Corpus Linguistics: Analysing the Development of English
| Fact sheet | |
|---|---|
| Faculty: |
Faculty 05 - Language, Literature, Culture |
| Department: | Department of English |
| Title: | Corpus Linguistics: Analysing the Development of English |
| Code: | 0525 |
| Lecturer: | Prof. Dr. Magnus Huber |
| Type of course: | Seminar (MA) |
| Description: | Corpus linguistics has become an increasingly popular method of linguistic analysis in the past 25 years. A linguistic corpus is a large collection of computerized texts, sampled to be representative of a certain variety of language. The advantage of such corpora is that they can be electronically searched and analyzed, usually with the help of special corpus software. Because corpora are usually very large (often consisting of several million words), they ideally lend themselves to the study of language variation and change. In this seminar, we will use corpus linguistic methods to investigate the development of English from Middle English times to the present. We will familiarize ourselves with different historical and diachronic corpora and will analyze them both in terms of overall linguistic change (e.g. the replacement of "thou" by "you" or the change from "know you not?" to "don't you know?") and in terms of linguistic and extralinguistic (e.g. social) factors that correlate with the change. For example, do-support was first introduced in negative interrogatives ("don't you know?") and only later in negative declaratives ("she did not go"). One example of a social parameter correlating with linguistic change is that men promoted the introduction of the relative pronouns "who" and "which", while women held on to "that" and the zero relativizer for longer. |
| Date/Time: | Thursday, 12.15pm – 01.45pm CET / asynchronous |
| Language: | English |
| Target group: | MA, Corpus Linguistics |
| Requirements for participation: | Knowledge of English language studies at BA-level |
| ECTS: | 5 |