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…
Category: Linguistics

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…

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…

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…

Dying Words by Nicholas Evans
Rating: 8.0/10. There are over 6000 languages in the world, but many of them are endangered. Often, they structure their grammar in really weird ways, like keeping track of absolute directions instead of left/right, or needing to specify how one got some information. There are lots of reasons why studying and preserving endangered languages are…