Kommentiertes Vorlesungsverzeichnis SS 2008

Stand: 14. April 2008; Änderungen in rot



Kernmodul 2.1: Englische Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft

Prof. Dr. Josef Schmied
VL: History of English Language and Culture BEUST, MMEKO (271431-101)
Wednesday, 07:30-09:00
2/N010
Content: This survey lecture shows language in its socio-cultural contexts: its rela-tionship to power and technology, to historical personalities and social groups. It ranges from the Romans to William the Conquerer, from Caxton to Dr. Johnson or Noah Webster, from Matthew Arnold to Bill Gates and from the medieval scriptorium to the internet. It gives the background necessary to understand the world-wide forms and functions of English today and tries to draw general conclusions about the so-ciocultural factors affecting language (change) today and in the past. Objectives: Students learn to see language in texts as well as language as a system: authentic historical texts with the people and cultures “behind” the texts as well as parts of the historical language systems of English in comparison to present-day English and German. This course will be accompanied by a tutorial on Thursday, 17:15-18:45, and a webpage. Prerequisites: Introduction to English Linguistics Requirements for credits: Regular attendance, participation in the accompanying tutorial, small written test in the last week. In addition to the above lecture course History of the English Language and Culture, you have to choose one of the following classes from the linguistics programme.

Dr. Martin Weißer
Seminar: Dialectology
(271431-106)
Monday, 11:30-13:00
RH41/338
Content: During the course of this seminar, we will try to cover all the diverse aspects the study of dialects entails. Topics range from a brief history of dialectology, via major dialect surveys, collection and analysis methodologies, to specific aspects of dialect description. Objectives: To enable students to develop an awareness of what the study of dialects entails and how to conduct their own small surveys. Requirements for credits: Active participation, a presentation in class about one of the topics listed on the course homepage, as well as a final written assignment based on the presentation. Please note that there will be a preparatory meeting on 1st February, at 2 p.m. in room 233, where all the presentation topics will be ‘distributed’. Prerequisite(s): Introduction to English Language and Linguistics

Kristiane Dürich, MA
Seminar: An Introduction to English Grammar BMEDP (271431-109)
Friday, 09:15-10:45
2/D201
Content: This seminar focuses on the major aspects and components of English grammar, such as Verbs, tense, aspect, and mood, clause structure, complements, and adjuncts, nouns and noun phrases, adjectives and adverbs, prepositions and preposition phrases. We will explore how these elements relate to each other in Eng-lish syntax. We will also have a look on how grammar books are made and the different approaches to grammar. Objectives: By the end of the course, you will be aware of the major structures of Standard English, you will know where all those rules, you had to learn by heart in school, come from, and you will be able to view grammar from different angles. Requisitions for credits: oral presentation in class, 2 written assignments Prerequisites: Introduction to English linguistics.

Kernmodul 2.2: Angewandte Englische Sprachwissenschaft


Dr. Christoph Haase
Seminar: Second Language Acquisition BMEDP (271431-107)
Tuesday, 13:45-15:15
4/105
Content: This seminar will outline and explain the main theories in the field of second language acquisition. The different approaches by Dulay and Burt, Gass and Selinker and especially Krashen will be systematized and their relevance and plausibility investigated. At any stage these theoretical foundations will be linked to application, in second language learners speech and especially in teaching practice. Side-topics will be bilingualism, early second language learning and the study of texts written by second language learners of English. Objectives: The goal of the seminar is to familiarize students with the principles of second language acquisition and to raise their attention towards phenomena in sec-ond language learners speech. It will thus enable them to focus their own ideas about language teaching and will help them to apply these ideas in teaching practice. Requirements for credits: Presentation in class and short written assignments on a 2-weekly basis. Prerequisites: Introduction to English linguistics, passed with good results Select bibliography: Ellis, R. (1995). The study of second language acquisition. Oxford: OUP. Ellis, R. (2004). Second language acquisition. Oxford: OUP. Gass, S.M. & Selinker, L. (2001). Second language acquisition. An introductory course. 2nd edition. Mahwah: Erlbaum. Mitchell, R. & Myles, F. (2004). Second language learning theories. 2nd edition. Lon-don: Arnold.

Dr. Christoph Haase
Seminar: Introduction to Historical Linguistics Thursday, 11:30-13:00
Content: The observation that languages change over time has been made long before the advent of structuralism, which discouraged the diachronic study of language until very recently. However, with modern approaches largely from the research of syntactic language universals and from the typological perspective across languages the study of systematic change in language can be considered as one of the liveliest fields in modern linguistics, encompassing morphology, phonology, syntax and se-mantics. Objectives: In this course we will start with the investigation and classification of types of sound change, find rules for sound change and apply the comparative method for the reconstruction of conditioned sound changes. The main part of this seminar is further dedicated to the mechanisms behind grammatical (i.e. morphological and syntactic) change and lexical change like shared innovation and shared retention. We will also focus on problems of the comparative method when it comes to phenomena like lexical diffusion. Prerequisites: Introduction to English linguistics, passed with good results Further reading: Crowley, Terry (1998) An introduction to historical linguistics. Oxford: OUP. Joseph, Brian D. (ed.) (2003) The handbook of historical linguistics. Malden: Black-well. Lass, Roger (1997) Historical linguistics and language change. Cambridge: CUP.
Spezialisierungsmodule 4.1-4.4


Prof. Dr. Josef Schmied
Colloquium: English Language and Culture
(271431-102)
Thursday, 09:15-10:45, 2/N105 First meeting: 17.04.
Content: This course introduces students to linguistic research methodologies and prepares them for possible BA dissertations. We will have a mixture of presentations and discussions of linguistic topics in the broadest sense. Student suggestions are very welcome. Objectives: By the end of the course, students

• have a basic idea about research processes,
• have heard presentations by older students how they went about their Magisterarbeit,
• have a broad survey of research methodologies (from literature, on the WWW and with the help of questionnaires and interviews),
• have a clear idea about academic writing and related problems,
• try their own hands at writing small research texts (abstracts, proposals, reviews), etc.
  Requirements: All participants have to submit 2 pieces of writing and join in the discussions contributing their own comments, ideas or problems, etc. Since you have to do a review of an academic book, you can select/read an academic book of your own choice (in English) before term.
  
  
  Veranstaltungen für das Magisterstudium Anglistik/Amerikanistik Englische Sprachwissenschaft
  
  
  Dr. Christoph Haase
  Seminar: Second Language Acquisition BMEDP (271431-107)
  Tuesday, 13:45-15:15
  4/105
  
  For details see above
  
  Prof. Dr. Josef Schmied
  HS: English for Academic Purposes (block seminar)
  (271431-103)
  Friday 25.04., 14:00-19:00, Saturday, 26.04., 9:00-18:00 Friday 13.06., 14:00-19:00, Saturday, 14.06., 9:00-18:00
  RH41/538
  "English for Academic Purposes" (EAP) is a big business and a daily challenge for students of English. To package information in an audience-/reader-specific, media-adapted and culturally acceptable form is however not only an "art", but also a "craft". In this course, students will learn secrets and strategies behind good writing and speaking in theory and try out "text optimisation" in practice. Linguistic concepts like theme - rheme, complexity, explicitness and cohesion/coherence will be supplemented by discussions of style conventions and a critical analysis of common "research tools", like corpora and the WWW. This block seminar will be in two parts: In the first part of the seminar we will discuss the role of writing in the research process (from proposal to summary) and analyse texts from academic writings (esp. our SPACE and Nordic Journal Corpora) and explain general principles of academic language using authentic texts. In the second part students will find their own academic texts (from various disci-plines) and rewrite texts to increase coherence, logical argumentation and reader-specific readability. Suggested topics and text can be found on the accompanying WWW page: http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/chairs/linguist/independent/kursmaterialien/eap
  
  Dr. Christoph Haase
  HS: Principles and Applications in Lexical Statistics
  (271431-108)
  Tuesday, 15:30-17:45
  4/105
  Content: The topic of this course will be the quantitative scrutiny of text data as made possible by sophisticated statistical methods. It is thus not a course on lexico-statistics in the historical-linguistic or comparative sense. After an introductory part of general statistical applications in linguistics involving measures of central tendency, of statistical significance and of correlation we will start with a look at high-frequency terms in English from where we will expand into algorithms such as TF*IDF (term frequency, inverse document frequency) and more recent additions to the lexicostatisticians toolbox such as Statistical Language Modelling (SLM), Deviation from Randomness (DFR) and Kullback-Liebler Divergence (KL). Objectives: All theoretical underpinnings will be trained in class by applying the statistical techniques introduced to text data. Students will thus made familiar with a va-riety of means to investigate text data quantitatively. The course is also designed to help students apply these principles to analysis in their upcoming final thesis (Magisterarbeit). Requirements for credits: Presentation in class and short written assignments on a 2-weekly basis. Prerequisites: Introduction to English linguistics, passed with good results Select bibliography: reading assignments to be supplied upon course start in the ESEM or accompanying webpage
  
  Prof. Dr. Josef Schmied
  Examenskurs Englische Sprachwissenschaft
  (271431-104)
  Thursday, 07:30-09:00, 14-tägig, Rh39/233 First meeting: 17.04. Besonders empfohlen für alle Studierenden im 7. und 10. Semester. Nach einer Einführung in Verlauf und mögliche Inhalte der schriftlichen und mündlichen Prüfungen gebe ich einige Anregungen zur Vorbereitung und, mit Hilfe der Lektüreliste, einen Überblick über die Teilgebiete der Sprachwissenschaft, die auch als Spezialgebiete gewählt werden können. Im Hauptteil des Kurses werden alle Gebiete wie in den Examensklausuren, ausgehend von Texten, beispielhaft diskutiert, wobei jeweils eine intensive Vorbereitung der TeilnehmerInnen erforderlich ist. Im Verlauf des Semesters sollte jede/r TeilnehmerIn eine Probeklausur abgeben. Eine spezielle Sitzung ist Magisterarbeiten gewidmet, 'Ehemalige' berichten über ihre Erfahrungen und Vorgehensweisen. Stategien für Themenfindung, Fokussierung, und Operationalisierung werden diskutiert Recommended preparatory reading: http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/chairs/linguist/independent/kursmaterialien/exam/sw-exam.html
  
  Prof. Dr. Josef Schmied
  Linguistic Research Projects and Methodology
  (271431-105)
  Wednesday, 15:30-17:00,14-tägig, Rh39/233 First meeting: 23.04. V. a. für Examenskandidaten
  This is a staff-student seminar, in which students will be given an opportunity to discuss their own projects or lectures and guests will present topics that might be inspiring and a starting-point for an M.A. thesis. The topics range from soft topics on the language and culture interface (like "Language & Food") to harder statistical exercises (like "Modality in Kenyan English"). Students in advanced studies are invited to listen, discuss and present ideas in linguistic research in the widest sense. More can be found on our www pages: http://www-tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/chairs/linguist/pages/studium_exam_thesis.html
  
  

   

Webmaster