PS-History of English II: Old English
Kirsten Middeke
Kommentar
This seminar introduces students to the history of the English language, with a special focus on the Old English period, i.e. the period between the settlement of substantial numbers of Germanic speakers in Britain, which made the dialects later to be called “English” a separate language, and the Norman Conquest, which constitutes a significant caesura in the history of English, because it led to English being replaced by French (and Latin) in most of its written functions for some 200 years.
Students will gain knowledge of the socio-historical events relevant to the external history of the English language (the Age of Migrations, Christianization, the Viking Age, the reign of Alfred the Great) and study the internal history of the language in detail (sound change, morphological change, syntactic change, lexical change). They will be introduced to the most important sources of historical language data and their analysis (text editions, dictionaries, thesauri, corpora) and will be given research tasks on all levels of linguistic analysis.
The exam will be an academic paper of 2000 words based on relevant academic literature and an original empirical investigation. Towards the end of the course, students will create and present academic posters (in groups) in preparation for their individual term papers.
Credit requirements are:
- regular participation in discussions, based on weekly reading assignments, translation tasks and/or other linguistic exercises
- active participation, including the design and presentation (in groups) of an academic poster
- an academic paper of c2000 words
Schließen
13 Termine
Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung