The Department of the History of the English Language, Faculty of English, AMU has the pleasure to invite everybody to the 2024 Jacek Fisiak Memorial Lecture, devoted to the memory of the founder of the department and one of the most prominent Polish historical linguists of the 20th century, Professor Jacek Fisiak.
This year's speaker will be Professor Donka Minkova (UCLA), whose talk will be devoted to evidence in diachronic linguistics. The lecture, which will take place on Zoom, is open to everybody.
When: May the 27th, 18:00 CEST (UTC +2)
Where: Zoom
How: Please register here [external link; valid as of 2024-05-24]
Abstract
“Evidence” in diachronic linguistics is an elusive cover term for the multiple empirical and theoretical bases on which we rest and test our reconstructions. The talk will address the types of evidence bearing on some findings in my current work with Bruce Hayes on a pre-15th century crux: the prosodic shape of Class 2 weak verbs in Old and Middle English. I will also share comments on case studies of currently ongoing morpho-phonetic variation in speech production.
About the speaker
Prof. Donka Minkova is an unquestioned authority in the fields of English and Germanic historical phonology and syntax, historical dialectology, English historical metrics. She is the author of The History of Final Vowels In English (1991), English Words: History and Structure (with Robert Stockwell) (2001, Second Edition 2009), Alliteration and Sound Change in Early English (2003) and A Historical Phonology of English (2014).
