The Linguistics of the History of English

ISBN-13: 9783031416910 / Angielski / Miękka / 2023 / 206 str.

Remco Knooihuizen

Spis treści

Part I    Introduction.- So what had happened was….- Explaining language change.- Part II   Sound change.- Phonetic change.- Phonological change.- Track changes.- Part III  Contact-induced change.- Language contact.- Dialect contact.- Part IV Structural change.- Analogy.- Grammaticalisation.- Syntactic change.- The loss of case.

O autorze

Remco Knooihuizen is an Assistant Professor in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His research includes experimental work on speakers' implicit awareness of strong verbal inflection patterns and verbal syntax in Dutch and Frisian, and contact-induced change in the pronoun system of Faroese. At the University of Groningen, he is responsible for courses on language variation and language change in the BA English Language and Culture.

Blurb

This textbook approaches the history of English from a theoretical perspective. The book provides a brief chronological overview describing the way in which the English language has changed over time from Old English to Modern English, while subsequent parts adopt a theoretical focus that is thematically organised to deal with the question of how and why English changed in the way it did, including a part addressing some specific contact-induced changes and key topics such as English as a Lingua Franca. Supported throughout with information boxes with empirical studies, the examples given are all drawn from English, but boxes with examples from other languages tie the development of the English language into changes in other contexts and settings. This book is an ideal resource for undergraduate students of the English Language and historical linguistics.