122051 PS PS Linguistics (2016W)

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. Teaching and assessing the grammar of such a fast changing language is often tricky for language teachers. 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, Lect, Standard, Erosion, Bleaching, Analogization, Grammaticalization, Constructionalization, …). 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?
Why is it important that teachers are aware of variation and language change? How should it affect their teaching?

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