Chapter 7： Historical Linguistics
I. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False:
1. One of the tasks of the historical linguists is to explore methods to reconstruct linguistic history and establish the relationship between languages.
2. Language change is a gradual and constant process, therefore often indiscernible to speakers of the same generation.
3. The history of the English language is divided into the periods of Old English, Middle English and Modern English.
4. Middle English began with the arrival of Anglo-Saxons, who invaded the British Isles from northern Europe.
5. In Old English, all the nouns are inflected to mark nominative, genitive, dative and accusative cases.
6. In Old English, the verb of a sentence often precedes the subject rather than follows it.
7. A direct consequence of the Renaissance Movement was the revival of French as a literary language.
8. In general, linguistic change in grammar is more noticeable than that in the sound system and the vocabulary of a language.
9. The sound changes include changes in vowel sounds, and in the loss, gain and movement of sounds.
10. The least widely-spread morphological changes in the historical development of English are the loss and addition of affixes.
11. In Old English, the morphosyntactic rule of adjective agreement stipulated that the endings of adjective must agree with the head noun in case, number and gender.
12. The word order of Modern English is more variable than that of Old English.
13. Derivation refers to the process by which new words are formed by the addition of affixes to the roots, stems, or words.
14. “Smog” is a word formed by the word-forming process called acronymy.
15. “fridge” is a word formed b y abbreviation.
16. Modern linguists are able to provide a consistent account for the exact causes of all types of language change.
17. Sound assimilation may bring about the loss of one of two phonetically similar syllables in sequence, as in the case of change of “Engla-land” to “England”.
18. Rule elaboration occurs when there is a need to reduce ambiguity and increase communicative clarity or expressiveness.
19. Language change is always a change towards the simplification of language rules
20. The way children acquire the language is one of the causes for language change.
II. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word which begins with the letter given:
21. H________ linguistics is the subfield of linguistics that studies language change.
22. The historical study of language is a d________ study of
