LING 645: Introduction to Historical Linguistics

Overview

Historical linguistics is concerned with how and why languages change over time and the resulting historical relationships between languages. This is a hands-on course. In addition to examining the basic theoretical underpinnings of historical linguistics, we will devote a significant amount of time to doing historical linguistics by working through exercises and data sets drawn from a variety of languages.

This is a survey course which briefly addresses most of the key areas of what is a very broad subfield of linguistics. Many of the topics introduced here—e.g. The Comparative Method, subgrouping, language contact, grammaticization, and phylogenetic methods—could easily merit an entire course of their own. Nevertheless, the current course provides a solid foundation for further exploration of a range of topics in historical linguistics.

While this course will be of interest to those wishing to specialize in the study of historical linguistics, the course is aimed at a wider audience of linguistic students working across a range of subfields. Language change touches all areas of the study of language. Whatever one’s field of interest—from phonology to syntax to sociolinguistics to psycholinguistics to documentation to revitalization—knowledge of historical linguistics theory and methods can help you to better understand the phenomena you study. Indeed, it is one of the key tenets of historical linguistics that language must be understood in its historical context.

Course Objectives and Student Learning Outcomes

This course aims to provide an introduction to the basic concepts of historical linguistics. At the end of this course students will have familiarity with the following concepts and methods:

• the establishment of genetic relationship
• phonological reconstruction
• types of sound change
• theories of sound change
• causes of irregularity in sound change
• semantic change
• morphological and syntactic change
• subgrouping
• linguistic evidence for determining homelands
• linguistic approaches to culture-history
• computational approaches to historical linguistics

Prerequisite

Introductory course in linguistics and familiarity with baisc linear phonology.

Materials

• Historical Linguistics: An Introduction (4th ed.) by Lyle Campbell (MIT Press 2020)
• Additional Readings, as assigned

Detailed syllabus available here