Rating: 7.6/10. Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu Book about the history of the Chinese language during the early 20th century, when China was beginning to modernize, and how the language and writing system coped with the challenges. It starts with Wang Zhao, a scholar who saw the…
Category: Linguistics
An Introduction to Foreign Language Learning and Teaching by Keith Johnson
Rating: 8.0/10. Book covering a lot of research about best practices in language learning and teaching. There is a lot of implicit knowledge that’s required to effectively use a language: the obvious ones like phonology, syntax, and the lexicon, but also often-overlooked ones like pragmatic differences between languages. There is some overlap between this book…
Assessing Vocabulary by John Read
Rating: 7.9/10. A classic book-length survey about vocabulary testing: the research literature, design considerations, and its usage in education. Many linguistic questions lie at the core of vocabulary testing and don’t have clear-cut answers, like what counts as a word family? (eg: socialize and socializing should probably as a single word, but socialism is quite…
The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris
Rating: 8.4/10. The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure, 2nd Edition by Randy Allen Harris Book about a period in the history of linguistics around the 1960s-1970s, when a “war” was being fought in theoretical syntax. Linguistics tries to study how form is linked to meaning, but there are many theories about…
Key Questions in Second Language Acquisition by VanPatten, Smith, Benati
Rating: 8.1/10. Key Questions in Second Language Acquisition: An Introduction by Bill VanPatten, Megan Smith, and Alessandro G. Benati Linguistics textbook about second language acquisition, covering key questions such as: Does L2 acquisition use the same processes as L1? Is input or output more important? Can L2 learners become nativelike or is there a critical…
Introducing Second Language Acquisition by Saville-Troike and Barto
Rating: 7.0/10. This is an introductory textbook on second language acquisition, approaching the subject from the perspective of linguistics, psychology, and sociology. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy this book and dropped it after about halfway through. It tries to cover a lot in only 200 pages, but the writing is disorganized, giving only a brief treatment…
A Death in the Rainforest by Don Kulick
Rating: 8.6/10. Book Review: A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea by Don Kulick Book by linguistic anthropologist about his experiences documenting the Tayap language, spoken in Papua New Guinea. Tayap is a language isolate, spoken by less than a hundred…
What the F by Benjamin K. Bergen
Rating: 8.0/10. Book Review: What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves by Benjamin K. Bergen Book by psycholinguistics researcher Benjamin Bergen from UCSD, about the linguistics of profanity. It is unusual to do academic research on swear words like “fuck” and “nigger”, but the author compares it to studying…
Introduction to Semantics by Zimmermann and Sternefeld
Rating: 8.5/10. This is an introductory textbook on compositional semantics, which uses higher order logic to represent meaning of words when combined together. This is different from lexical semantics, which is concerned with the meaning of individual words. Below are my notes. Ch1: Lexical Meaning Semantics deals with literal meaning, which excludes hidden / metaphorical…
The Language of the Inuit by Louis-Jacques Dorais
Rating: 7.8/10. Academic book describing various aspects of the Inuit languages, spoken by about 110k aboriginals in Alaska, Northern Canada, and Greenland. The Inuit languages are part of the Eskimo-Aleut language family, whose homeland is around the Bering Strait. The Aleut (Unangax) language is the most divergent, followed by several Yupik languages in Siberia and…
Exploring the German Language by Sally Johnson and Natalie Braber
Rating: 6.4/10. Not quite what I was expecting — I was looking for a linguistic overview of the German language, but this book is more like an intro linguistics textbook that uses examples from German. About 70% of the material is general linguistics knowledge (eg: explaining what’s a phoneme or morpheme or word class), only…
Construction Grammar and its Application to English by Martin Hilpert
Rating: 7.8/10. Ch1: Introducing Construction Grammar Traditionally, linguistic knowledge is thought of as having a lexicon and grammar component (the dictionary-and-grammar model), but construction grammar proposes that all linguistic knowledge is different constructions. The change is motivated by idiomatic expressions that are a sort of “appendix” in dictionaries. Yet we can’t represent idioms as fixed…