Early Modern English - Einzelansicht

The seminar will deal with the period from around the end of the 15^th century to the end of the 18^th century. While the language by the 16^th century had reached a recognizably ‘modern' state, many important linguistic developments, such as the Great Vowel Shift, the rise of the do-paraphrase or the emergence of the full modal system, were still going on. This was also the time of standardization, visible most obviously in a host of publications on the English language, in particular dictionaries and grammars. In this course, we will chart the major developments, also by analyzing texts (among others by Shakespeare), and read some of the ‘linguistic' literature of the time.