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Updated on:
1/14/21

 

E 412: HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Notes

 

I.21 Make-up assignments. Make-up for an assignment before the midterm is here, after the midterm is here. Permission required.


I.21 Final Paper Topics. If you do not have a topic of your own devising that I confirmed, then please pick one of the following. Your paper must be 10 to 15 pages long, and it needs to burn with a gem-like flame of intellectual intensity. Grads and Independent Studies: papers 20 - 25pp. Also, Grads and Independent Studies may choose any topic, even though some are recommended for you.

1. Dialect Map. Collect and assess data for a dialect map. You will need at least 25 local responses. Pick a word or phrase used in the Dialect Atlas of the United States, select for Massachusetts, and use this as a gauge by which to measure isoglosses and variation. See me for more details.

2. Teaching Grammar. What are some of the issues involved in teaching grammar to children and adolescents? What are the arguments for and against? How do you respond? Do you have a proposal for how best to make students aware of the structure of language? If so, what is it? You can include lesson plans or course descriptions. See me for more details. (Especially recommended for M.A., Ed. students.)

3. Thinking Grammatically. How are thought and language related? What are some of the main perspectives on this topic? How do you respond?

For example, if language is thought, does thought change as language changes? Then, how then can we understand writing from the past, like Shakespeare or Beowulf, and how can we understand the thoughts of people who don't speak our language? How significant must language changes be before we cease to recognize a given thought as familiar. If thought is beyond language, do we lose our abilities to express thoughts as language changes? Ruminate on these questions and address one. (Especially recommended for grad students and independent studies.)

4. Origins. Where does language come from? If language is an instinct, as Steven Pinker suggests, then was our species ever without language? What evidence do we have for the beginnings of language? How does this evidence support a primitivist view of the past as simple and uncomplicated? Does it imply that language is getting more complex (and are we getting more complex, too)? What does the future of English look like? Ruminate on these questions and address one. For this paper, think about language in terms of evolution.

5. Babel. For eons, humans told stories about an originary language. Whether it's Hebrew in the Garden of Eden or German of the Garden of Eden, one language was considered best evocative of Nature. Discuss one story of an originary language. Then compare that story to the story of a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language. What do they imply about human control over language? About nature versus culture? See me for more details. (Especially recommended for grad students and independent studies.)

6. Piers Plowman. Of the eight major manuscripts of Piers, which are from where? How can you tell? How many manuscripts in total? Consider the dialect distribution of the manuscipts and suggest ways that various editions of the text either disguise its diverse dialect origins or reflect them.

7. Shakespeare. Using the Oxford English dictionary and a dictionary of slang, describe the lexical ambiguities of a Shakespearean sonnet. Pick half a dozen words or so. Concentrate on what a word meant in the seventeenth century. Then, discuss how your linguistic research leads to an interpretation of the sonnet.

8. e. e. cummings. From capitalization to punctuation, e sure did bust up language good i guess. Sescribe how the lexicon, phonology, semantics, and syntax of one or two of e's poems influence your interpretation(s).

9. Germanic languages. Why didn't German lose its inflections? Beginning with Proto-Germanic, describe the phenomena that led to the simultaneous development of Old High German and English. What accounts for the major morphological variations of German?

10. Celts and Germans. The Celtic languages have always been left out of descriptions of the development of Germanic languages. But Celts and Germans were sometimes considered the same peoples by Roman ethnographers, and often inhabited the same lands. Compare two views of how Celtic and English are related: one before 1920 and one after 1920.

11. Modern English. Language around us is constantly changing. Certain dialects take precedence over others. Describe three major language changes in English in the United States today: consider dialects, urban environments, class, the role of universities and a mobile work force, population shifts, and so forth. Narrow your focus as much as possible. Rely on credible sources (avoid journalists, bloggers, and podcasters).

12. The Great Vowel Shift. Describe it and the controversy surrounding it. Be sure to include the work of Donka Minkova.

13. Philology. Pick a significant word from a pre-modern poem, describe its semantic field, and discuss the literary ramifications of its semantics. You may choose an Old English, Middle English, Middle High German, or Anglo-French work.

14. Computers. Write a computer program that analyzes a very specific matter of syntax. For example, look for the number of prepositional phrases in an author's work. (Tagged corpora are available on the internet. Check Linguist List.)