Language Change and Evolution

Catalog description

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. In this course we will survey change at multiple levels (i.e., phonetic, phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels), practice methods of historical reconstruction, explore relationships between linguistic variation and change, study change in the context of language contact, language birth, and language death, and explore new methods in historical comparative linguistics. Our focus will be on Indo-European languages.