Lecture (LEC)

This course focuses on how and why languages change over time. In particular, we will see how contemporary linguistics can shed light on sound change, morphological change, syntactic change, and semantic change. We will consider the extent to which language change is motivated by system-internal factors and to what extent it is the result of language contact and (adult) second language acquisition. The course will include an examination of many case studies of language change, including historical changes in several branches of the Indo-European language family (Armenian, Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Romance, Slavic, and Indo-Iranian), changes in Austronesian, Basque, Cariban, Nilo-Saharan, Semitic, Turkic, and Uralic languages, among others, and the genesis and development of creole languages. We will consider what it means to say that languages are ¿historically related¿ and how far back into the past our current methods and available records allow us to explore such relationships.