Here is our growing list of some of our preferred texts, recommended by professors and students. If you have your own favs, send us the information and we will post it!
Executive Function in Education
Executive functions perhaps make possible many of the goals we live for and permit ways to identify and achieve those goals. However, to know where one is going, it is necessary to know where you have been and where you are. In this sense, development and elaboration of executive functions are critically dependent on memory and attention and, when built upon this foundation, can provide a basis for continuing adaptation, adjustment, and achievement throughout the life span.
Linguistic Fieldwork A Practical Guide
This book describes methods for doing fieldwork on language. It grew out of a need for a text which would be useful both to new fieldworkers in linguistics and linguistic anthropology and to students in field methods classes. Although elicitation strategies and data processing are the focus of a field methods class, in the field there are many more skills needed than just data collection, and it may well be that linguistics is the least of the fieldworker’s worries. Therefore here I cover not only linguistic data recording, but also grant-writing procedures, ethics and living in the field.
Vowels and Consonants: An Introduction to the Sounds of Languages
The notion of the ‘a priori’ has its primary application in the field of epistemology, where it is standardly used to characterize a species of prepositional knowledge (knowledge that p, where p is a proposition) and, derivatively, a class of propositions or truths, namely, those that are knowable a priori (though strictly this way of classifying propositions should be relativized to a type of knowing subject, the usual presumption being that human subjects are in question). In a related usage, certain concepts are sometimes classified as a prior, namely, those that figure as substantive constituents of a priori truths.
Vowels and Consonants: An Introduction to the Sounds of Languages
This book is about the sound of languages. There are thousands of distinct languages in the world, many of them with sounds that are wildly different from any that you will hear in an English sentence. People trill their lips and click their tongues when talking, sometimes in ways that are surprising to those of us who speak English. Of course, some of the things that we do, such as hearing a different between fin and thin, or producing the vowel that most Americans have in bird are fairly amazing to speakers for other languages, as we will see.
Elements of Acoustic Phonetics
This revised and expanded edition of a classic textbook provides a concise introduction to basic concepts of acoustics and digital speech processing that are important to linguists, phoneticians, and speech scientists. The second edition includes four new chapters that cover new experimental techniques in acoustic phonetics made possible by the use of computers. Assuming no background in physics or mathematics, Ladefoged explains concepts that must be understood in using modern laboratory techniques for acoustic analysis, including resonances of the vocal tract and the relation of formants to different cavities; digital speech processing and computer storage of sound waves; and Fourier analysis and Linear Predictive Coding, the equations used most frequently in the analysis of speech sounds. Incorporating recent developments in our knowledge of the nature of speech, Ladefoged also updates the original edition’s discussion of the basic properties of sound waves; variations in loudness, pitch, and quality of speech sounds; wave analysis; and the hearing and production of speech.
The Rutledge Companion to Sociolinguistics
Have you ever noticed an accent or puzzled over a dialect phrase? Language can be a powerful tool with which one can create a persona; it can be a common ground between people or can be used as a divide between social groups. This Companion is for anyone who is interested in how and why people speak and write with such diversity.
The Iranian Languages edited by Gernot Windfuhr
The Iranian languages are a major Indo-European language family, and with between 150 and 200 million native speakers represent the western branch of IndoIranian. This volume, consisting of fifteen chapters contributed by leading experts in
the field, offers an introductory overview of Iranian dialectology and typology, followed by detailed discussions of the principal languages of Old, Middle, and New and Modern Iranian. The language chapters follow the same pattern and sequence of topics, taking the reader through the significant features not only of phonology and morphology, but also of syntax, from phrase level to complex sentences, and pragmatics. In addition, they also address issues of lexis and sociolinguistics. Ample examples on all levels are provided with detailed annotation for the non-specialist reader, and annotated sample texts conclude the chapters
This text is meant as a first course book in phonology. The book has evolved as the textbook for a course taught to a mostly undergraduate audience over a number of years in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. The course meets in lecture for four hours per week, with a one-hour problem-solving session, during a ten-week term.
An Introduction to Sociolinguistics
This book is intended to provide students with a sound, basic coverage of most of the topics dealt with in courses described as either ‘Sociolinguistics’ or ‘The Sociology of Language.’ It assumes very little previous knowledge of linguistics, anthropology, or sociology, and so should prove to be most useful in a first-level course. It may also be used as a supplementary text in a higher-level course that deals with a narrow range of topics but in which the instructor wants students to become familiar with topics not treated in that course. Each of the sub-topics covered here concludes with a ‘Discussion’ section. The material in these sections is designed to encourage further discussion and research; it may also lead to assignments of various kinds.
Strategic Research Agenda For Multilingual Europe 2020
During the last 60 years, Europe has become a distinct political and economic structure. Culturally and linguistically it is rich and diverse. However, from Portuguese to Polish and Italian to Icelandic, everyday communication between Europe’s citizens, enterprises and politicians is inevitably confronted with language barriers. They are an invisible and increasingly problematic threat to economic growth as several recent studies have shown.
Linguistics An Introduction
The major perspective we adopt in this book regards a language as a cognitive system which is part of any normal human being’s mental or psychological structure. An alternative to which we shall also give some attention emphasises the social nature of language, for instance studying the relationships between social structure and different dialects or varieties of a language.
As more and more institutions of higher learning realize the importance of linguistics in teacher preparation programs, linguistics courses are becoming a more integral part of their curriculum. You’re reading this book because you’re in a linguistics class, and you’re probably in a linguistics class because your school or state feels that an understanding of language will help you be a better teacher. Unfortunately, you probably haven’t taken a linguistics class before, so you probably have no idea what linguistics is all about or how it will help you be a better teacher. Hopefully, by the end of the term, this will change.
Handbook of Discourse Processes
The notion of process is a key ingredient of discourse processes. Researchers explore the processes of comprehending, producing, reproducing, composing, recalling, summarizing, and otherwise creating, accessing, and using discourse representations. So a theory of discourse processing does not simply translate a discourse excerpt into a representation (e.g., a set of propositions, clauses, hierarchical structure, or a matrix of features). The theory also needs to specify the operations of assembling, augmenting, rearranging, or disassembling the representations and contexts in which these operations occur. The processes and representations may be captured at different degrees of grain size and analytical specification. Most of the time the components of a theory are articulated verbally, but sometimes the researcher adopts a concise symbolic language (as in the chapter by Moore and Wiemer-Hastings) and sometimes a precise mathematical language (as in the chapter by Foltz).
The Handbook of Language and Gender
The purpose of The Handbook of Language and Gender is to provide an authoritative, comprehensive, and original collection of articles representing the richness and diversity of contemporary research in the area. Currently, language and gender is a particularly vibrant area of research and theory development within the larger study of language and society, and the contributions in this volume focus especially on more recent trends and developments. The volume comprises specially commissioned articles in five distinguishable but closely related areas, identified because of their importance in current language and gender research, and encompassing the breadth of interdisciplinary interests of researchers and students in this dynamic area.
More Recommended Books
- The Atoms of Language The Mind’s Hidden Rules of Grammar – Baker, Mark. Basic Books, 2002. ISBN: 9780465005222.
- Contemporary Linguistic Analysis: An Introduction (7th edition) – W. O’Grady & J. Archibald, Pearson Longman.
- Semantics – J. Saeed, Blackwell If you lack background in traditional grammar, you may wish to consult:
- An Introduction to Grammar – L. LaPalombara, Traditional, Structural, Transformational. Winthrop (Chapters 2-10) (on reserve at Redpath Library).
- Linguistics: An introduction to linguistic theory – Fromkin, Victoria A. (ed.). 2000. Blackwell: Malden, Mass.
- Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature – Jackendoff, Ray. 1994. Basic Books: New York.
- Language – Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. A classic introductory overview of aspects of language(s), by one of the greatest thinkers in the field.
- The Syntactic Phenomena of English, 2nd Edition – McCawley, James. 1998. University of Chicago Press: Chicago. A fantastic sourcebook on English syntax.
- Language, Its Structure and Use (Fifth Edition) – Finegan, Edward. 2008. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth.
- Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication – Akmajian, Adrian, and Richard A. Demers, Ann K. Farmer, Robert M. Harnish. 2001. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
- Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics – 1998. Dept. of Linguistics, The Ohio State University. OSU Press, Columbus.
- Essential Introductory Linguistics – Hudson, Grover. 2000. Malden MA: Blackwell. ISBN 9780631222842.