24.914 | Spring 2019 | Undergraduate

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

Course Info

As Taught In
Spring 2019
Learning Resource Types
Lecture Notes
Written Assignments