16849

WiSe 22/23: Advanced investigations in historical linguistics

Malte Felix Rosemeyer

Kommentar

The Joint Online Course “Advanced Topics in Historical Linguistics” will be held as a parallel course at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and co-taught by Malte Rosemeyer (FU) and Eitan Grossman (HUJI). Due to differences in the length of the semester at both universities, the course will start on October 27, 2022, and end on January 26, 2023. It will be held in an online format and be followed by a student workshop in the week between February 20-24, 2023, held in presence either in Berlin or Jerusalem. In the workshop, students will present the topic of their term papers. We have achieved funding for the travel and accommodation costs. Both participation in the online classes and the student workshop is mandatory. The proposed course will both offer an introduction to basic questions in historical linguistics and discuss recent approaches to these problems. The students will first be introduced to one of the dominant contemporary paradigms in the study of language change, grammaticalization. We will introduce Lehmann’s (2002) classic principles of grammaticalization and discuss the role of the linguistic context for grammaticalization processes. Two sessions will be concerned with mapping the limits of the concept of grammaticalization. In particular, we will expound the problems with the unidirectionality hypothesis and discuss lexicalization and paradigmaticalization. The concepts of grammaticalization, lexicalization and paradigmaticalization are mostly used to explain semantic changes within a linguistic item that later diffuse through the linguistic system. Such actualization processes have been studied in detail in sound change and word class change, and we will dedicate two sessions to these topics before discussing ramifications of sociolinguistic approaches to the study of language change. We will address the highly debated question of whether language change can be entirely explained by inter-generational transmission, and the role of discourse traditions for descriptions of language change. Finally, we will discuss to which degree language contact can explain processes of language change. In the final sessions of the course, we will introduce basic tenets from usage-based historical linguistics. We will dedicate one session to the role of frequency effects in language change. Afterwards, we will demonstrate the relevance of taking into account actual language use in interaction when discussing accounts of semantic reanalysis and conventionalization in discourse. Schließen