General Linguistics and Comparative Philology

This subject consists of three parts, of which you choose two: 

            Part 1: the linguistic descriptions of Latin or Greek (you choose one), especially the application to the classical languages of modern descriptive and theoretical frameworks. Topics will include: pronunciation and the system of sounds; grammatical categories (such as gender, case, voice, mood); the formation and meaning of new words (compounds and derivatives); the types and structures of complex sentences.

University teaching: six 2-hour classes in each language.

            Part 2: modern linguistic theory in more general terms, including topics in contemporary phonological and grammatical theory, and historical linguistics.

University teaching: various courses of lectures offered by the Sub-Faculty of Linguistics.

            Part 3: the reconstruction of Indo-European. This course deals with problems affecting parts of the sound-system and the grammar (especially the verb) of the parent language and their reflections in the (pre-) history of Latin and Greek. Note: Part 3 follows on from the Mods. special subject in Comparative Philology. You may take it without having done the subject in Mods, but you will then have some ground to make up.

University teaching: eight two-hour classes.

Preliminary reading: for Part 1 — Latin: Ch. 2, 'Latin' in The Romance Languages, edited by Martin Harris and Nigel Vincent (London, 1988); — Greek: the chapter on 'Greek' by Brian Joseph, in the World's Major Languages, edited by Bernard Comrie (London and Sydney, 1987); for Part 2: Jean Aitchison, Linguistics: an Introduction (London 1995); for Part 3: Oswald Szemerényi, 'Recent developments in Indo-European linguistics', Transactions of the Philological Society, 1985, 1-71.