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Instructors: Dr. Markus Freudinger; Charlotte Anna Hahn; Prof. Dr. Christian Langstrof; Nina Reshöft M.A.
Event type:
Seminar
Org-unit: Anglistik/Amerikanistik
Displayed in timetable as:
Hours per week:
2
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 62
Requirements and recommendations:
(For all courses)
In order to attend this course, you MUST have completed the Introduction to Linguistics and have your "aktive/qualifizierte Teilnahme" for the History of English.
In the second part of the semester you will work on your own linguistic project related to our topic.
At the end of the semester (Saturday, January 28 2017), there will be a conference at which all participants must present the results of their own project. Participation on that day is obligatory, so save the date.
Literature:
A bibliography will be provided at the beginning of the term.
Comment:
Language as a marker of social class in Britain
When travelling through Britain, or even when zapping through British television channels, you will notice the many different dialects and accents used. Why is this the case? Who uses which dialect? How did the accents develop over time? These are some of the questions we will discuss in the course to try and find out how language and society are connected in Britain.
The Language of Food
Preparing, consuming and discussing food form an integral part of our everyday lives. The words to describe food are therefore part of the most basic and oldest part of our vocabulary (e.g. bread or milk go back to early Old English). At the same time words for food can be an expression of the contact the English language had with other cultures. Food can also be an expression of ideologies, i.e. belief systems – how are particular food items (e.g. meat) being talked about by particular groups of people? Food discourses often occur in particular text forms, e.g. as cooking recipes. Now what is the difference between recipes by, e.g. Julia Child and Jamie Oliver?
At the end of the Semester, there will be a conference at which all participants must present the results of their own project. Participation on that day is obligatory, so save the date.
Exploring the power of verbs
Verbs, “they're the proudest – adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs” (Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass). Verbs are powerful parts of speech which hold the sentence together. In the first part of the course, you will learn about experimental and corpus-based approaches to explore the lexical semantics of verbs (e.g. climb vs. clamber), verb classes such as verbs of emotion (e.g. love, dislike, envy) or verbs of killing (e.g. kill, murder, assassinate), and explore how verb meaning can be studied in relation to other parts of the sentence (e.g. The wimbush glipped the rolkin). We will draw on various kinds of corpus data such as car accident reports and cooking recipes as well as experimental data (e.g. goodness-of-example ratings, word association tasks). In the second part, you will develop your own research project, collect and analyze linguistic data and prepare the presentation of your results. At the end of the semester, there will be a conference at which all participants must present the results of their own project. Participation on that day is obligatory. A list of readings, the course schedule, and more information about the requirements will be announced at the beginning of the semester.
English accents in video games
In this class, students will be familiarised with the different ways in which accents of English are used in a specific media format - video games- to cue various non-linguistic (broadly speaking "social") categories. In spite of being a young genre, video games represent a rich source of insight on the ways designers and directors envisage the role of specific real varieties of English in the context of hypothetical worlds.
Class participants will be asked to design and carry out their own project over the course of the semester, and present the results in the context of a small-scale student conference towards the end of term.
Important notes:
At the end of the semester (Saturday, 30 January 2016), there will be a conference at which all participants must present the results of their own project. Participation on that day is obligatory, so save the date!
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