LIN 617 – Advanced Studies in Historical Linguistics
Spring 2015 - Elly van Gelderen
W 4:30 PM – 7:15 PM EDB L1 24
Office: LL 226C; e-mail: ellyvangelderen@asu.edu; Office hours: Office Hours: T 12-1;
W 9-11 (but check beforehand); and by appointment/e-mail.
Website for the class is http://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/HL.htm but I am trying to get
all the links on this syllabus.
Aims:
The aim of Historical Linguistics is to describe change and to (try to) explain it. In this
course, we will
(a)
briefly look at the bigger picture (language evolution and possible migrations) and
briefly discuss some frameworks of language change and some methods (CM, IR,
corpora),
(b)
examine specific morpho-syntactic changes in Old, Middle, and Early Modern
English to get a sense for typical changes
(c)
discuss a variety of (mainly morphosyntactic) changes in different language
families, e.g. from synthetic to analytic and back, changes in embedding, negation,
pronoun systems in Indo-European (Germanic, Romance), Semitic, Niger-Congo,
Athabascan, Uto-Aztecan, and other families. We’ll have two main topics while
doing this:
(d)
grammaticalization and the linguistic cycle, and
(e)
changes in argument structure.
Evaluation:
40%: 4 Homework assignments
10%: 10 Questions (roughly 1 each week) on the readings, to be sent to me by e-mail the
day before class.
50%: Project/Research paper/handout for a conference. In week 12, a first draft of the
project is due. This draft will be commented on by Elly and given back. There will
be a workshop style discussion of all papers and the final version of your
paper/project should incorporate the comments.
There are no required textbooks. The instructor will make pdfs available of articles.
Optional books
Elly van Gelderen 2014 edition. A History of the English Language. Amsterdam:
Benjamins. (we will use chapters 3, 4, 6, and 7; follow link on the schedule)
Elly van Gelderen 2011. The Linguistic Cycle. OUP. (chapters are available on
http://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/pub.htm
Mike Hopper & Elizabeth Traugott 2003. Grammaticalization. CUP.
David Lightfoot 2006. How new languages emerge. CUP.
Crisma, Paola & Giuseppe Longobardi 2010. Historical syntax and linguistic theory.
OUP.
Dimmendaal, Gerrit 2011. Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African
Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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Preliminary schedule:
Week 1; 14 January
Introduction, Organization, and Resources.
Handouts on typical change, methods, history of historical linguistics, and language
origins. Reading: Greenberg (1987) on Eurasiatic and Amerind and Cavalli-Sforza (2000)
on the connection between DNA and language families.
Week 2; 21 January
Evolution of Language (van Gelderen to appear chap 3); evolution and grammaticalization
(Bickerton 1990); introduction to grammaticalization (Hopper & Traugott 2003) and a
discussion of other work relevant to language change (Lightfoot; Roberts & Roussou, etc).
Grammaticalization and areal features (Heine & Kuteva 2002; 2005; Bisang n.d.)
Week 3; 28 January
Homework 1 due; Old English (van Gelderen to appear, chapter 4); introduction to
corpora/e-texts.
Week 4; 4 February
Middle English (van Gelderen to appear, chapter 6); e-sources continued.
Week 5; 11 February
Homework 2 due; Early Modern English (van Gelderen to appear, chapter 7);
Review of the morpho-syntactic changes from Old to Modern English.
Week 6; 18 February
The Linguistic Cycle: Macro and micro-cycles. Reading: Hodge (1970), Sapir (1921),
Givon (2000), Schwegler (1990), and van Gelderen (2013).
Week 7; 25 February
Grammaticalization and the linguistic cycle: negation, and TMA. (van Gelderen 2011,
chapter 7 and chapter 8).
Week 8; 4 March
NO CLASS
Week 9; 13 March
SPRING BREAK
Week 10; 18 March
Homework 3 due; Grammaticalization in Chinese (HO by Elly) and in South East Asian.
(Post 2007; Matisoff 1991)
Week 11; 25 March
Changes in Argument Structure. Causatives: van Gelderen (2011, JHL) and Garci Garcia
(2012, TrPS). Ergativity: Aldridge (2008). Impersonal verbs: Lightfoot (1979); Allen
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(1995); Möhlig-Falke (2012).
Week 12; 1 April
Research paper draft due, Argument Structure and case continued.
Week 13; 8 April
Homework 4 due; Review of the entire class: methods and future areas of research.
Week 14; 15 April
Workshop
Week 15; 22 April
Workshop continued
Week 16; 29 April
Final review
Some examples of paper topics
1.
Take one of the grammaticalizations discussed in Heine & Kuteva (2002) and learn
as much as you can from their references, e.g. `owe’ > `obligation’. Then, using the
OED or COHA or another resource, find evidence for such change in the history of
English.
2.
Grammaticalization in language acquisition. Can you use CHILDES and trace the
development of modals and of demonstratives etc? Diessel (2011, in Narrog &
Heine)
3.
Loanwords. Which languages borrow most; which words are borrowed?
http://loanwords.info. See also Haspelmath & Tadmor’s 2009 Loanwords in the
World's Languages: A Comparative Handbook (Berlin: de Gruyter; it is available
from google books).
4.
Changes in determiners (Lyons 1999; Diessel; Aldridge 2009), or instrumentals
(e.g. Luraghi 2001), or future markers (Joseph 1982, Robert & Roussou 2003), or
pronouns (Howe 1996). Find a way to chronicle some change and account for it.
5.
The change from ergative to non-ergative (Modern Persian), or the development of
ergativity (e.g. Garrett 1990, Aldridge 2008; Deo & Sharma
http://pantheon.yale.edu/~asd49/ergvar.pdf). This would be a pretty descriptive
paperunless you could find a way to link it to a language you know.
6.
Explore the development of noun class markers in Niger-Congo (Heine & Reh
1984), classifiers (Post 2007), and in Germanic (Brems ...).
7.
Changes in subordinate clauses, e.g. the replacement of the subjunctive by the
infinitive (Haspelmath 1998; van Gelderen 2006: 169-170; 212-213) or changes
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from control to raising verbs or in the complementation patterns
(http://email.eva.mpg.de/~haspelmt/Stockholm99.pdf).
8.
The typology of languages that use animate/inanimate, i.e. active languages.
Lehman (1993) and Gamkrelidze & Ivanov (1994: 233-276). What remnants of this
might non-active languages have?
9.
Discuss a controversy in genetic groupings, e.g. in Altaic, in the Italo-Celtic branch
of Indo-European, or in language spread, e.g. that of Dravidian. For a concrete
suggestion: review and evaluate the evidence for grouping the Pueblo languages
(Zuni and Acoma etc.; see Davis 1979 in Campbell & Mithun 1979), or what might
Basque be related to (various writing by Vennemann).
10.
Explore the development in pronouns in Semitic (Russell 1984; Pat El 2012).
11.
Discuss and compare the use of certain methods in Historical Linguistics. You
could look at the use of corpora, internal reconstruction, comparative method,
Glottochronology (start with Bynon 1977: 266-72).
12.
Describe what the Computational Phylogenetics Project aims to do
(www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/CPHL/). Think of a way you can make this practically
useful, e.g. in the classroom.
13.
Explore connections among various writing systems, as found on e.g.
http://www.ancientscripts.com/ws_families.html. Are there reasons these systems
are similar? (contact?)
14.
Can one link population size/type and e.g. phoneme inventory, as in Trudgill; Gil et
al? Review the evidence.
15.
For those of you interested in semantics, Deo (2007) may be interesting
(http://pantheon.yale.edu/~asd49/progpaper-final.pdf) as well as Eckardt.
16.
How do outside scientific and social developments influence (historical) linguistics.
Good examples may be the influence of Darwinism on 19th century linguistics and
racist views (Bernal’s Black Athena, Koerner 2004, Said 1984).
17.
How can Sound Symbolism (Prokosch 1939: 120-23) be relevant to language
change? Are some patterns universal and some language/family-specific? [This is a
question I have no clue about myself].
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