LOT Winter School 2010 course description


Course title

 

 Topics in Historical Morphology and Syntax

 

Teacher

 

Alice C. Harris

 

E-mail: alice.harris@stonybrook.edu, acharris@linguist.umass.edu

Postal Address:  Department of Linguistics, 226 South College,
University of Massachusetts, 150 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA 01003, U.S.A.        

Homepage: http://www.linguistics.stonybrook.edu/faculty/alice.harris

Course Level

Intermediate level.  Students should have taken at least one semester each of historical linguistics (could be at undergraduate or graduate level), phonology, and syntax or morphology.  I will review the essential concepts to be discussed.

Course Description     

This course will highlight recent developments in historical linguistics, focusing on morphology and syntax.  It will include discussion of new empirical data from the little-known language families of Nakh-Daghestanian (Northeast Caucasian) and Kartvelian (South Caucasian).  Emphasis will be on general principles of language change and the relevance of historical linguistics to theoretical linguistics. 

Day-to-day Program

Monday:  Reconsidering the basics of morphological change:  Paradigm leveling, simplification, and analogy

 

Tuesday: Morphomic patterns in morphology

 

Wednesday:  Reconstruction in morphology and syntax

 

Thursday:  “Evolutionary” approaches to morphology and syntax

 

Friday:  How historical linguistics can address larger issues in linguistics

 

Reading list

 

 

Background and preparatory readings:

 

Campbell, Lyle.  Historical Linguistics:  An Introduction.  Any edition.  Published both by MIT Press and the University of Edinburgh.  Or another textbook on historical linguistics.

Aronoff, Mark.  1994.  Morphology by itself: Stems and inflectional classes.   Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press.
 


Course readings:


Monday:

Garrett, Andrew.  2008.  Paradigmatic uniformity and markedness.  Linguistic universals and language change, ed. by Jeff Good, 125-143.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press.

Albright, Adam.  2005.  The morphological basis of paradigm leveling.  Paradigms in phonological theory, ed. by Laura Downing, Tracy Alan Hall, and Renate Raffelsiefen.  Oxford:  OUP.

Enger, Hans-Olav.  2009.  Sound laws, inflectional change and the autonomy of morphology.  Ms., University of Oslo.

Plank, Frans, Thomas Mayer, & Tikaram Poudel.  2009.  Phonological fusion is not the only, and probably not even the main source of morphological cumulation.  Ms., University of Konstanz.

Tuesday:
Maiden, Martin.  1992.  Irregularity as a determinant of morphological change.  Journal of Linguistics 28: 285-312.

One additional reading to be announced.

Wednesday:
Harris, Alice C.  2008.  Reconstruction in syntax:  Reconstruction of patterns.  Principles of Syntactic Reconstruction, ed. by Gisella Ferraresi and Maria Goldbach.  Amsterdam:  John Benjamins, 73-95.

Lightfoot, David W.  2002a.  Myths and the prehistory of grammar.  Journal of Linguistics 38: 113-136.

 

Campbell, Lyle, and Alice C. Harris.  2002.  Syntactic reconstruction and demythologizing ‘Myths and the prehistory of grammars’.  Journal of Linguistics 38: 599-618.

Lightfoot, David W.  2002b.  More myths.  Journal of Linguistics 38: 619-626.

Thursday:

Blevins, Juliette.  2004.  Evolutionary phonology: The emergence of sound patterns.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.  Chapter 1 (for background), pp. 304-310.

 

Harris, Alice C., and Lyle Campbell.  1995.  Historical syntax in cross-linguistic perspective.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.  Chapter 8.

Kiparsky, Paul.  2008.  Universals constrain change; change results in typological generalizations. Linguistic universals and language change, ed. by Jeff Good, 23-53.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press.

Friday:
Harris, Alice C.  2008. On the Explanation of Typologically Unusual Structures.  Linguistic Universals and Language Change, ed. by Jeff Good, 54-76.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press.

Greenberg, Joseph H.  1978.  Diachrony, synchrony, and language universals.  Universals of human language, vol. 1, Method and theory, ed. by Joseph H. Greenberg, Charles A. Ferguson, and Edith A. Moravcsik, 61-91.  Stanford: Stanford University.

Harris, Alice C.  In press.  Explaining Typologically Unusual Structures: The Role of Probability.  Rara et Rarissima:   Collecting and interpreting unusual characteristics of human languages (Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Typology), ed. by Wohlgemuth, Jan and Michael Cysouw.  Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

 

Further readings:

Kiparsky, Paul.  2000.  Analogy as optimization:  ‘Exceptions’ to Sievers’ Law in Gothic.  Analogy, levelling, markedness:  Principles of change in phonology and morphology, ed. by Aditi Lahiri, 15-46.  Berlin:  Mouton de Gruyter.