The test will take the full 2 hours of class time.

It will cover all material from class lectures, and readings from Crystal and Millward that correspond to those lectures. Anything in Crystal and Millward about vocabulary is reader-friendly and also fair game.

You can expect to find unfamiliar texts on it that contain the kinds of linguistic features characteristic of the kinds of texts that we have already looked at; for instance, later modern English and present-day English, scientific and "lay" language, "written vs oral" language, English creole. So, it would be a very good idea to make a list of the kinds of features characteristic of (for instance) creole, scientific English, later modern English, spoken language, etc., and expect to find and identify those features in texts on the test. If you're very lucky, I might find parallel translations of the bible that efficiently contrast early modern, later modern, present-day and creole! Most of the time I will just expect you to identify features (e.g. finding and identifying as "later modern/present-day English" the passive progressive "The church was being built" ) rather than to explain their origins, but your data about words for insecticide might generate some more interpretive questions. ("Describe the main linguistic features of words denoting insecticide, and make some intelligent speculations about their intended effects").

I might also give you unfamiliar words or sentences to comment on: you're starting to be in the position of being able to make educated guesses. Here are some examples from recent lectures. You can now make an educated guess about the relative order in which words like "polite" and "police" were borrowed into English, for instance (relates to class on Great Vowel Shift), or make an educated guess about why the word "receipt" has a "p" in it that we don't pronounce. (Thoughts about "conceit" and "concept"?). And you can now say something intelligent about the following quotation from Shakespeare's Richard II: "the slye slow houres shall not determinate/The dateless limit of thy deere exile". All of these words and sentences relate to the class on early modern English latin loanwords. Or, given what you now know about what often happens to the last element in word-final consonant clusters, you can make some observations about my electricians' use of the form jois "joist" Or, I might give you some examples and definitions of some very new words, and you might account for them ("conversion from noun to verb", "metaphorical extension").

You should be able to define and especially to apply the terms introduced in class lectures. This includes, certainly, being able to identify the subject, verb, and object (for instance) of a sentence you haven't seen before, being able to transcribe vowels and consonants (pick a system and stick with it: I suggest the handout that you got from O'Grady), describe vowels ("front, back, high, low") and consonants ("voiceless interdental fricative"), being able to identify free and bound morphemes.

There will also be some short-answer identifications ("Who was Robert Lowth and why was he important?") and a choice of essay questions that involve combining information from different parts of the course (we'd identified dictionaries as a potential subject, and I have been giving you heavy hints about identifying and accounting for historically some differences between Canadian and British English!)