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WiSe 20/21: PS-Historical Linguistics: Topics in Historical Linguistics: Early Modern English

Stefan Thim

Comments

The Early Modern English period (c.1500–1700) plays a fundamental role both in the emergence of Modern Standard English and its international varieties and in the development of non-standard varieties of the language. But it is also a fascinating topic in its own right, a language that is often familiar and sometimes wildly exotic from a present-day point of view, with considerable internal variation and ongoing linguistic change within the period.

In this class we will look at some literary but also a number of non-literary Early Modern English texts in order to assess the major characteristics of the emerging standard on all levels of linguistic description, from phonology to text linguistics and stylistics. We will trace contemporary debates on the role of English and the ways in which English extends to functional domains previously occupied by Latin and French and the concomitant changes in the lexicon (including their lexicographic coverage), but also have a closer look at the major morphological and syntactic developments (e.g. periphrastic DO, word order, tense and aspect, etc.). Other topics will include the reasons for the discrepancies between spelling and pronunciation in Modern English (and Early Modern English proposals for a spelling reform), or the pragmatic implications of the replacement of older pronouns of address.