17347

SoSe 21: PS- History of English II: Old, Middle, and Early Modern

Kirsten Middeke

Comments

This seminar introduces students to the history of the English language. The period covered will be the time between the beginnings of English as a separate language in the Age of Migrations until the Colonial Age, when English began its spread around the world and started developing into several distinct national varieties.

The focus of the seminar will be on making students familiar with the structure of Old, Middle and Early Modern English and to teach you basic reading/translation skills. But you will also be introduced to diachronic linguistics (language change). You will gain knowledge about the socio-historical events relevant to the external history of the English language and you will study the internal history (sound change, mophological change, syntactic change, semantic change). You will be introduced to the most important sources of historical language data and their analysis (text editions, dictionaries, thesauri, corpora [passive cqp]) and will be given reading or translation exercises as well as research tasks on all levels of linguistic analysis.

In the end, you will be able to comprehend modern linguistic constructions as the products of language change, you will be able to recognize and read early English texts, and you will have the knowledge and skills to conduct your own diachronic or synchronic linguistic research with historical data.

Credit requirements are:

regular participation in discussions, based on weekly reading assignments, translation tasks and/or other linguistic exercises
active participation, including the design (in groups) of an academic poster and the recording of a five-minute video/audio presentation
an academic paper of c2000 words