|
Lehrende/r: Dr. Florian Dolberg
Veranstaltungsart:
Vorlesung/Übung
Anzeige im Stundenplan:
Hist.Linguistics
Semesterwochenstunden:
2
Unterrichtssprache:
Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl:
- | 35
Anmeldegruppe: English Historical Linguistics
Prioritätsschema: Senatsrichtlinie
Zulassung gemäß Richtlinie über den Zugang zu teilnahmebeschränkten Lehrveranstaltungen vom 07. März 2007.
Nähere Informationen hierzu entnehmen Sie bitte www.info.jogustine.uni-mainz.de/senatsrichtlinie
Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches:
This course is geared towards students who have a pronounced interest in linguistics, who are comfortable with reading a fair amount of at times demanding scientific literature, who are willing to obtain and share information beyond what is directly offered in the seminar, and who are in the habit of freely sharing their insights (and difficulties) both in class and on-line.
All important technical and administrative information will be relayed in the first session. Participants unable to attend the first session are required to obtain it from their peers.
Participants are required to fulfil all of the following requirements in order to obtain credit:
- complete preparatory reading assignments prior to each session (this entails making notes and annotations),
- discuss the relevant texts prior to class on ReaderPlus (i.e. at least one posting on topic per person per week by saturday noon),
- actively and regularly partake in in-class discussions on the basis of these discussions, notes and annotations,
- join a team devising and running a teaching unit on one aspect of eModE spanning two sessions,
- evaluate the teaching units run by others,
- pass the final exam.
Inhalt:
This class takes you on a grand tour of early Modern English.
We will learn about its nature on all levels of linguistic analysis from phonology to semantics, but also find out about the massive social and cultural changes came to pass in just over two and a half centuries: from a late mediaeval kingdom with a near-absolutist monarch, England developed to be Europe's most advanced society by the advent of the industrial revolution. It is this period that produced England's greatest, such as Will S., who wrote some plays or other, and also dabbled in cheesy love poems and came up with a word or two, or Issac N., who had a thing going about falling apples, to name but two of many.
Our favourite language also changed greatly: we will witness the introduction of the printing press and the development of widespread literacy, we will watch the continous efforts to develop an orthography and find out why today's English's spelling and pronunciation appear to have no bearing on one another whatsoever. In this respect we will also experience the Great Vowel Shift, one of the most massive makeovers the English sound system underwent ever. We will observe how the vocabulary expanded drastically by borrowing and making up new words, how hallmarks of English grammar like do-support and progressive aspect developed, and how the remains of the inflectional system diminished further.
Despite all this, many people appear to think that historical linguistics is boring.
Hence, we will make the class even more interesting: next to the focus on contents (i.e. all things eModE) we will have a second focus on didactics:
Most of you are going to become teachers, and even those of you who won't nonetheless will often have to present information or assess other people's behaviour. Therefore, you will join a larger team to design and conduct a teaching unit spanning two sessions. This entails studying the relevant pasages from textbooks and devising excercises, games, groupwork, applications of other kinds, discussions, presentations of the key aspects, worksheets, a handout summarising the central aspect of your topic, homework assignments and the use thereof in the following session and so forth.
This teamwork will be collaborative and cooperative in nature, and NOT characterised by division of labour: your task is to devise ONE teaching unit, and not a sequence of small lecture-style presentations that have nothing to do with one another apart from incidentally covering related material. The latter does not constitute an acceptable Studienleistung and hence results in the entire team (!) failing the course. So, you are well advised to collaborate closely. Also, use this opportunity to test your teaching prowess and to experiment with novel teaching ideas: our seminar is also a testing ground for teaching techniques, which is something you are not likely to encounter very often in your studies.
For those sessions that are run by other teams, you will study the relevant texts in advance. Then you will share your thoughts on these materials on ReaderPlus, so that the presenting team can utilise the discussions on ReaderPlus to tailor their teaching units towards your needs. For this to work, it is imperative that you have finished your preparations and posted all you deem relevant before the weekend, so that the presenting team has some time left to take on board your input (in short: no weekly posting by saturday noon = no credit). Further, you will help your presenting classmates by assessing their performance on the basis of an evaluation sheet, which you will transfer into an excel-file and email to your lecturer.
With such great preparation, our final exam is going to be a piece of cake.
Empfohlene Literatur:
- Baugh, Albert C. & Thomas Cable. 1993. A History of the English Language. London: Routledge.
- Brinton, Laurel J. & Leslie K. Arnovick. 2006. The English Language: A Linguistic History. Oxford: OUP.
- Crystal, David. ‘Think on my Words’: Exploring Shakespeare’s Language. Cambridge: CUP.
- Lass, Roger & Richard M. Hogg (eds.). 1999. The Cambridge history of the English language, Vol. III: 1476-1776. Cambridge: CUP.
- Nevalainen, Terttu. 2006. An Introduction to Early Modern English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
|
