Eduqas A-Level English Language: Component 2 Language Change Over Time overview quiz quiz

Two unscripted spoken transcripts recorded in the same week, marked purely on transcription accuracy

A single contemporary advertisement chosen to illustrate persuasive rhetoric and brand identity

Dated texts from across the post-1500 period, tracing how and why English has changed

Your own original creative writing piece, submitted in advance and assessed only for technical accuracy

Reading, writing, speaking and listening, the four core language skills

Past, present, future and conditional, the four basic verb tense systems

Formal, informal, spoken and written, the four main registers of discourse

Lexical, semantic, grammatical, and orthographic/graphological

Narrowing makes a meaning more specific (meat: any food to flesh); broadening makes it more general (place: a street to any location)

They are interchangeable terms for the same single process of gradual meaning change over the centuries

Narrowing affects only a word's spelling and orthography over time, whereas broadening affects only its grammatical class, word order and syntactic function

Narrowing turns a word's connotation positive (amelioration), while broadening always turns its connotation negative

Archaic features do not really exist, since every form found in a historical text is also fully current in modern usage

It is AO1 only if you name the process (borrowing, narrowing, inflection loss); the marks reward precise process terminology

You should never mention the age or dating of a feature at all, because chronology is irrelevant to language analysis

Describing a feature as old is always factually wrong, as no genuinely dated forms ever survive into later periods of English

A prescriptive grammar rule governing the sequence of tenses in subordinate clauses across earlier English

A specific category of lexical borrowing in which loanwords are adapted to native spelling conventions

The process of fixing a standard variety (printing, dictionaries, education); it explains the shift from variable older English to fixed modern forms

A spoken-language feature, found only in regional dialects and entirely absent from any written historical record, which therefore leaves no trace whatsoever in the older texts studied for the exam

The visual shape of a particular letterform as it evolved through successive printing and handwriting styles

The supposed long-term decline and decay of English from an earlier, more perfect and grammatically pure state

A type of complex sentence structure favoured by writers during the early modern standardisation period

The rate of adoption of a change: slow (innovators), then rapid (majority), then slow (last adopters)

The prescriptivist view that English was once perfect and is decaying; she objects that there was no perfect past state

A real medieval castle she studied, whose crumbling stonework she argues ought to be carefully restored and preserved

A neutral model of how an innovation spreads gradually through a speech community, a model which she explicitly endorses

A particular named type of semantic change affecting fortification vocabulary, which she catalogues and dates precisely

They are identical approaches, since both ultimately seek to set out and enforce the single correct form of the language

Prescriptivism judges language against a fixed standard and resists change; descriptivism describes how language is actually used without judging it

Prescriptivism deals exclusively with spoken language, whereas descriptivism deals exclusively with the written standard

Prescriptivism is a strictly modern twentieth-century movement, while descriptivism applies only to the study of long-dead historical languages that nobody speaks any more

AO5, the creative-writing objective rewarding original composition and crafted authorial choices in the student's own work

There is no distinctive objective, since the change analysis is assessed against exactly the same set of objectives as every other section

AO4, comparison across the dated texts

AO1 only, with no credit available for any contextual, comparative or methodological understanding in this part

It simply looks neater and more organised on the page, which examiners are known to reward with extra presentation marks

It uses noticeably fewer words overall, leaving more time in the exam to check spelling and refine the final paragraph

The mark scheme strictly requires that the dated texts always be analysed one at a time in chronological date order, oldest to newest

Organising by level or idea and weaving the texts together builds in the AO4 comparison; text-by-text analysis neglects it

Its features are rule-governed adaptations of writing to a fast, interactive medium, continuous with the history of change

It is not innovation at all; digital language is simply the steady decline and corruption of correct written standards

It has no genuine linguistic features worth analysing, being merely careless error and random deviation from the norm

It only ever appears in formal written contexts, so it cannot really tell us anything useful about informal speech or interactive language use

It has only one single correct form, codified at one authoritative centre to which all other varieties must defer

It has multiple standards or norms (the World Englishes), functioning as a plural, multi-centred language

It is spoken only within England itself, and its use anywhere beyond those borders counts as a non-standard deviation

It cannot be reliably written down, existing purely as a spoken medium with no fixed orthographic standard at all