Historical Linguistics

The majority of modern linguistic analysis looks at language as a static system, which L1 learners acquire based on the data they are exposed to in early childhood, without access to its history. Learners are unconcerned with why their language is the way it is, or how it got that way; they only need to know its structure and extrapolate which rules will produce the correct outputs. Understanding this linguistic competence is the task that occupies most working linguists. In this course, however, we will explore how language systems get into the state they’re in when learners encounter them, with their idiosyncrasies and irregularities. Historical linguistics gives us, among other things, the power to explain synchronic irregularities. In doing so, we will discover patterns of regularity in how grammars change over time across different languages. For instance, the English verb forms was and is have an s where their plural counterparts were and are have an r. To the L1 learner and the synchronic linguist, the question is: “How is this system learnable and what rules will correctly (re)produce it?” But as historical linguists we will inquire further: “How did the distribution of these forms come about in the first place? Does some former regularity underlie it? If so, what rule accounts for it?” We will find that synchronic irregularity tends to emerge from the operation of regular principles, some of which work to obscure rules that had once been part of speakers’ grammars.

Cross-list ANTH 47300