Course Outline:
While Shakespeare philology has a long research tradition, linguistic contributions to Shakespeare are much more recent and less numerous. However, these formerly distinct research areas are coming into closer contact under what one could label “the new philology”.
The topics to be explored in this course include “traditional” linguistic subjects, such as “Shakespeare’s” vocabulary (e.g. Germanic vs. Romance vocabulary), morphology and syntax, and also more recent subjects such as pragmatics (e.g. address forms, speech acts, politeness), sociolinguistics (e.g. social and regional variation) and discourse studies (e.g. conversational strategies).
By means of close reading we will examine the play King Lear in order to study how the use of linguistic devices and the realisation of communicative patterns can highlight aspects of the meaning of the text.
The play (preferably in the Third Arden Edition edited by Richard A. Foakes (1997)) should have been read by the beginning of term.
Reserve bookshelf:
A reserve bookshelf will be put up in the library (ground floor). A selected bibliography of secondary sources and suggested topics for presentations in class will be available soon.
