DLAB Cross-Linguistic Comparison

Question 1

English says 'the red big house' sounds wrong, preferring 'the big red house.' This shows that English has a fixed adjective order where size comes before color.
Which type of language rule does this demonstrate?

Accepted Answer

Syntactic ordering constraint on adjectives

Answer

Phonological rule

Answer

Morphological rule

Answer

Semantic rule

Question 2

Japanese uses Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) order: 'Tanaka-san hon-o yomu' = 'Tanaka book reads.' English uses SVO: 'Tanaka reads a book.' What percentage of world languages use SOV order?

Accepted Answer

About 45%

Answer

About 10%

Answer

About 25%

Answer

About 75%

Question 3

In Mandarin Chinese, 'ma' can mean 'mother,' 'hemp,' 'horse,' or 'scold' depending on the tone used. What type of language is Mandarin in terms of its use of pitch?

Accepted Answer

A tone language where pitch distinguishes word meaning

Answer

A stress-timed language

Answer

An intonation language

Answer

A pitch-accent language

Question 4

Turkish 'ev-ler-im-de' means 'in my houses.' Each suffix has one meaning: ev (house), -ler (plural), -im (my), -de (in/at). What type of morphological system does Turkish use?

Accepted Answer

Agglutinative

Answer

Isolating

Answer

Fusional

Answer

Polysynthetic

Question 5

Arabic forms words using root consonant patterns: k-t-b relates to writing (kitab = book, katib = writer, maktub = written). What is this word-formation system called?

Accepted Answer

Root-and-pattern (templatic) morphology

Answer

Compounding

Answer

Reduplication

Answer

Prefixation

Question 6

English has prepositions ('in the house'), while Japanese has postpositions ('ie ni' = 'house in'). What typological correlation exists between word order and adposition type?

Accepted Answer

SVO languages tend to use prepositions; SOV languages tend to use postpositions

Answer

No correlation exists

Answer

All languages use prepositions

Answer

SOV languages use prepositions

English says 'the red big house' sounds wrong, preferring 'the big red house.' This shows that English has a fixed adjective order where size comes before color.Which type of language rule does this demonstrate?

English says 'the red big house' sounds wrong, preferring 'the big red house.' This shows that English has a fixed adjective order where size comes before color.
Which type of language rule does this demonstrate?