Brian Stross Course Description Anthropology 320L
Language
data can be revealing in the study of contemporary society, of history, and prehistory. This course focuses on the latter, on how
language changes through time, and on how language data can be used to reveal what
and how other aspects of culture and society have changed, or how they tell us
about conditions of the past. Following an introduction to the structure of
language and some critical concepts, the course will consider the facts and
effects (through examples) of folklore and prehistory, word and meaning change,
chronology based on language change, aspects of sound change, the comparative
method of language reconstruction, internal reconstruction and other inferences
from internal evidence, variation, contact, and diffusion, morphological and
syntactic change, written records, language classification (both genetic and
typological), models of language and community with reference to change and
what we can learn from them.