This course covers essential changes that have taken place in the English language over the past thousand years.
We will be asking questions like: how does the language that groups of people use change over time? How does the language that individuals use change from day to day or over the course of their lifetime? How do we change our speech when we are speaking to people from different groups or backgrounds? What does this use of language show us about the knowledge human beings have about language, and about how they process speech?
We will cover theories and methods from historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychology, formal syntax and phonology, and philology. All of these concepts will be introduced through specific key instances of change in English, like the Great Vowel Shift. By the end of the course, you will have a basic knowledge of key topics in English linguistics and will have the conceptual tools to connect these specific examples to more wide-reaching questions such as:
1. How can we investigate language change through the lense of cognitive science with its three pillars of experimentation, computation and theory?
2. What do the findings of such research show us about the nature of change and stability in language?
Semester: SuTerm 2020