Universität Wien

122048 PS Proseminar Linguistics 2 (2017S)

BA (612) 6.1 - I am loving it! - investigating variation and change in Present Day English syntax

5.00 ECTS (2.00 SWS), SPL 12 - Anglistik
Continuous assessment of course work
Moodle

Registration/Deregistration

Note: The time of your registration within the registration period has no effect on the allocation of places (no first come, first served).

Details

max. 25 participants
Language: English

Lecturers

Classes (iCal) - next class is marked with N

This PS2 is PARTLY BLOCKED!!!Instead of the last 5 regular sessions, all student presentations will be blocked on Friday, June 9th (16.00-20.00) & Saturday, June 10th (9.00-13.00).
Attendance during this entire block is mandatory for course completion!
Weekly sessions will be held until 24th of May.

  • Wednesday 08.03. 16:00 - 18:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 15.03. 16:00 - 18:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 22.03. 16:00 - 18:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 29.03. 16:00 - 18:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 05.04. 16:00 - 18:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 26.04. 16:00 - 18:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 03.05. 16:00 - 18:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 10.05. 16:00 - 18:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 17.05. 16:00 - 18:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 24.05. 16:00 - 18:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Friday 09.06. 16:00 - 20:00 Raum 5 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O1-17
  • Saturday 10.06. 09:00 - 13:00 Raum 1 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-05

Information

Aims, contents and method of the course

English, which is used as a global language with millions of users, is full of social, regional and stylistic variation and one of the fastest changing languages in the world. The difficulty to distinguish between well-formed and ill-formed grammatical constructions can be understood much better if one takes into account that language is constantly changing. That is why one aim of this course is to introduce basic concepts of language variation and change (e.g. Register, Variety, Erosion, Bleaching, Analogization, Grammaticalization, Constructionalization, Subjectification, constructional competition). The course will give a brief overview on semantic change as well as word formation processes. However, the focus will be on syntactic variation. Students will investigate if and how English grammar is currently changing by analyzing morphosyntactic variation in contemporary English.
The following questions will be answered:

Why and how does a language change (external social reasons, cognitive internal reasons…)?
How can language change be modelled and which linguistic levels are mostly being affected?
How can linguistic variation and change be detected in the data?

Another aim of this course in to show students what it means to work empirically and how to write an academic paper in linguistics.

Assessment and permitted materials

Each student will choose one syntactic phenomenon/construction which has been undergoing observable change in the last decades e.g. future reference (I’m gonna be there), increase of progressive form (I’m loving it), alternative adverb formation (Come quick!), decrease of present perfect usage (I didn’t do it yet), increase of kind of, sort of, dropping of 3rd person -s, regularization of irregular plural and past forms …, get-passive, Intensifier competition). By using the BYU corpora - COCA, COHA, BNC,...- empirical data will be elicited and analyzed. The results of this data analysis will be presented in a 25 min group presentation and in a written proseminar paper (written individually).

Minimum requirements and assessment criteria

This interactive course involves discussions, group work and presentations. Course evaluation is based on regular attendance (max. 2 absences of weekly sessions; full participation at blocked sessions in June), class participation (readings, 2 smaller assignments) 16%, an oral in-class presentation 20%, a paper proposal 20% and a written seminar paper 44%.

Examination topics

you need to collect > 60p/% to pass the course sucessfully

Reading list

Materials will be provided in class. Please note that there is a moodle platform for this course.

Association in the course directory

Studium: BA 612;
Code/Modul: BA06.1;
Lehrinhalt: 12-2044

Last modified: Mo 07.09.2020 15:33