All aspects of languages undergo change, from sounds, word formation and lexical meaning to sentence structure. How does this change take place and what causes it? This course will introduce students to the basic concepts and methods of historical linguistics.

Week 1: Mechanisms of change

Monday: Introduction
Tuesday: Lexical change
Wednesday: Sound change
Thursday: Morphological change
Friday: Syntactic change

Week 2: Methods, causes, and effects

Monday: Relatedness between languages
Tuesday: The comparative method
Wednesday: Internal reconstruction
Thursday: How changes spread
Friday: Languages in contact

• Level: Students must be familiar with the basics of phonetics, morphology and syntax or simultaneously be following courses on these subjects.
• Requirements: There will be daily homework.
• Materials: The course will largely follow Robert McColl Millar (2023), Trask’s Historical Linguistics (4th ed.; London: Routledge). Students are encouraged, but not required, to acquire their own copy of this or the second/third edition, or of Lyle Campbell (2021), Historical Linguistics: An Introduction (4th ed.; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).

Since the 1960s in particular, literature on how grammatical systems vary has grown exponentially alongside our ability to provide sophisticated analyses of cross-linguistic variation. Pioneering work in historical syntax includes that by Traugott (1965, 1969), Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968), Givon (1971), Andersen (1973), Lehmann (1973, 1974), Allen ([1977] 1980), Timberlake (1977) and Lightfoot (1979). These fundamental works will form the basis of this advanced course in historical syntax which will focus on state-of-the-art methods and theories of word order variation and change. We'll explore a range of topics in detail, such as (de)grammaticalisation, contact, actuation & transition problems and syntactic reconstruction.

• Level: Participants should have a good foundation in core linguistics domains and have completed at least one introduction to syntax course.
• Requirements: None.
• Materials: Course materials will be provided.

This course explores how historical linguistics can be practiced when the traditional tools of language comparison are limited or even unavailable. We focus on three different (near) language isolates (P’urhepecha, Etruscan, and Yurakaré), which together spell out a representative range of challenges and opportunities for doing historical linguistics on isolates. During the course, we introduce methods for reconstructing linguistic history in the absence of extensive cross-linguistic evidence, or even a written historical record. In this way, the course offers approaches, methodologies and insights that can be applied in the study of the history of (near) language isolates.

• Level: MA (BA in linguistics or related field required).
• Requirements: There is no homework.
• Materials: Course materials will be distributed.

Around the turn of the millennium, the explanatory burden in linguistics shifted from inherent properties of language systems to processes of communication which over time lead to the emergence of languages as “complex adaptive systems”, thus reviving and supplementing proposals by Darwin and linguistic ‘early adopters’ of evolutionary theory. Around the same time, new research into origins of language arose. Eventually, these developments merged into a new research field, studying the dynamic interaction between genetic and cultural evolution.

This course provides an introduction to evolutionary linguistics: its history, fundamental concepts, methodologies, and connections to behavioral biology (evolution of vocal communication systems).

• Level: The course does not require any specific previous knowledge, but a basic familiarity with linguistics is useful.
• Requirements: Reading the textbook (see below), if possible before the start of the Summer School. Students will be regularly invited to explore novel ways of thinking about the foundations of the field.
• Materials:
  1. Pleyer, Michael, and Stefan Hartmann (2024). Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution. Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009385022 
  2. Additional readings will be supplied digitally by the instructor before the start of the course
  3. Pdf of slides will be distributed after each lecture.