(Replying to PARENT post)
> I don't know of any dialects of English for example that switch the assignment of roles (A speech delivered Bill, eg)
This is a complete guess, but perhaps this exists to identify english-as-a-second-language speakers from languages where this form exists?
(English is my first and only language and I know very little about languages. The test guessed correctly that I am Australian)
👤xmodem🕑11y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
I noticed an instance where a collective noun had were after it rather than was. I.e "Apple were the largest NASDAQ company" rather than "Apple was the largest NASDAQ company". This is typical of British English[1].
[1] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/words/matching-verbs-to...
👤Moto7451🕑11y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
Keep in mind that with surveys like this, especially online ones, it is important to have trap questions that will indicate if the responder is answering randomly and/or jokingly. So you may be correct that some answers are just wrong for everyone.
👤anywhichway🕑11y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
1. Passive alternation
2. It-clefting (simply `clefting` in some circles)
3. Another it-cleft?
4. It-cleft + possible scope ambiguity
5. Quantifier scope ambiguity (do you get quant raising, basically)
6. More clefts? Don't recall, but maybe they're mixing it up with the overt complementizer (`that`).
7. Ditto above
8. Passive construction again
9. More quantifier scope stuff
10. Lexicon inventory (modal shall is antiquated in most (all?) dialects)
11. Idunno, phrasing. Not-quite-collocate decisions
12. Aspect-tense interaction, I guess...
13. 'Conjugation', or how do you express tense?
14. Lexical selection/wh-feature spellout (does `+person` override the 'incorrect' case-marked `whom`?)
15. Skipped this one due to a double-click, too much coffee
16. Even more lexicon stuff
17. Lexical selection, or 'what kind of thing needs a determiner?'
...okay this is tedious. My point was going to be that a lot of these, especially the syntactic construction ones, seem very specific. I don't know of any dialects of English for example that switch the assignment of roles (A speech delivered Bill, eg) so freely as some of these questions suggest, and I thought all dialects had passive construction and it-clefting. Maybe I'll go through again and answer all the wrong things and see where it thinks those features are from.
Anyway, this was interesting. If this sort of thing also interests you, waste the rest of your day on The World Atlas of Language Structures! [1] It's a ton of fun.
[1] http://wals.info/