122047 PS Proseminar Linguistics 2 (2017S)

This course will introduce students to the field of historical linguistics and language variation and change. More specifically, the course aims to identify instances of syntactic change in 19th and 20th century English, and to investigate the contexts in which these changes take place in more detail. For example, it has been suggested that the frequency of the present perfect tense has been declining over the last decades, while the past simple is on the rise (I have already done that vs. I already did that); similarly, the progressive has been reported to be gaining ground at the expense of the simple tense, particularly with stative verbs such as love or believe (cf. McDonalds well-known slogan ‘I’m loving it’).

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.

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). 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