Rating: 8.7/10. Poem written in Middle English by an anonymous poet in the 14th century. It is about 2500 lines long (90 pages) and is part of the “alliterative revival” — similar to the style of Old English poetry like Beowulf, but in a regional dialect of Middle English. Unlike Chaucer who is from London,…
Category: Type
Syntax: A Generative Introduction by Andrew Carnie
Rating: 8.4/10. Ch1: Generative Grammar Generative syntax was first developed by Noam Chomsky, to try to capture what we know intuitively about syntax. Use scientific method to gather data, form hypotheses of rules, and check if they agree with native speaker judgements. Source of data can’t be solely from corpora, since these only have correct…
Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦) by Cao Xueqin
Rating: 7.2/10. One of the four great classic novels of Chinese literature, written in the 18th century. The novel has several English names: it is most commonly known as Dream of the Red Chamber, but also Story of the Stone. It spans 2500 pages over 5 volumes (David Hawkes’s translation), I got through about 200…
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Rating: 8.3/10. Novel spanning 7 generations, beginning in Ghana around 1760 and following two half-sisters and their family lines. The first sister Effia marries an Englishman in charge of the slave trade; this side of the family remains in Ghana. The other sister Esi is captured and sent on a ship to the Americas; this…
Linguistic Fundamentals for NLP II by Bender and Lascarides
Rating: 7.7/10. Overall an okay but not superb book. The parts about pragmatics were the least familiar to me, but the writing was poor as a lot of advanced concepts were introduced too quickly for me. Ch2: What is Meaning? One way to represent meaning is by assigning logical forms to sentences. Modal logic adds…
Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics by Fernandez and Cairns
Rating: 8.3/10. Ch1: Beginning Concepts Language has finite rules and symbols, but has infinite generation. Can think of language as a system to connect signals (acoustic, or words on a page) to meaning. This is done through phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. Linguistic competence is the knowledge of a language’s lexicon and grammar; linguistic performance is…
Four Views on Free Will by Kane, Fischer, Pereboom, and Vargas
Rating: 8.7/10. Ch1: Libertarianism (Robert Kane) Libertarianism is the view that the universe is not deterministic, and this is necessary for FW; also, FW is necessary for moral responsibility. It’s closest to laymen’s intuitions about FW. Compatibilists attack it in two ways: (1) by claiming that determinism doesn’t conflict with FW, and (2) that indeterminism…
The Lexicon: An Introduction by Elisabetta Jezek
Rating: 8.2/10. Ch1: Basic notions The lexicon is the set of words in a language, abstract object stores in our mind; a dictionary is a concrete object (printed book or electronic) that describes the lexicon. Dictionaries do not always store everything in the lexicon, either intentionally or unintentionally. A vocabulary can refer to either a…
Understanding Syntax by Maggie Tallerman
Rating: 8.5/10. Overall impression: this book gives a well-rounded overview of syntax, good for an introduction and avoids most of the more theoretical issues. It’s split about 50/50 between English constructions and examples in other languages. This is a good balance, using English examples is easier to “ground” the theory to reality, while there are…
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Rating: 8.8/10. Summary Classic American novel by John Steinbeck, set in the Great Depression. It follows the story of the Joad family, originally they owned a farm in Oklahoma, but after crop failures in the dust bowl, they lost their farm. Hearing of greener pastures out west in California, they pack up all their belongings…
The Plague (La Peste) by Albert Camus
Rating: 8.0/10. Novel by philosopher Albert Camus, set in Oran, a town in Algeria, in the 1940s. Very relevant reading in the time of COVID-19: the novel tells of an epidemic of bubonic plague that hits Oran. The style is more philosophical rather than plot driven, and describes the reactions of society and how various…
The Saga of the Volsung translated by Jackson Crawford
Rating: 7.5/10. One of the most famous of the Icelandic Sagas: it was written in the 1200s in medieval Iceland, but describes existing folklore of the Viking culture that were familiar to everyone in the society. The events are perhaps based off real people but would have taken place several hundred years prior, in continental…