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Category: Linguistics

An Introduction to Foreign Language Learning and Teaching by Keith Johnson

Posted on March 25, 2022April 11, 2022
Topics: Linguistics, Textbooks

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

Posted on January 12, 2022April 11, 2022
Topics: Linguistics, Textbooks

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

Posted on January 3, 2022April 11, 2022
Topics: History, Linguistics, Nonfiction

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

Posted on November 30, 2021April 11, 2022
Topics: Linguistics, Textbooks

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

Posted on September 24, 2021April 11, 2022
Topics: Linguistics, Textbooks

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

Posted on September 3, 2021April 11, 2022
Topics: Linguistics, Nonfiction, World

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

Posted on August 18, 2021April 11, 2022
Topics: Linguistics, Nonfiction

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

Posted on February 19, 2021April 10, 2022
Topics: Linguistics, Textbooks

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

Posted on February 8, 2021April 10, 2022
Topics: Indigenous, Linguistics, Nonfiction

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

Posted on January 21, 2021April 10, 2022
Topics: Linguistics, Textbooks

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

Posted on November 12, 2020April 10, 2022
Topics: Linguistics, Textbooks

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…

Syntax: A Generative Introduction by Andrew Carnie

Posted on October 17, 2020April 10, 2022
Topics: Linguistics, Textbooks

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…

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