Unit 3 Language over Time overview quiz - WJEC A-Level English Language quiz

1 hour 30 minutes

45 minutes

2 hours

2 hours 30 minutes

Language at a single point in time

Language change across time

Spoken language only

The grammar of a sentence

Writing an original story

Recording a conversation

Analysing and comparing texts from different periods and explaining the changes

Designing an advert

A word's meaning becoming more specific

A word falling out of use

A word gaining a negative sense

A word's meaning widening to cover more

'Meat' once meant any food but now means flesh

'Nice' once meant foolish

'Silly' once meant blessed

'Google' became a verb

A word gaining a more negative meaning

A word gaining a more positive meaning over time

A word being borrowed from Latin

A change in spelling

A word gaining a more positive meaning

A word widening its meaning

A word gaining a more negative meaning over time

A new word being coined

Writers were careless

The texts were translations

There were no vowels

Spelling had not yet been standardised by print and dictionaries

The visual appearance of text: typeface, layout, punctuation and capitalisation

The study of handwriting personality

The sounds of speech

The history of grammar

The Norman Conquest

The printing press and dictionaries such as Johnson's of 1755

The Great Vowel Shift alone

Social media

Change happens randomly

Change is always decay

Change happens through contact with other languages

Change never happens

Prescriptivist: change is decay to be resisted

That only spelling changes

That English never changes

Descriptivist: change is natural and continuous

Describing each text in turn instead of comparing them

Comparing texts level by level

Naming processes of change

Explaining change with theory

Language changes only by accident

Language changes to meet new needs, such as new words for new things

Language never changes its vocabulary

Language changes only in spelling