English 400 Study Guide

The final exam covers all material since the midterm--essentially Middle English and Early Modern English. You should be able to demonstrate the following skills:

• Be able to make statements about the date and dialect of a Middle English text based on its linguistic forms. Be able to describe what evidence (orthographic/phonological, morphological, lexical, etc.) supports your statement.
• Be able to relate the linguistic forms of a text (particularly graphological, orthographic/phonological, and lexical) to the cultural developments of the time period when the text was produced.
• Be able to evaluate the assumptions about the relationship between language and society revealed by a text and relate them to the historical develoments or intellectual ideas of the time when the text was produced.

You should also be able to decribe the changes in a particular linguistic phenomenon (e.g. long vowels) over time--providing explanations where we have discussed this, as with the Great Vowel Shift--and the changing ideas about language and how they manifested (e.g. in the forms of dictionaries) over time.