This compulsory subject in the fourth year of the English Studies degree belongs to the English Linguistics Module. It deals with the development of English between late Old English and current English. Specifically, it looks into (i) change in the pronunciation and spelling and (ii) change in the syntax and morphology. It is most obviously connected with those subjects that look at the same areas synchronically (Phonetics and Phonology, Grammar, Syntax and Morphology) as well as to subjects that deal with variation in English (World English, Varieties of English).

COMPETENCES

This subject belongs to the Module M03 Foundations of English Linguistics. Specifically, it contributes to the achievement of module competences CM01/CM03:



- M03CM01 – To describe and analyse the structure of English in its phonetic, morphological, syntactic and semantic components.

- M03CM03 – To describe and analyse the history and development of the English language.



Final achievement of the module competences above entails the fulfilment of the degree competences G003/G005:

- G003 To analyse, synthesise, and explain the grammar and use of English.

- G005 To know the history, evolution and varieties of English today.

- G007 To be able to relate the specific knowledge of the degree with other areas and disciplines and to transmit that knowledge in further studies in order to favour conciliatory and tolerant attitudes towards multilingual and multicultural diversity

- G008 To be able to work autonomously and in teams, making use of the techniques and tools acquired.



LEARNING OUTCOMES

In this subject students can:

(1) Transcribe Old and Middle English.

(2) Explain the meaning of a phonological change rule.

(3) Use a list of phonological change rules to trace the phonological history of a given English word.

(4) Explain the historical origin of major current spelling rules.

(5) Describe Old English word forms morphologically.

(6) Translate simple Old English sentences / passages.

(7) Describe the morphological and syntactic differences between earlier English sentences and / or passages and their equivalents in current English.

(8) Write about the major morphological and syntactic developments in the history of English.

1. Changes in the Pronunciation and in the Spelling

1.1. Old English vowel and consonant letters and sounds, and stress.

1.2. Transcription and listening practice.

1.3. Vocalic and consonantal sound changes in Middle English.

1.4. Changes in the spelling of vowels and consonants in Middle English.

1.5. Transcription and listening practice.

1.6. Vocalic and consonantal sound changes in Modern English.

1.7. Spelling changes in Modern English.

1.8. Geoff Lindsey's Southern Standard British English

1.9. Phonological change between Old and Present-Day English.

1.10. Phonological change practice.



2. Changes in the Morphology and in the Syntax

2.1. The role of the cases in Old English.

2.2. The inflection of nouns, adjectives and demonstratives in OE.

2.3. Personal, interrogative and relative pronouns in OE.

2.4. Old English verbal forms and their meanings.

2.5. Word order in OE.

2.6. Translation practice.

2.7. The reduction of inflections in Middle English.

2.8. Nouns, adjectives, demonstratives and articles after OE.

2.9. Personal, interrogative and relative pronouns after OE.

2.10. Verbal forms after OE, the progressive and the passive.

2.11. Other developments maybe.

The classes are a mixture of lecturing and practical work of various sorts, including exercises and answering questions on set readings. Homework will be used as follow-up to the lectures or in preparation for them. Students will be asked to read certain parts of their lecture notes prior to the lectures.

• Sistema de Evaluación Final
• Herramientas y porcentajes de calificación:
  • Prueba escrita a desarrollar (%): 40
  • Realización de prácticas (ejercicios, casos o problemas) (%): 60

- As a form of continuous self-assessment, exercises that will be corrected in class and at home will be used.

- As a form of continuous assessment by the teacher, students will take two tests. The final mark will result from adding the points obtained in the tests. To add the points obtained in a test, they must amount to at least 40% of the total for that test. The tests can be passed, failed and retaken individually.

- Classroom activities that add to the basic contents of the lecture notes will be automatically passed for those carrying out the activity in the classroom satisfactorily. The rest of the students will take questions about the contents of those activities in the corresponding test.



The test types and marking criteria cannot be included here for lack of space but will be available in eGela in the first week of the term along with an exam model.



Home assignments and class assignments/presentations (if relevant):

the work submitted by the students must be their own work and must have been written completely by themselves. The students must identify and include the source of all facts, ideas, opinions and viewpoints of others through in-text referencing and the relevant sources should all be included in the list of references at the end of their work. Direct quotations from books, journal articles, internet sources or any other source must be acknowledged and the sources cited must be identified in the list of references. If group work is done, the work must be distributed equally among all the group members.





In the event of confinement or other situation making it impossible for exams to happen in a classroom, exams will be taken through Tarea, Cuestionario, etc on eGela or a virtual environment allowed by the university.



Unless otherwise stated, any complementary materials necessary to do the tests will be provided by the teacher. Use of any materials not provided by the teacher, as well as mobiles or other electronic devices, is strictly forbidden.



Following University of the Basque Country regulations, cheating – copying from the notes, the Internet, etc or a classmate – and plagiarism – using somebody’s ideas or words without attributing them to their true author – will result in a fail in the particular exam in which it happened, regardless of the extent of the offence.



Sample tests and marking schemes will be available on the eGela page for the subject at the beginning of the course.



Any modifications affecting the evaluation of this subject that happen after the latest date of publication of this Guía Docente, whatever their cause, will be agreed with the students and will be announced in the ‘Evaluation’ part of our eGela course. Students who do not attend class regularly can look up ‘Evaluation’ in eGela to be up to date.



Withdrawal from Continuous Assessment:

All students have the right to be evaluated according to the final evaluation procedure independently of whether or not they have participated in the continuous or mixed assessment module. In order to do so, they must write to the instructor responsible for the course expressing their desire to withdraw from continuous assessment. The form that needs to be filled is available at http://www.ehu.eus/eu/web/letrak/idazkaritza. For term courses students can do so within the first 9 weeks of the course, according to the academic calendar of their centre.



Withdrawal from an exam call: Withdrawal from a call will be assessed as “no grade reported” [no presentado/a, ez aurkeztua].

1. In the case of continuous assessment,

a. If the final exam is worth more than 40%: not sitting the exam on the official date of the exam qualifies as an automatic withdrawal from the corresponding call.

b. If the final exam is worth 40% or less: all students can withdraw from a call until at least one month before the date of the end of the teaching schedule of the corresponding course. This withdrawal must be submitted in writing to the instructor responsible for the course.

2. In the case of final assessment, not sitting the exam on the official date of the exam qualifies as an automatic withdrawal from the corresponding call.



The new regulation about assessment can be found here:

http://www.ehu.eus/es/web/estudiosdegrado-gradukoikasketak/ebaluaziorako-arautegia

The Convocatoria Extraordinaria will consist in an exam whose date is set and announced by the Faculty authorities. The conditions for passing this exam will be the same as in the Convocatoria Ordinaria. Students are allowed to repeat only that part they failed and keep the marks from that they passed, provided they got at least 40% of the marks carried by that part.



Independently of the assessment type chosen, students who fail to pass the first exam call will be able to take the same tests as those doing the final evaluation. The teacher may allow students not to repeat a test if they passed it in the first exam call.

The teacher's notes and the relevant chapters/pages from Algeo and Acevedo-Butcher (2005) (workbook), and Algeo and Pyles (2005) (coursebook), parts of the book by Donka Minkova (2014), passages from Henry Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer, 9th edition revised by Norman Davis (1953)(https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.99471/page/n79/mode/2up)

- Algeo, J. and C. Acevedo Butcher. 2005. Problems in the Origins and Development of the English Language. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth.
- Minkova, D. 2014. A Historical Phonology of English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.
- Pyles, T. and J. Algeo. 2005. The Origins and Development of the English Language. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth.
- Sweet, Henry (1953) Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer, 9th ed. revised by Norman Davis.

Bibliografía básica

Baugh, A. C. and T. Cable. 2002. A History of the English Language. London: Routledge.

Brown, L. ed. 1993. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Crystal, D. 1997. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fernández, F. 1993. Historia de la lengua inglesa. Madrid: Gredos.

Freeborn, D. 2006. From Old English to Standard English. London: Macmillan.

Mitchell, B. and F.C. Robinson. 2007. A Guide to Old English. Oxford: Blackwell.

Scragg, D.G. 1974. A History of English Spelling. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Simpson, J. A. and E. S. C. Weiner eds. 1989. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wells, J. C. 1982. Accents of English 1: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bibliografía de profundización

The Cambridge History of the English Language: Vol I The Beginnings to 1066, Vol II 1066-1476, Vol III 1476-1776, Vol IV 1776-1997, Vol V English in Britain and Overseas and Vol VI English in North America.
Barber, C. 1997. Early Modern English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Barber, C. 2000. The English Language: A Historical Introduction. Cambridge: CUP.
Bauer, Laurie. 1994. Watching English Change: an Introduction to the Study of Linguistic Change in Standard Englishes in the Twentieth Century, London: Longman.
Brinton, L. and A. Bergs (eds.) 2017. The History of English. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Volume 1: Historical Outlines from Sound to Text; Volume 2: Old English; Volume 3: Middle English; Volume 4: Early Modern English; Volume 5: Varieties of English.
Burnley, D. 2000. The History of the English Language: A Source Book. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.
Cruz, I. and J. Martín Arista eds. 2001. Lingüística histórica inglesa. Barcelona: Ariel.
Crystal, D. 2004. The Stories of English. London: Penguin.
Denison, D. 1993. English Historical Syntax: Verbal Constructions. New York: Longman.
Guarddon Anelo, M.C. 2005. Understanding Old and Middle English Texts: A Guide to Diachronic Translation. Madrid: Ediciones Académicas.
Hogg, R. and D. Denison eds. 2006. A History of the English Language. Cambridge: CUP.
Kemenade, A. and B. Los eds. 2006. The Handbook of the History of English. Oxford: Blackwell.
Los, B. 2015. A Historical Syntax of English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.
Millar, R.M. 2012. English Historical Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.
Minkova, D. 2014. A Historical Phonology of English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.
Mossé, F. 1968. A Handbook of Middle English. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press.
Mugglestone, L. ed. 2006. The Oxford History of English. Oxford: OUP.
Prins, A. A. 1972. A History of English Phonemes. Leiden: Leiden University Press

Revistas

Diachronica, English Studies, Folia Linguistica Historica, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, Journal of Linguistics, Language, Lingua, Linguistics, Shakespeare Studies, Studia Linguistica Diachronica et Synchronica, Language in Society

Audio/video/DVD:
Chaucer Studio Middle English and Shakespeare recordings.
From Old English to Standard English. 1993. Read by Dennis Freeborn and Alison Wray.
The General Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Read in Middle English by Nevill Coghill and Norman Davis.
Beyond Babel. English on the World Stage
The Story of English

Direcciones web

Beyond Babel http://www.beyondbabel.co.uk
The Voices recordings (BBC), UK accents
http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/recordings/index.shtml
Readings from A Guide to Old English and Beowulf
www.engl.virginia.edu/OE/Sound.howto.html
Readings from The Canterbury Tales by academics
http://academics.vmi.edu/english/audio/audio_index.html
Oxford English Dictionary http://www.oed.com
David Crystal http://www.davidcrystal.com/
Francisco Fernández http://www.uv.es/fernandf/
John Wells www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/
William Labov http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/home.html
The relevant Virtual Linguistics Campus lessons