LIN 617 - Historical Linguistics - Seminar - Spring 2005
LIN 617 – Advanced Studies in Historical Linguistics
Spring 2017 - Elly van Gelderen
T 4:50 PM – 7:35 PM
Office: LL 226C; e-mail: ellyvangelderen@asu.edu; Office hours: T 1-4pm; Th 9:20-10:20 am (but check beforehand); and by appointment/e-mail.
Website for the class is .
Aims:
The aim of Historical Linguistics is to describe change and to (try to) explain it. In this course, we will
(a) briefly look at the bigger picture (language evolution and possible migrations) and briefly discuss some frameworks of language change and some methods (CM, IR, corpora),
(b) examine specific morpho-syntactic changes in Old, Middle, and Early Modern English to get a sense for typical changes
(c) discuss a variety of (mainly morphosyntactic) changes in different language families, e.g. from synthetic to analytic and back, changes in embedding, negation, pronoun systems in Indo-European (Germanic, Romance), Semitic, Niger-Congo, Athabascan, Uto-Aztecan, and other families. We’ll have two main topics while doing this:
(d) grammaticalization and the linguistic cycle, and
(e) changes in argument structure.
Evaluation:
40%: 4 Homework assignments
10%: 10 Questions (roughly 1 each week) on the readings, to be sent to me by e-mail the day before class.
50%: Project/Research paper/handout for a conference. In week 12, a first draft of the project is due. This draft will be commented on by Elly and given back. There will be a workshop style discussion of all papers and the final version of your paper/project should incorporate the comments.
There are no required textbooks. There will be pdfs available of articles.
Optional books
Elly van Gelderen 2014 edition. A History of the English Language. Amsterdam: Benjamins. (we will use chapters 3, 4, 6, and 7; follow link on the schedule)
Elly van Gelderen 2011. The Linguistic Cycle. OUP. (chapters are available on )
Elly van Gelderen 2017. The Diachrony of Verb Meaning: Aspect and Argument Structure. In progress.
Mike Hopper & Elizabeth Traugott 2003. Grammaticalization. CUP.
David Lightfoot 2006. How new languages emerge. CUP.
Crisma, Paola & Giuseppe Longobardi 2010. Historical syntax and linguistic theory. OUP.
Dimmendaal, Gerrit 2011. Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Preliminary schedule
Week 1; 10 January
Introduction, Organization, and Resources (HO1): typical change, methods, history of historical linguistics. Evolution of Language (HO2; Cavalli-Sforza 2000) on the connection between DNA and language families and on proto-language (Bickerton 1990). Reading for class discussion: Bickerton and Cavalli-Sforza.
Week 2; 17 January:
Introduction to grammaticalization (Hopper & Traugott 2003) and a discussion of other work relevant to language change (Lightfoot; Roberts & Roussou, etc). Grammaticalization: paths and areal features (Heine & Kuteva 2002; 2005; Bisang n.d.) HO on Grammaticalization; reading for class discussion: Hopper & Traugott.
Week 3; 24 January
Homework 1 due; Old English (van Gelderen 2014, chapter 4); Orosius HO; introduction to corpora/e-texts.
Week 4; 31 January
Middle English (van Gelderen 2014, chapter 6); Bestiary HO. Discussion of analytic/synthetic (Szmrecsanyi 2012; Schwegler 1990).
Week 5; 7 February
Early Modern English (van Gelderen 2014, chapter 7); Review of the morpho-syntactic changes from Old to Modern English. Discussion of complexity. Reading for class discussion: Szmrecsanyi & Kortmann 2009 and Trudgill 2004.
Week 6; 14 February
Homework 2 due. Complexity continued and more types of change. Handout on various types of change. Reading for class discussion: Brinton 2000; Nichols 2009. Optional: Sapir 1921 Chapter 6 from Language.
Week 7; 21 February
The Linguistic Cycle: Macro and micro-cycles. Reading for class discussion: Hodge (1970) and van Gelderen (2013). Optional: Sapir (1921), Givon (2000). A very informal presentation of the paper topics you will be pursuing; this needs to be only very brief.
Week 8; 28 February; Continue the Linguistic Cycle
Grammaticalization and the linguistic cycle. Reading for class discussion: van Gelderen 2011 chapter 6, just for the data and South East Asian Post 2007. Optional reading: Matisoff 1991.
Week 9; 5-12 March
SPRING BREAK
Week 10; 14 March
Homework 3 due; The Copula Cycle and changes in the argument structure of copulas. Reading for class discussion: van Gelderen (2015) and (2017).
Week 11; 21 March
Changes in the lexicon. Reading: Haselow. Gender in change: HO.
Week 12; 28 March
Changes in Argument Structure. Ppt on changes in verb meaning and argument structure. Reading for class discussion: Psych verbs (van Gelderen 2014 and Lightfoot 1979.
Research paper draft due
Week 13; 4 April
Homework 4 due; Review of the entire class: methods and future areas of research; preview of the topics you have chosen.
Week 14; 11 April
Workshop
Week 15; 18 April
Workshop continued
Week 16; 25 April
Dinner
Some examples of paper topics
1. Take one of the grammaticalizations discussed in Heine & Kuteva (2002) and learn as much as you can from their references, e.g. `owe’ > `obligation’. Then, using the OED or COHA or another resource, find evidence for such change in the history of English.
2. Grammaticalization in language acquisition. Can you use CHILDES and trace the development of modals and of demonstratives etc? Diessel (2011, in Narrog & Heine)
3. Loanwords. Which languages borrow most; which words are borrowed? . See also Haspelmath & Tadmor’s 2009 Loanwords in the World's Languages: A Comparative Handbook (Berlin: de Gruyter; it is available from google books).
4. Changes in determiners (Lyons 1999; Diessel; Aldridge 2009), or instrumentals (e.g. Luraghi 2001), or future markers (Joseph 1982, Robert & Roussou 2003), or pronouns (Howe 1996). Find a way to chronicle some change and account for it.
5. The change from ergative to non-ergative (Modern Persian), or the development of ergativity (e.g. Garrett 1990, Aldridge 2008; Deo & Sharma ). This would be a pretty descriptive paperunless you could find a way to link it to a language you know.
6. Explore the development of noun class markers in Niger-Congo (Heine & Reh 1984), classifiers (Post 2007), and in Germanic (Brems ...).
7. Changes in subordinate clauses, e.g. the replacement of the subjunctive by the infinitive (Haspelmath 1998; van Gelderen 2006: 169-170; 212-213) or changes from control to raising verbs or in the complementation patterns ().
8. The typology of languages that use animate/inanimate, i.e. active languages. Lehman (1993) and Gamkrelidze & Ivanov (1994: 233-276). What remnants of this might non-active languages have?
9. Discuss a controversy in genetic groupings, e.g. in Altaic, in the Italo-Celtic branch of Indo-European, or in language spread, e.g. that of Dravidian. For a concrete suggestion: review and evaluate the evidence for grouping the Pueblo languages (Zuni and Acoma etc.; see Davis 1979 in Campbell & Mithun 1979), or what might Basque be related to (various writing by Vennemann).
10. Explore the development in pronouns in Semitic (Russell 1984; Pat El 2012).
11. Discuss and compare the use of certain methods in Historical Linguistics. You could look at the use of corpora, internal reconstruction, comparative method, Glottochronology (start with Bynon 1977: 266-72).
12. Describe what the Computational Phylogenetics Project aims to do (cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/CPHL/). Think of a way you can make this practically useful, e.g. in the classroom.
13. Explore connections among various writing systems, as found on e.g. . Are there reasons these systems are similar? (contact?)
14. Can one link population size/type and e.g. phoneme inventory, as in Trudgill; Gil et al? Review the evidence.
15. For those of you interested in semantics, Deo (2007) may be interesting () as well as Eckardt.
16. How do outside scientific and social developments influence (historical) linguistics. Good examples may be the influence of Darwinism on 19th century linguistics and racist views (Bernal’s Black Athena, Koerner 2004, Said 1984).
17. How can Sound Symbolism (Prokosch 1939: 120-23) be relevant to language change? Are some patterns universal and some language/family-specific? [This is a question I have no clue about myself].
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