Instructors: Dr. Matthias Eitelmann
Event type: online: Lecture
Displayed in timetable as: 05.008.260
Hours per week: 2
Language of instruction: Englisch
Min. | Max. participants: - | -
Contents: Following the premise that the synchronic state of a language can best be explained by adopting a diachronic stance, we will take a closer look at a number of peculiarities and inconsistencies that characterize Modern English and try to elaborate on these odd features by means of a diachronic analysis. Problems that we will be concerned with in the course of this semester are, for example: - Is English spelling really as chaotic as it seems? - Where do irregular plurals come from – and why have they proven so resistant against any regularization processes? - Are irregular verbs really irregular? - Why has Modern English retained only a scarce amount of inflectional endings? - What makes modal auxiliaries so defective? - Why is English word order so fixed? And how do exceptions to SVO fit into this general pattern? - Why does English have DO-support while German (as it seems) lacks this feature? - Why do certain relative clauses (so-called contact clauses) do without a relative pronoun? - Why can we observe a steady trend towards zero-reflexives (I wash ø) while self-marked reflexives (I wash myself) are on the decline? The diachronic perspective provides valuable insight to the aforementioned aspects and serves as a key to the solution of these linguistic puzzles. In this way, we will gain a better understanding of the English language.
