Historical Sociolinguistics

This course investigates language variation and change in its socio-historical context, examining the effects of sociolinguistic parameters such as age, gender, education, social class, and region on the development of language through space and time. We will apply sociolinguistic theories, methods, and models to historical language contexts, with examples drawn from phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and lexical variation and change. Hands-on work with corpus-based methods will give a feel for the "tools of the trade".