Live Quiz Arena
🎁 1 Free Round Daily
⚡ Enter ArenaQuestion
← Language & CommunicationIf a frequently used content word gradually takes on a grammatical function within a language, which consequence follows?
A)Phonetic erosion is effectively reversed
B)Semantic bleaching and grammaticalization occur✓
C)Lexical borrowing rates exponentially decrease
D)Syntactic complexity undergoes rapid reduction
💡 Explanation
Semantic bleaching and grammaticalization occur because the content word loses its original meaning and evolves into a grammatical marker. Therefore, the word shifts function, rather than retaining its lexical weight; thus, phonetic erosion is not reversed.
🏆 Up to £1,000 monthly prize pool
Ready for the live challenge? Join the next global round now.
*Terms apply. Skill-based competition.
Related Questions
Browse Language & Communication →- If a language consistently places subjects before objects, and determiners before nouns, which consequence follows regarding adposition choice in a typological harmonic?
- Why does neural machine translation sometimes generate translations with high BLEU scores but lack coherence?
- An engineer builds a voice assistant that misinterprets user commands when complex sentences contain multiple clauses connected by conjunctions. Which mechanism explains this semantic parsing failure?
- A convolutional neural network (CNN) attempts to recognize objects in images but fails to generalize to rotated versions of those objects. Which mechanism explains this failure?
- An auctioneer rapidly changes their voice pitch to highlight the best offers. Which communication effect limits the efficiency of this strategy?
- Why does verb-object-subject (VOS) order remain relatively rare cross-linguistically despite its logical possibility?
