SoSe 24: PS-History of English II: Early Modern English
Kirsten Middeke
Comments
This seminar introduces students to the history of the English language, with a special focus on the Early Modern English period, i.e. the period between, very roughly, 1500 and 1800, during which English was increasingly used as a language of science, learning, law and administration. The meta-linguistic discourse of the period was concerned with the huge amount of loanwords that entered the language as a consequence and with questions of standardization and variation, all of which are still contested issues in language debates today. We will discuss these sociolinguistic issues, as well as the structural changes that English underwent at this time, e.g. the grammaticalization of new tense and aspect constructions.
Students will gain knowledge of the socio-historical events relevant to the external history of the English language (the reformation, for instance, led to the introduction of the printing press, which in turn led to more widespread literacy and to the desire for standardization) 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
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13 Class schedule
Regular appointments