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If someone asked you to describe major properties of English grammar, one of the first things that come to mind might be that English –unlike German or Latin, for instance – is a poorly inflecting language with a relatively fixed word order. However, English has not always been like this – Old English for instance had a very rich inflectional system. So, how come that Present Day English is the way it is now? In which other respects does it differ from Old English? What happened in the course of Middle English? What triggered those changes? And, will English stay as we know it today or is it still changing? These are questions that are tackled in the field of diachronic English linguistics and will be taken up in this course. We will start out with Old English, move on to Middle English, Early Modern English and Present Day English to trace the major changes the English language has undergone before we turn to possible explanations for these processes. |
