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This course is concerned with explanations of linguistic diversity. What are the main language families of the world and how have historical linguistics determined these family relationships? In which ways does multilinguality affect language change? What are the limits to typological diversity? How can we combine information from different linguistic subdisciplines and further non-linguistic disciplines in order to explain linguistic diversity? This course has a primary focus on methodology, specifically traditional and computer-assisted methodology of historical linguistics, corpus linguistics for diversity linguistics, and quantitative methods in typology. Secondly, a major focus is on the typology of the languages of the world, including typological perspectives on phonology, morphology, the lexicon, and syntax (lexical classes, semantic roles, grammatical relations, case and agreement systems, and word order). |
