801 Historical Linguistics 1 G 5
Prereq: 601 and either 611 or permission of instructor
An introduction to the methods, conventions, and literature of comparative-historical linguistics.
This course is designed to introduce students to historical linguistics on an advanced level, concentrating on problems and methods in historical phonology. The question of causation of phonological change is considered carefully, both in relationship to the methodology employed in historical phonological analysis, and in relationship to the models of synchronic phonologies in the community (sociophonetics) and in the individual (psycholinguistics of the mental lexicon) that have been assumed in developing different methodologies.
The first part of the course will be a brief review of the comparative method and its theoretical foundations in the models of phonological grammars and of speech communities proposed by the Neogrammarians. Coursework in this part consists of two short homework exercises, using material drawn from Indo-European, although parallel phenomena in other reasonably well-studied language families will be emphasized in discussing the exercises in relationship to the readings to the concurrent readings. Readings in these first weeks will be the relevant review articles on the comparative method in Joseph & Janda's (2003) Handbook of Historical Linguistics.
The second (and larger) part of the course will be a more in-depth exploration of relevant methodological and theoretical issues pertaining to demonstrations of the regularity of sound change and/or to the explanation of (apparent) counter-examples. Two sets of questions will be addressed in this part. First, what is the best way to understand the relationship between synchronic variation and sound change? In particular, how can quantitative sociolinguistic findings from modern speech communities apply to our understanding of the origin and the spread of sound change completed in the more or less distant past? Conversely, how can the model of this relationship proposed by Weinreich et al. (1968) and developed further in the extensive body of literature summarized in Labov (1994) inform phonological theory? Second, is "lexical diffusion" a distinct mechanism or merely a subtype of analogy or dialect borrowing? In particular, how does the choice of theory about the relationship of phonological grammar to mental lexicon constrain our understanding of the spread of sound change through the vocabulary of an individual speaker (in contrast to the spread of a sound change across the aggregate of speakers that constitute the speech community at any time during the course of a particular sound change in progress)? What are the constraints imposed by theory-internal assumptions about the phonological grammars of individual speakers in the different answers to this question proposed by Kiparsky (1994), Guy & Boyd (1990), Anttila (1997), Bybee (2000), and Pierrehumbert (2002).
Coursework in this part consists of individual term projects: each student chooses a more specific question of personal interest, develops an annotated bibliography of relevant readings, and designs a corpus study, a field project, or an experiment that could be done to explore the question either in the course of the quarter or independently after the course is over, as appropriate for the size of the data-gathering phase of the project. Readings in this part will include relevant articles from the literature that the entire class reads together, as well as the readings from the project bibliographies, which each student does alone.
Offered 2007-2008:
Offered 2008-2009 (projected):
Instructor's Course Pages:
Mary E. Beckman
Last modified 2004-09-10
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