1. (Jan 29h) Variation and change in the German language today

Reading:

• Russ 1994, ch. 2 Variation in German
• Stevenson 1997, ch. 10: Sprachkultur: preserving the cultural heritage

In class:

• Variation and change: looking at some examples and the effect of change over time, register, text-type, immediacy (Grammatik der Nähe und der Distanz)
• Getting practice in corpus linguistics: Practice in TextStat and presentation of data (exercise on zwar)

2. (Feb 5th) Even German grammar changes! Changes in grammar

Reading:

• Russ 1994, ch. 8 (short loan)

This is a long chapter with a lot of new information in it – give yourselves plenty of time to read it carefully. (In return, there is no reading set in Week 5!)

In class:

• Case study: changes in the use of weil and obwohl

We will not be discussing any more sections of Russ (1994) in class, but note that there are also useful chapters on language change and variation in word-formation, in lexis, etc. You might find these a good place to start for thinking about how and why to analyse any given aspect of the language. Of course grammar references like those listed in the bibliography will also be useful.

3. (Feb 12th): How corpus studies can add to what we think we know about grammar

Reading:

• Jones, Randall L. 2000. “A corpus-based study of German accusative/dative prepositions”. In B. Dodd (ed.), Working with German Corpora (Birmingham: Birmingham University Press), pp.116-142.

In class:

• Investigating the use of German prepositions

4. (Feb 19th) What is corpus linguistics? Qualitative und quantitative analysis

Reading:

• Corpus linguistics : an introduction by Tony McEnery and Andrew Wilson. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), short loan.

Read enough of this to be able to explain the following terms:
corpus, sample, qualitative, quantitative, and to be able to give some examples of what corpus linguistics can be useful for, in the areas of grammar, lexis (i.e. vocab.), word-formation (i.e. derivational morphology) and phonology/ phonetics (i.e. pronunciation). Think of some examples of your own for German.

What do we have to be careful about when using a corpus to investigate language?

In class:

• Nicola will not be there, but you should work through the materials provided on your own. This is a chance for you to investigate different types of corpora:

1. a smallish corpus of German spoken language (http://dsav-oeff.ids-mannheim.de/DSAv/ZUGANG.HTM),
2. parallel corpora of German-English (- Using the Chemnitz Translation Corpus http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/chairs/linguist/real/index.html), and
3. a corpus of nineteenth century letters,as well as the German Parole corpus that we have already worked with.(See separate worksheet)