This unit focuses on the investigation and explanation of language change, both as a consequence of internal forces within a language community and through contact between language communities. It considers the history of thinking about language change and its role in the development of linguistics as a science, the development of the comparative method as a means of reconstructing past language states, and theories of language classification based on historical relationships of both inheritance and diffusion. -- Course Website
Instructor: Assistant Professor Celeste Rodriguez-Louro
Prerequisites: (LING2002 Phonetics and Phonology: the Sounds of the World's Languages or LING2201 Phonetics and Phonology) and [LING2001 Grammatical Theory: the Structure of Sentences or LING2202 Grammatical Theory (Syntax)] and (LING2003 or LING1103 Language, Culture a