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Cursus: TLRMV16112
TLRMV16112
Principles of Language Change
Cursus informatie
CursuscodeTLRMV16112
Studiepunten (EC)5
Cursusdoelen
Students who have passed this course:
• Possess up-to-date knowledge of the fundamentals of language variation and change
• Are capable of forming an opinion about current debates on mechanisms and causes of language variation and change and of applying theory to the analysis of historical corpora of language data
• Are capable of setting up and conducting research on themes of the course
Inhoud
Individual languages across the world come in all shapes and forms, which occupy different points on a very wide continuum of possibilities. The course deals with language as an ever-changing beast. Students will be confronted with ways in which languages undergo major changes to their structure, both within one or two generations as well as across many millennia. The course will explore the following specific topics:
• Fundamentals: comparative method: sound laws, analogy, language reconstruction; nineteenth-century neogrammarian theory and the measure of its success at the present time; basic theories, research methods and insights of the sociolinguistic study of language variation and change and their application to historical data will be presented; UG-based accounts of language variation and change
• Syntactical change, morphological change and how syntax becomes morphology: grammaticalization
• Language-internal causes of change as opposed to language-external causes of change (contact: how change in one language can be triggered by contact with another)

Career orientation:
The course will help students develop their data analysis competencies, in addition to their written and oral communicative skills.
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