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仅供学习与参考 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 by 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 学习资料
仅供学习与参考 language rather than a synchronic study.
23. European R________ Movement separates the period of Middle
English from that of modern English.
24. An important set of extensive sound changes, which affected 7
long or tense vowels and which led to one of the major discrepancies
between phonemic representations of words and morphemes at the end of
the Middle English Period, is known as the Great V_______ Shift.
25. A_______ involves the deletion of a word-final vowel segment.
26. A change that involves the insertion of a consonant or vowel
sound to the middle of a word is known as e__________.
27. The three sets of consonant shifts that Grimm discovered became
known collectively as Grimm s L ____.
28. Sound change as a result of sound movement, known as m_______,
involves a reversal in position of two adjoining sound segments.
29. B________ is a process by which new words are formed by taking
away the supposed suffixes of exiting words.
30. Semantic b________ refers to the process in which the meaning
of a word becomes more general or inclusive than its historically
earlier denotation.
31. The original form of a language family that has ceased to exist
is called the p_________.
32. Sound a________ refers to the physiological effect of one sound
on another. In this process, successive sounds are made identical or
similar to one another in terms of place or manner of articulation.
33. In order to reduce the exceptional or irregular morphemes,
speakers of a particular language may borrow a rule from one part of
the grammar and apply it generally. This phenomenon is called i_________
borrowing.
34. By identifying and comparing similar linguistic forms with
similar meanings across related languages, historical linguists
reconstruct the proto form in the common ancestral language. This
process is called c________ reconstruction.
35. The m ____ rule of adjective agreement has been lost from
English.
III. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice
that can best complete the statement:
36. Historical linguistics explores ________________.
A. the nature of language change
B. the causes that lead to language change
C. the relationship between languages
D. all of the above
37. Language change is ______________.
A. universal, continuous and ,to a large extent, regular and
systematic
B. continuous, regular, systematic, but not universal
C. universal, continuous, but not regular and systematic
D. always regular and systematic, but not universal and continuous
38. Modern English period starts roughly _____________.
A. from 449 to 1100
