Course for international guest/part time students
- Faculty
- Faculty of Humanities
- Organization
- BTK Department of English Linguistics
- Code
- BMI-ANGD17-B3E
- Title
- Varieties of English and the History of English
- Usual semester
- Spring
- ECTS
- 5
- Language
- en
- Learning outcomes
- The primary objective of the course is to introduce students to the history of English through those aspects of formal analysis that will be of help in deciding which language is (not) related to which.
- Course content
- The objective of this MA level course will be the coverage of a number of linguistic areas of the history of English: (i) proofs of relationship of English with Indo-European languages (with the help of historical comparative phonology, as exemplified by Grimm’s laws), (ii) proofs of areal relationship with both Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages, (iii) semantic changes, (iv) syntactic changes, (v) morphological changes, (vi) dialectal diversification of English (in the past and the present). The course is primarily a theoretical course but practical aspects of analysis will also be exemplified through close reading of a number of texts from various stages of English.
- Assessment method
- The course will end in a 100 point multiple choice exam at the end of the semester.
- Bibliography
- John Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language (based on Thomas Pyles) (6th Edition), Wadsworth: Cengage Learning, 2010.
- Recommended bibliography
- John Algeo, Carmen Butcher, Workbook: Problems for Algeo/Butcher's The Origins and Development of the English Language, 2013 Ishtla Singh, The History of English (A Student's Guide), London: Hodder Education, 2005 Haruko Momma, Michael Matto (eds.), A Companion to the History of the English Language, Wiley-Blackwell International David Crystal, A Little Book of Language, Sydney: UNSWP, 2010