Word order

Multiple-choice exercise

ELT Concourse home
Choose the best answer for each question

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