifting from an engraved block to a touch screen
    “Google” becoming a verb for online searching
  • Put these synonyms in order from oldest to most recent in English: scent, smell, stench, odour.
    Stench, Smell, Odour, Scent
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