Prof. Juan Camilo Conde Silvestre, Professor of English Philology at the University of Murcia visited the LVTC research unit and lectured on linguistic change and historical sociolinguistics.
Cv details
Juan Camilo Conde works as a Full Professor of English Philology at the University of Murcia where he is in charge of courses on Medieval English language and literature, historical linguistics and history of the English language. Within these fields, his particular research interests are Old English literature and the application of sociolinguistic methods to the history of English. He has published widely on these matters, his most recent publication being Sociolingüística histórica (2007), the first handbook on historical sociolinguistics published in Spanish and aimed at a wide range of specialists and academics.
Abstract of the lecture
This lecture offered a systematic evaluation of the problems posed and the solutions presented within the larger field of historical linguistics by Historical Sociolinguistics (HS) and its most recent research mechanisms. More specifically, two issues were dealt with in detail: HS as a means to explain linguistic change and HS's contribution to the diffusion of the different linguistic changes that took place in the evolutionary stages of a given language. The issue of (socio)linguistic universals was also tackled.
