[lingh] The Development of Late Modern English - Changes and Perspectives - Einzelansicht

English has changed considerably over the centuries since 1700, the somewhat arbitrary date often seen as the starting point for the Late Modern English period. In this seminar, we’ll look at the major developments in usage, vocabulary and structure since then and explore current and future developments, particularly in a web-based global context. We’ll follow English through its double expansion phases that made it a world language and led to the development of the New Englishes of today. Using examples from online corpora, participants will examine how usage patterns shift and change, how social variation shapes styles and registers such as youth language or slang, and specialized discourse such as advertising or business language. In particular, we will  follow these patterns through the present-day context of computer-mediated discourse and discuss the newest perspectives of language change under the influence of new communication and interaction methods. Texting prompts brevity, the use of abbreviations and symbols. Messaging apps such as WhatsApp allow the integration of spoken-language features, multi-participant conversations and multimodal elements as part of written discourse. Social networks like Facebook prompt lexical innovation, the creation and use of memes and the disappearance of spatial and temporal adjacency. Microblogs like Twitter or image and video sharing websites like Pinterest or Flickr organize information in radically different ways, employing new semantic, pragmatic and multimodal structuring methods. Standards in spelling and word formation are changing, and global web communication facilitates the integration of code-switching, the use of lexis from around the world and even the creation of new varieties.

We will describe these and other new language features and types of innovation by collecting and analyzing examples from both diachronic and current contexts. As part of the seminar, students will also perform

hands-on research on one web-based variety by recording and analyzing conversations with one of our partner universities in the context of the Corpus of Academic Spoken English (CASE) project.
A list of topics for presentations and research will be available in the first seminar session. For detailed course requirements please also consult the respective module descriptions.

Die verbindlich geltenden Zulassungsvoraussetzungen entnehmen Sie eigenverantwortlich den Modulhandbüchern und Studienordnungen Ihres jeweiligen Studienganges.

Die zu erbringende Prüfungsleistungen sind den Regelungen der Modulhandbücher und der Studienordnung Ihres jeweiligen Studienganges eigenverantwortlich zu entnehmen.