UM Linguistics Faculty at the 2009 LSA Institute
Two Linguistics faculty will be teaching courses at the 2009 LSA Summer Institute.
Carmel O’Shannessey will be teaching LSA 216: Linguistic effects of language attrition and shift
The course will explore changes that take place within languages and speech communities when the dynamics of language use changes, so that languages spoken less often come to be spoken more often, and others come to be spoken less often. We will examine the linguistic processes occurring in use of the languages from which speakers are shifting and those to which they are shifting, including creation of new mixed languages or varieties. We will examine the interplay of language learning and attrition through individuals’ dynamic use of first and second languages in these complex situations.
Sally Thomason will be teaching LSA 212: Language contact and language change
Because language contact is a fact of life for most of the world’s people, it is hardly surprising that it often plays a major role in language change. This course will begin with a brief survey of historical, social, and political settings of language contact, to provide background for the main focus of the course: contact-induced language change. Among the topics that will be covered are social and linguistic predictors for the effects of language contact (together with a discussion of why they can never be expected to yield deterministic predictions); the effects of contact-induced language change on the structure of the receiving language; criteria for establishing contact as a cause of language change; mechanisms of contact-induced change; linguistic areas as a special problem for the study of contact and change; mixed languages (pidgins, creoles, and bilingual mixed languages); and contact-induced changes in some (not all) dying languages.