Word order

Multiple-choice exercise

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Choose the best answer for each question

  1. Hungarian, Japanese and Korean have ...
    1.   VOS ordering
    2.   SVO ordering
    3.   SOV ordering
    4.   OVS ordering
  2. French and English both exhibit ...
    1.   Genitive-Noun ordering
    2.   Noun-Genitive ordering
  3. How many basic arrangements of S, V and O are possible?
    1.   8
    2.   9
    3.   4
    4.   6
  4. In the sentence He kissed Mary, how do we know who kissed whom?
    1.   By the position of the verb phrase
    2.   By the ordering of the noun phrases and the form of the pronoun
    3.   By the ordering of the noun phrases
  5. Most languages on earth are either ...
    1.   SVO or VOS ordered
    2.   SVO or SOV ordered
    3.   VOS or SOV ordered
    4.   SVO or OVS ordered
  6. Scandinavian languages mostly have ...
    1.   OVS ordering
    2.   SVO ordering
    3.   SOV ordering
    4.   VOS ordering
  7. Turkish and Japanese both have ...
    1.   prepositions
    2.   postpositions
  8. German and French have two canonical word orders which are ...
    1.   SVO and SOV
    2.   SOV and OSV
    3.   OSV and SVO
    4.   VOS and OVS
  9. With this ring, I thee wed is an example of ...
    1.   OVS ordering in English
    2.   VSO ordering in English
    3.   SOV ordering in English
    4.   OSV ordering in English
  10. Languages with free or very flexible word order are ...
    1.   usually isolating and uninflected
    2.   usually Romance or Slavonic
    3.   usually Germanic, like English
    4.   usually heavily inflected to show case