ENGL 554: History of the English Language
Professor: Dr. Alyson Eggleston
Location: Citadel
Modality: Online Asynchronous (May 17 – June 28)
A historical survey of English language change with a focus on the identifying phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic features of Old, Middle, Early Modern, and Present-Day varieties of English. War, contact, and several processes of language change are emphasized. Described typologically against the backdrop of the Indo-European (IE) language family, English will be investigated as a putative member of the Germanic language family. The course will emphasize the identifying features of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the consequences of Grimm’s Law, and the predictable language contact effects that emerged as a consequence of Roman, Celtic, Norman, and Scandinavian influences: internal and external language change, case impoverishment, the Great Vowel Shift, lexical loans, syntactic loans, and semantic drift.
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