DIACRONIA DEL MUTAMENTO LINGUISTICO

The course aims to equip students with the skills, insights and appropriate theoretical approaches necessary to analyse and describe changes in the structure of English from the earliest written records to the Late Medieval/Early Modern period. Students will also be encouraged to explore historical linguistics within a framework of cultural analysis which will allow them to relate changes in the structure of English to the sociocultural contexts in which those changes occur.

Frontal lessons, seminars, laboratories

Angles, Saxons and Jutes in Britain. Germanic culture and classical-Christian culture. The Scandinavian influence. Old English and its written expressions. The Conquest and its consequences. From Old English to Middle English. Middle English and its written expressions. Late Middle English. Early Modern English.

1) Nicoletta Francovich Onesti, L’inglese dalle origini ad oggi. Le vicende di una lingua, Roma 1988 (and more recent editions and reprints), chapters 1-7.

2) Philip Durkin, Borrowed Words. A History of Loanwords in English, Oxford 2014 (part I-V, pp. 3-297).

3) Passages from significant Old English and Middle English texts (see 6).

4) Reference dictionaries: J. Bosworth, T. N. Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, available at https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/germanic/oe_bosworthtoller_about.html, or other electronic version; H. Kurath et al., Middle English Dictionary, electronic version https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary

5) Reference grammar books: Gemma Manganella, L’anglosassone e il sassone antico, Napoli, 1960 (see 6); Joseph Wright and Mary Elizabeth Wright, An Elementary Middle English Grammar, London et al., 1921 (available at archive.org).

6) Supplementary materials (downloadable from the Studium web page dedicated to the course; registration required).

7) Further readings: Valeria Di Clemente, Strenuissimus princeps, rex et dominus noster. Figure e temi della prima guerra di indipendenza scozzese tra storia e letteratura (XIV e XV secolo), Leonforte (EN), 2020.

N.B. Grammar books and dictionaries are consultation works.