This course introduces students to concepts and methodologies in study of language change. Traditionally the study of language change is divided between historical linguistics (sometimes called diachronic linguistics) and comparative linguistics. Both subfields study focus on different dimensions of language change. In the diachronic dimension we seek answers to how and why languages change over time. In the synchronic dimension we classify languages into families and study situations which lead to language change. The course will cover both descriptive and theoretical components. A fair amount of time will be spent on mastering the descriptive tools to enable students to independently analyze patterns of language change. At the same time, a number of theoretical issues related to grammaticalization and language evolution will be discussed to introduce students to current debates in the field.
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Year Taken: AY 20/21, Sem 1
Class Participation 10%
Mid Term Quiz 25%
Final Quiz 35%
Final Paper 30%This is a course on Historical Linguistics, synthesizing everything that Dr. Francesco has taught in other classes, such as Etymology and Semantic Analysis. There is a huge focus on Indo-European languages and the Comparative Method in the first half of the semester. The second half of the semester is more about how the various structures of languages (phonology, semantics etc.) can change over time. No readings are required for this course, but doing so will help you a lot for the Final Paper. I had a lot of extra-academics stuff for this semester and only studied the slides for the quizzes, which were enough to get me good grades.
There was supposed to be a topic on the distribution of cognates across Europe (e.g. Spain and France uses word A to refer to ‘apple while Italy uses word B). However, this topic was not tested in the final quiz due to complaints by some classmates. I thought it was pretty wasted since I would rather do application-based questions instead of rote-learning and regurgitating for the final quiz.
Due to the nature of this course on Language Change, I felt that I had to be mechanical in my essay and I was not able to write theoretically (Idk how you are supposed to write theoretically in Historical Linguistics). My peers agreed with me that they had no other choices but to be somewhat technical and mechanical in their final papers. Although the final paper was free topic, please make sure your topic has something to do with diachronic language change. It would be even better if the topic is about languages with long history, such as Ancient Greek or Old Chinese, since Dr. Francesco is a historical linguist.
This review was reposted with the kind permission of aLMSstudent. Originally published at https://ntulmsmods.wordpress.com/2020/11/18/ntu-lms-year-4-semester-1/
June 28, 2021
