LFU:online

Students can reproduce acquired in-depth knowledge on the change of diatopic varieties in Austria and work independently on the topic of language change on this basis.

If languages and dialects did not change, they would be doomed. Because the basis for change is use, are speakers who use a language or variety, which they grind down, model, recreate, transform. And use makes the object of use into something living. The expression of the living, in turn, is the dynamic, the unsteady, the flowing. This is also true for the dialects spoken in Austria. And yet it is possible to capture the status quo of the varieties spoken right now in all its facets and to fix this section on the space-time axis.
In the PS we want to trace the phenomenon of language change by a) working out an overview of the most important phenomena of change from Middle High German to New High German, respectively to different Austrian varieties, thus making them accessible diachronically and diatopically. Based on this, we want to b) create a small current corpus of a dialect that interests you and analyze it with regard to individual change phenomena. More precisely, we want to collect audio material from people of different ages at one location and document various divergences occurring at individual linguistic levels and try to explain them on the basis of the acquired linguistic-historical knowledge as well as on the basis of language change models.

Theoretical input by the course instructor (lecture), discussion on reading to be prepared, group work on materials, presentations and exercises

Work assignments, collaboration, presentations, written term paper

To be announced in the course

cf. curriculum