Syllabus for Ling 310, Linguistic History of English.

Week & Session
1a Overview of the Indo-European family and the Germanic subfamily.
1b Sketch of PIE grammar: sounds and morphological categories.
2a Sketch of PIE grammar: inflection; Wackernagel's Law.
2b The development to Proto-Germanic: sound shifts and simplification of inflection.
3a Sketch of PGmc. grammar: sounds and the nominal system.
3b Sketch of PGmc. grammar: the verb system and derivational morphology.
4a The diversification of Germanic.
4b The development to Old English: sound changes.
5a The development to Old English: syncretism and reduction of lexical classes.
5b The development to Old English: syntax and the V2 constraint.
6a Syntactic change over the history of Old English.
6b Sketch of OE grammar: sounds and morphological categories.
7a The dialect situation in OE.
7b The transition to Middle English: the origin of Modern English vowel alternation rules.
8a The transition to Middle English: the collapse of the West Saxon chancery tradition and the emergence of dialect writing.
8b The transition to Middle English: the Norse factor.
9a Syntactic variation and change in Middle English.
9b A snapshot of Middle English: comparative early 13th-century texts.
10a A snapshot of Middle English: comparative late 14th-century texts.
10b The Great Vowel Shift.
11a Do-support and restructuring in 16th-century English.
11b English in 1750: the latest common denominator.
12a The 19th century: Received Pronunciation and rural dialect in England.
12b The 19th century: urban dialects in northeastern North America.
13a Contemporary dialect developments: variation and change in progress.
13b [To be announced.]