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Historical linguistics, Pragmatics, Language change, Computational linguistics
Abstract:
The fact that “all languages evolve, as long as they exist” (Schleicher 1863: 18f) has been long
known to linguists and does not surprise us anymore. The reasons why all language change constantly,
however, is still not fully understood. What we know, however, is that language usage must
be at the core of language evolution. It is the dynamics among speakers, who want to be understood
and understand what others say, while at the same time trying to be efficient, convincing, or poetic
when communicating with others. If the dynamics of language use are indeed one of the driving forces
of language evolution, it is evident that the phenomena of language change need to be studied from
the perspective of pragmatics. In times of constantly increasing amounts of digital language data, in
various forms, ranging from wordlists via results of laboratory experiments to large historical corpora,
it is clear that every attempt to understand the specific dynamics of language evolution must be carried
out in an empirical framework. In the course, I will try to give a rather broad (but nevertheless
eclectic) introduction into topics in historical linguistics in which pragmatics play a crucial role for the
study of language change and its driving forces. In this context, we will look into empirical aspects
of research on language evolution, empirical studies on sound change, and the pragmatics of language
contact. In addition, we will also learn how language change can be modeled, and how we
can study pragmatic phenomena themselves from an evolutionary perspective by investigating how
speech acts and poetic traditions evolve.
