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Early Middle English Review Test

1. EME diphthongs were all

rising
centering
closing

2. The PDE sentence 'I like you' was expressed in eME as

me likeþ you
I likeþ thee
me likest thou

3. The number of French loans into English in the period 1066-1100 was

a few dozens
between 100 and 500
between 500 and 1000

4. Which of the following constructions (from the text) does not represent a syntactic innovation from OE?

For so seyth ure Lord
And also he hedde imad þise forewerde …
... þet yef we uilleth don his seruise ...…

5. The eME infinitive with "to" descends from

the OE bare infinitive
the OE inflected infinitive
the OE present participle

6. On the basis of which ME phonological process can we predict the ungrammaticality of the (often mispronounced) words in capitals? Johnny DEPP */di:p/ cd ROM */ru:m/ MICK Jagger */maik/

trisyllabic shortening
smoothing
pre-cluster shortening

7. In eME, the great majority of the native English population were speakers of

English
English and French
English and Latin

8. Which of the following cases lost a specific morphological mark at the end of the eME period?

dative
genitive
accusative

9. One of the following orthographic symbols ceased to be used at the end of eME (1300). Which one?

thorn (þ)
edth (ð)
yogh (3)

10. Which of the following factors did not play a role in the reanalysis OV-VO in eME?

word order in French (it wasVO at the time)
rise of unambiguous subordinators
postposition of relative clauses and heavy objects

11. Old English /a:/ developed into non-northern Middle English dialects as

/o:/
/a:/
/ɔɔ/ (long open "o")

12. Concerning the demonstrative-article, most eME texts from the South and Midlands display

inflected forms only
uninflected forms only
both inflected and uninflected forms

13. Which of the following types of derivation is not likely to appear in an eME text?

BASE native + AFFIX foreign
BASE foreign + AFFIX foreign
BASE foreign + AFFIX native

14. The ending "-e" for the plural of the (proximal) demonstrative "þise" was added to the singular form "þis" by analogy with the ME

substantive
adjective
adverb

15. One of the semantic fields from which eME speakers did not borrow significantly from French was

justice and administration
religion
art and literature

16. The medial "e" in "moreghen" (from OE "morgen") is due to

metathesis
epenthesis
aferesis

17. What are the three factors which are said (according to some theorists) to have led to the simplification of the morphology in ME as they created redundancy in function marking?

morphology/fixed word order/intonation
rich morphology/use of prepositions/intonation
rich morphology/fixed word order/use of prepositions

18. The productive declension for nouns in eME was

the strong one
the weak one
the monosyllabic one

19. The spelling for words like "what", "where," "which" is due to

Anglo-Norman convention
metathesis
association of "h" with a fricative marker

20. In eME, we are bound to have a more simplified morphology as we move

north
south-east
south-west
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