Anglistisches Seminar - Universität Heidelberg - Ruprecht-Karls ...

2 Vorlesungen 2.2 Vorlesung historische Sprachwissenschaft
2.2 Vorlesung historische Sprachwissenschaft
History of the English Language and Language Change
Prof. Dr. B. Busse/A. Mantlik Tue, 11:15 – 12:45 NUni HS 14
This course offers an introduction to the historical development of the English language and
its varieties from Old English to Modern English. We shall focus on changing and stable
factors in English phonology and spelling as well as lexis, syntax and grammar. In addition,
historical pragmatic and historical sociolinguistic aspects will be addressed, and, of course,
we shall also study what some of the external historical, political or cultural changes have
been.
Furthermore, you will be introduced to classic and more recent methods in and approaches
to English historical linguistics, and we shall discuss selected theories of language change,
including, for example, grammaticalisation and pragmaticalisation.
Using standard introductions to the history of English, students are asked to acquire basic
knowledge of the major historical periods of the English language prior to the beginning of
the course.
Texts: A reader will be made available on Moodle prior to the beginning of the semester.
Course requirements:
Students will be asked to prepare reading for each session and to be active in class.
There will be a 90-minute exam at the end of term.
Each student will also be asked to prepare a small analytical task.
Note: This is a lecture where students can also obtain the credit “PS II historische
Sprachwissenschaft (Überblick)”.
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2.3 Vorlesung moderne Sprachwissenschaft
Semantics
Prof. Dr. S. Kleinke Tue, 2:15 – 3:45 AS Room 110
This lecture course is mainly directed at BA-students. The first part of the course will be
devoted to how semantics links up with other fields of linguistics and how the concept of
linguistic meaning has been defined in different linguistic schools of thought. Later on, the
lecture will move on to units of semantic description such as the word and the sentence and
look at the linguistic toolkit used in their analysis. The topic will be approached from the
perspective of different frameworks of semantic description including structuralism, truth
conditional semantics, frame semantics and cognitive semantics.
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