The aim of this course is to provide an insight into language change and its mechanisms at the different levels of linguistic analysis: lexical, semantic, phonological, morphological and syntactic. The course also introduces the student to language variation and its implications in the discussion of language change in progress. Both language-internal and language-external factors prompting language change will be examined, including the ways in which social context and the cognitive organisation of language make certain kinds of change more natural than others. Illustrations of these changes will cover mainly English, but other languages shall also be mentioned.
