Language Variation and Change

Calendar

SES #	Session Topics	Due dates
Introduction
1	Introduction
Geographical Variation
2	Regional Accents - Transcription
3	Overview of Accent Variation in the USA
4	Speech Acoustics	Phonetic transcription exercise due
5	Acoustic Analysis of Speech	“Your vowels” exercise due
Sound Change as a Source of Variation I: Regularity of Sound Change
6	What Are the Units of Sound Change?
7	Regular Sound Change vs. Lexical Diffusion (I)
8	Regular Sound Change vs. Lexical Diffusion (II)	Short paper 1 due: What is /æ/-tensing?
Sound Change as a Source of Variation II: Age-Related Variation
9	Age-Related Variation
Sound Change as a Source of Variation III: Social Variation
10	Social Variation
Variation within the Individual, Stable Variation
11	Variation within the Individual
12	The Role of the Listener in Sound Change	Short paper 2 due: Lexical diffusion
The Mechanisms of Sound Change I: Phonetic Conditioning
13	Phonetic Conditioning of Sound Change	Discuss final paper topic with Prof. Flemming
14	An Exemplar-Based Model of Sound Change
15	Phonetic Grammar and Gradual Change
16	Stability and Change
17	Sound Change and Fashion	Short paper 3 due: Computational models of sound change
The Mechanisms of Sound Change II: Grammatical Conditioning
18	Morphological Conditioning
19	Chain Shifts
20	Chain Shifts (cont’d)
The Comparative Method
21	The Comparative Method: Introduction	Draft of final paper due
22	The Comparative Method: Grouping Languages, Cladistics
In-Class Presentations
23	Presentations
24	Presentations
Syntactic Change
25	Word Order Change in Old English
26	Syntactic Change II	Final paper due