122047 PS Proseminar Linguistics 2 (2016W)

This course will introduce students to the field of historical linguistics and language variation and change. More specifically, this course aims to explore the concepts of competition and competition resolution in language change, meaning that the main focus of the course will be to identify instances of competing linguistic variants, and to investigate how this competition has been resolved (or is being resolved still). For example, the 2nd ps. pronoun ‘you’ has clearly successfully ousted its competitor ‘thou’ in the history of English, indicating that one way to resolve competition is simply for one variant to win out, and for the other to be lost entirely. However, another possibility is for two variants to co-exist and possibly cooperate. Such a scenario can be seen in e.g. the history of expressions for future reference: both the be going to-future and the will-future are still used today, but have come to be used in slightly different contexts (will: predictions, going to: plans, etc.).

In order to address and explore these issues, the course will first introduce basic concepts of language variation and change, and will give a brief overview of different types of changes, i.e. phonological, morphological, and semantic change. The main focus will here be on (morpho-)syntactic variation and change, since instances of such changes are most easily identifiable in historical corpora. The students will furthermore be introduced in more detail to the concepts of competition and competition resolution, and (very briefly) the theoretical framework in which this approach is grounded, namely Evolutionary linguistics.

Students will then investigate if and how English grammar has changed since the early 19th century (and/or if and how English is currently changing) in regard to instances of competing linguistic variants. This will be done on the basis of empirical analyses of corpus data drawn from various historical and contemporary corpora. Beforehand, students will be introduced to the corpora in question, and to corpus work in general, including issues such as normalisation and (briefly) statistical testing.

After having completed the course, students should:
be familiar with
- relevant theoretical approaches and main concepts in historical linguistics and language change

and should be able to:
- identify basic literature
- critically analyse scientific papers in the field
- find relevant literature on a specific research topic/question
- formulate an appropriate and concise research question
- conduct an empirical analysis of a specific phenomenon (on the basis of historical corpus data)
- give a successful presentation on a chosen topic
- write a term paper