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Nature of Examination Mr. McGowan will check his e-mail for questions and will be in his office on exam day from 8:00-9:00. |
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Sample multiple choice questions Choose the best answer to complete each statement. 1. The system of social rules that a speaker knows about using language
is Answer: (D). This question involves your understanding basic terms in our course. Remember our address exercise ("Mr. McGowan") applied this term. The movement toward standardization involves pragmatics. 2. The OE initial consonant cluster /hr/ and /hl/ were simplified to
/r/ and /l/ in ME. This language process is Answer: (A). The proper use of these four terms continued throughout our course. |
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3. The best source of developed historical information about any English
word is Answer: (C). All four of these books are important to use, but the OED is the best source for historical evidence of individual words in English. 4. To represent linguistic information about a word concisely and professionally
in our course, we would type Answer: (B). The word /IPA symbols/ 'meaning' arrangement has been a writing convention in our text community that McGowan teaches in his comments to your writing about words. |
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5. Middle English sounds Answer: (B). The Great Vowel Shift changing long vowel pronunciation was a major phonological change our course has emphasized. 6. The ME pronunciation of breeth 'breath' includes the vowel Answer: (C). Chaucer had two long-e's, both often spelled at doubled-e.
The ModE spelling helps us distinguish the difference: <ea> reflects
/ 7. The OE nominative plural of bat 'boat' was batas /b Answer: (A). Bat is an OE a-stem strong masculine as shown by its -as
nominative plural. This inflection occurred in an unstressed final syllable
so that the vowel was reduced to schwa: / 8. In the first syllable of batas discussed in question 7, the
long-a appears as oo in Chaucer. This non-Northern ME spelling
shows Answer: (C). One dialect sound change we studied is this rounding of OE long-a in dialects south of the Humber River. 9. In OE the dative plural form of hand was handum, but
Chaucer in using this word in good ME as object of a preposition writes
handes. His form developed by Answer: (B). The three main sound changes affecting inflections that we studies would not produce this form. It developed by analogy with the predominant a-stem strong masculine nominative/accusative plural. 10. The Middle English dialect used by Chaucer was Answer: (C). The special status of southeast
Midlands has been a theme in our course. |
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11. In Middle English, the noun inflection -es signified Answer: (B). This inflection was the general plural inflection; however, some -en plurals existed (particularly in the Southern dialect), and some mutated plurals continued. 12. In East Midlands dialect, the sentence I lovede hem meant Answer: (C). Chaucer's third person plural pronouns included they (subject) but hem (object). 13. To say, "They hate the men," Chaucer would write Answer: (A). This sentence is the only one that has the right meaning and correct inflection on the verb. In this kind of question, you won't have a grammar sheet available. The PowerPoint presentation on Middle English includes the main inflections you need to know; the McGowan Middle English grammar sheet also gives them. 14. From the following choices, the correct noun phrase in Chaucer's
dialect is Answer: (C). The only adjective inflection is -e (schwa) to signal the weak adjective needed here. It also can mean "plural" adjective when in a strong adjective phrase. 15. The final-e in badde in the noun phrase in 14 (C) is Answer: (D). The following consonant sound usually means that ME final-e is pronounced in Chaucer's poetry. The inflection is for a weak adjective form as noted in question 14. (B) and (C) include vowels that don't appear in final unstressed syllables in the English stress system althoough they are important to our study of ME. |
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16. The AHD gives the following etymological information about
raven: Middle English, from OE hræfn. Raven
is Answer: (A). The dictionary shows an OE form that developed into our PDE word. There is no evidence of borrowing in the etymological entry. 17. The AHD etymological set up suggests that the Middle English form
was Answer: (B). The AHD uses a shorthand where the previous or headword form isn't repeated in the etymological forms if they are the same. |
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18. Following the Norman Conquest, the speech of the king and his council
was Answer: (A). Norman French became the superstratum language for about two hundred years following the Norman Conquest in 1066. Its borrowed forms get recognized in dictionaries at Norman French, Anglo-French (French as spoken in medieval England), and Anglo-Norman. 19. Alfred the Great wrote about his dogs as hundas, but Chaucer
described his houndes. Chaucer's spelling shows Answer: (D). The <ou> spelling develops from Anglo-Norman spelling practices. It represents /u:/ (in words that become /aU/ by the Great Vowel Shift). Reduction of vowels to schwa in final unstressed syllables is a major change in English inflection patterns. |
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20. OE cniht /knIxt/ became ME knight /knIxt/. This description
shows Answer: (A). The pronunciations are the same, but some new spelling practices have been introduced. Some of these reflect the use of Norman spelling practices to handle English words. Although there was a change of meaning, this description doesn't give you any information about the meaning of the word. In ME internal <gh> began to represent the voiceless velar fricative /x/, and these spellings stayed despite that sound's deletion later. |
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21. An extremely simplified form of a language used as a contact language
among speakers of different languages is Answer: (C). A pidgin had a very rudimentary grammar; a creole is the development of a pidgin as a first language by a next generation of speakers. 22. Fennell argues that the creolization thesis is Answer: (D). Fennell describes the interesting aspects of creolization, but she judges that no evidence exists of pidgin and creolized ME texts and that the reduction in inflections of Middle English was part of a long historical process related to Germanic loss of stress in final syllables (131). |
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23. A Middle English speaker writes "The kinges gives them bates,"
meaning "The kings give them boats." This speaker is likely
from Answer: (D). Southern dialects still used hem, a form descended
from the OE pronoun system, to mean "them." The Northern th-forms,
however, finally take over in the development of the English pronoun system.
Here them and bates, without the rounding of OE / |
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24. In ME, /i:/ was spelled Answer: (B). Both <i> and <y> represent /i:/ and /I/ in ME. Variation of spellings is a characteristic of the non-standardized state of the language. 25. Chaucer wrote, "I ride," and we write, "I ride."
The difference here is in Answer: (C). Pronunciation. The long-i's here become diphthongs
by the Great Vowel Shift: /i:/ > /aI/. But the spelling had become
established and hasn't changed. Chaucer means the same sense and uses
SV word order, our Modern English syntax pattern. He prpbably also pronounced
final-e in /ri:d 26. The Mod E spellings of great and meat suggest that
ME greet 'great,' grete 'great,' meet 'meat', and
mete 'meat' Answer: (B). All four words start with ME open long-e, / |
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27. Conventional scholarship dates Early
Modern English as beginning around Answer: (C). By 1500, more inflections were lost, many more foreign words borrowed, and the Great Vowel Shift had occurred. These characteristics make it different enough from ME for scholars to distinguish another historical stage of the language. Our Bloomfield reading dated the Great Vowel Shift 1350 to 1550. |
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28-29. Here is the American Heritage Dictionary etymology under the head word name: [Middle English, from Old English nama.] Answer the two questions about it. 28. The ME spelling was Answer: B. Since the word existed in OE, name is a native English word and so also existed in ME. The way AHD etymologies work is that they don't repeat common spellings. If the ME is the same as the ModE, the editors don't repeat the spelling of the headword, which is name. 29. The ME spellings and ModE spellings of this word represent Answer: C. Yes, Chaucer and we use the same letters, i.e., "graphs," in our orthographic systems. However, Chaucer would pronounce the final-e as schwa, but it is "silent" in ModE pronunciation. The spelling was established in OE, but the final-a developed a schwa pronunciation in ME, being in a final unstressed syllable. Schwa is often spelled -e. There are no French influences here. |
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: / long open-e.
t
s/.
In Chaucer's writing, the plural used as a subject appears as bootes.
This ME spelling shows an inflection
/ producing -es
as the spelling. 
:/
in the Midlands dialect
Webpage published 22 March 1:00 p.m.