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Instructors: Prof. Dr. Günther Lampert
Event type:
online: Proseminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.008.160
Hours per week:
2
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 45
Registration group: Engl. Ling. 160
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
All information pertaining to this class will be found on the platform https://lms.uni-mainz.de, which you can access via your zdv account once you have been registered as a regular participant. The platform is first of all meant to serve what is now being called asynchronous teaching, but it seems to have a potential for synchronous communication as well.
Asynchronous communication here means that you can study and work on the material at whatever time of day you prefer.
At regular intervals, you will receive newsletters (announced via e-mail), which are meant to provide essential information.
This class is a historical proseminar (3 credit points, 90 hours workload, type of exam: Studienleistung, not a Modulprüfung).
Participants should have attended the Introduction to English Linguistics and (ideally) the Spoken English class.
To fulfill the requirements of Active Participation in this entirely digital course, participants will have to read 10 chapters from introductory textbooks or handbook articles; divided up into week-by-week reading assignments that include some written tasks, such as answering a few study questions or write a short abstract.
All course material will be made accessible to participants in pdf form on the lms-platform. It will include introductory readings, PowerPoint Presentations to introduce and survey the course topic, links to videos, as well as a pool of texts for participants’ final task.
To obtain credit, a summary of two research articles will have to be handed in by August 9, 2021. Everybody will be free to choose these articles from a pool of texts according to their personal interests, expanding on an aspect of the topics covered in the introductory chapters.The summary will have to be 600 words long.
There will be no final test of whatever sort.
Contents:
The history of English can, very generally, be described in terms of a long series of language contacts:
- beginning with early Germanic and Anglo-Saxon contacts (or non-contacts) with the Celts, the Romans, and the Scandinavians;
- followed by the effects of the Anglo-Norman Conquest (resulting in English-French bilingualism and the ensuing question of why English could survive the Conquest in the first place plus the restructuring of English vocabulary by loss and importation);
- the many ways in which Latin served as a model for English over the centuries (in vocabulary, in grammar, in style, register, and genres),
- culminating in the emergence of extraterritorial Englishes (like American, Australian, or New Zealand English) as a consequence of dialect contact, and in the development of entirely new languages (pidgins, creoles, mixed languages) as an effect of language contact in the era of colonization;
- and terminating so far in the recent rise of new dialects (regional and ethnic), in both Britain and the US, as an effect of contact, levelling, and diffusion..
This asynchronos on-line class will systematically survey the manifold results of contact-induced changes in English at practically all levels of the language.
Recommended reading list:
All the texts for this class will be available as pdfs on lms.uni-mainz.de
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