Grammar
What are the parts of speech in English?
There are eight parts of speech in the English language: noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection.
What is morphology?
Morphology is the branch of linguistics that deals with the internal structure of words and how words are formed. It focuses on how morphemes are combined to create words.
What is etymology?
Etymology is the study of the origin and historical development of words. It explores how words have changed in form and meaning over time, tracing their journey from their earliest forms to their present use.
What types of word order are there? Which one is the most common?
SVO, SOV,VSO, VOS, OVS, OSV. The most common are SOV and SVO.
What are anomalous verbs and how to understand such verbs as: beon, gan, willan, don
Anomalous verbs are the irregular verbs. These verbs have unique features in terms of conjugation patterns such as irregular stem formations or vowel changes. The verbs mentioned are irregular verbs in Old English, now they mean: Beon (be), gan (go), willan (will), don (do)
Types of morphological classification in languages?
Classification based on the morphology of languages:
What do native words and borrowed words mean?
Native words have existed in a language for a very long time and are inherited from the ancestral language. Meanwhile, borrowed words are adopted from another language. They are incorporated into the borrowing language with varying degrees of adaptation to fit its pronunciation and grammar.
Which language is a perfect example of VSO?
Irish
What is the category of moods and name the types of moods?
Mood focuses on how verbs are conjugated to indicate the speaker's attitude or modality towards the action or state of being expressed. Types of moods:
What is meant by isolating languages in morphological terms?
Isolated languages, in morphological terms, refer to languages with minimal internal structure in words. Each word typically consists of a single morpheme and grammatical relationships are expressed through word order or separate function words. (Vietnamese, Mandarin Chinese)
What words in English have their origin in the Indo-European languages?
Words with roots in Indo-European languages are kinship terms, phenomena of nature, animals and plants, parts of the human body, numerals, pronouns and the most frequent words
What pattern concerning prepositions can be observed in languages with the VO model?
Languages with the verb before object tend to have prepositions before the noun
What are strong and weak verbs? Which is more productive in modern times?
Strong and weak verbs are verb conjugations based on how their past tense is formed. Strong verbs change their vowel in the root, while weak verbs add a suffix (in eng.:-ed). Weak verbs are more productive in modern Germanic languages.
What is the difference between analytic languages and synthetic languages?
Analytic languages rely more on word order and have fewer morphological processes because each word has its own meaning. Synthetic languages, on the other hand, rely heavily on morphemes, which can give a new meaning to a word when added to it
In what ways can words be assimilated into a language?
Borrowings may or may not be fully assimilated phonetically, grammatically or semantically
What pattern concerning prepositions can be observed in languages with the OV model?
Languages with the object before the verb are more likely to have noun followed by preposition
What is the present preterite? How has it been transformed and does it exist now?
The present preterite is a verb tense in which a verb form looks like the present tense but actually conveys a past meaning. It has been transformed over time into various past tense forms we use in modern Germanic languages. There are no Germanic languages that have a fully functional present preterite verb tense in everyday use today.
What is the difference between agglutinative languages and fusional languages?
In agglutinative languages, each morpheme added to the root word has a clear and specific meaning, and they are joined together like building blocks. Whereas in fusional languages, several grammatical meanings can be combined in a single morpheme, making it difficult to separate the individual meanings.
What is an etymological doublet? Give an example.
Etymological doublets are words that originate from the same etymological source but are different in phonemic shape and meaning. For example, the shirt is a native word, and the skirt is a Scandinavian borrowing. Their phonemic shape is different, but a certain resemblance reflects their common origin. Their meanings are also different but easily associated: they both denote articles of clothing.
In languages with verbs before objects, nouns usually come before adjectives, but which language with the VO pattern is an exception to this pattern?
English is an exception. In English the verb comes before the object but adjective usually come before the noun