WiSe 21/22: S-Language Change II: Morphophonetic Change
Ferdinand von Mengden
Comments
The source of all linguistic activity is articulation – mechanic process resulting from the interaction of several physical organs. It is therefore plausible to raise the question to what extent larger linguistic structures – grammar in the widest sense – can be accounted for by articulatory processes. This constitutes the core research question of this seminar.
In the first weeks of the semester we will study the articulatory inventory of humans as a fundament for the phonetic potential of human language. This includes a recap of basic notions of phonetics, phonology, intonation and prosody. As the semester proceeds, we will explore how these articulatory processes shape structures and regularities, but also interfere with existing regularities and cause grammatical idiosyncrasies.
The notion ‘change’ in the title pays tribute to the assumption that linguistic structures are generally dynamic and subject to constant variation and change. Language change, therefore, bears a huge potential to explaining linguistic structures even when the descriptive mapping of some phenomenon is represented as static. In other words, the basic assumption is that structures can be explained by the way they come into being. And the underlying hypothesis of this seminar is that human articulation is one of the crucial sources of these dynamics.
Students who cannot come to the first class of the term are kindly asked to notify me before the beginning of the lecture period.
close16 Class schedule
Regular appointments