122220 SE Linguistics Seminar / BA Paper (2025S)

In this seminar we explore variation and change in the history of English morphosyntax. Our focus will be (a) on inflectional suffixes such as the suffixes ‘-er’ and ‘-est’ (used for comparing adjectives as in ‘nicer’ and ‘nicest’, and competing with the analytic comparison strategies involving ‘more’ and ‘most’, as in ‘more interesting’, ‘most interesting’), the adverb forming suffix ‘-ly’ (as in ‘quickly’), or the suffix ‘-ing’ (used since Middle English times for forming participles such as ‘walking’), and (b) on derivational affixes such as ‘-hood’, ‘-ship’, or ‘-dom’ (which can be used for forming nouns like ‘childhood’, ‘lordship’, or ‘kingdom’), ‘-able’ (used for forming adjectives such as ‘likeable’), ‘-(at)ion’ (forming nouns like ‘conversion’, ‘conversation’), ‘-er’ (forming agent and instrument nouns like ‘writer’ or ‘screwdriver’), prefixes like ‘un-’ (as in ‘unimaginable’, or ‘undo’), ‘de-’ (as in ‘detach’, ‘defreeze’), ‘for-’ as in (‘forgive’, ‘forbode’), and various others. Finally, we shall investigate the history of some grammatical constructions such as the passive progressive (as in ‘Dinner was being prepared’), which is a comparably recent phenomenon, and may have prepared the path for even more recent constructions such as ‘He was being sarcastic’.

In our projects we shall gather and analyse evidence form diachronic corpora such as the ‘Corpus of Historical American English’, the ‘Early English Books Corpus’, but (possibly) also corpora covering older stages of the language (such as the ‘Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English’).

The course will begin with an introductory phase in which we shall remind ourselves of terms and concepts that are crucial in the study of morphology, and in which we shall learn how to access digital corpora and how to retrieve relevant evidence from them. We shall also learn a few basic methods for analysing corpus findings quantitatively in programs such as MS Excel, and how to visualise our results graphically.

In the second phase, students select projects to work on from a list provided at the beginning of the course. They will design and submit brief proposals, describing their research questions, their hypotheses (if any), and the methods they intend to employ. This phase will involve some supervised work in the classroom as well.

In the third phase, students will present (preliminary) results of their research and discuss them with the seminar.

At the end, students will submit written project reports (aka BA-papers).