I’ve always been very fond of foreign languages, yet linguistics itself is something that escapes me completely. From phonetics to anything more than basic grammar, it’s all pretty much a mystery to me.
What would be a good textbook on the subject for a beginner? Pic not necessarily related.
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Saussure - A Course on Linguistics
Chomsky - Three models for the description of language
These two works cover the most important schools present in the field of linguistics, which are the functionalist school and the generative school. The former studies language as something with a fixed structure, whereas the latter studies language as a collection of objects with mutable forms.
What's the difference between functionalism and structuralism? I thought Saussure is structuralist and Martinet is functionalist.
For really accessible intros, I enjoy leafing through David Crystal's Encyclopedia of Language and Encyclopedia of English Language. (They're not really organised as encyclopedias, in fact they look a bit like kid's books, but very informative.)
These seem easier to start with than jumping straight into the most high-theoretical aspects of the field.
Functionalism is the designation of a branch of Structuralism that is present only in Linguistics. Structuralism is a broad term used for many schools of thought in Social Sciences that more or less present the underlying assumption that phenomena present in human societies and in human behavior can all be classified and mapped out into structures with a relatively stable form. It seems like the designation "Functionalism" is mostly restricted to Romance-speaking countries, however, which is why linguists who operate under the functionalist framework may often be referred to as Structuralists.
That they're related schools/ideas within linguistics is clear to me.
But still, structuralism is originally linguistic, the terminology and concepts were first made for linguistics. Of course, especially the French diluted the term in their theoretical musings (not that I don't like them), but regardless I still had the feeling that it's somewhat clear what the word means within linguistic thought.
I guess I should just read the books already.
Not a modern textbook by any standard but I really really enjoyed Sapir's Language (1921). It was such a fun breezy read.
I think to understand Saussure you really need to understand how exactly the French appropriated him and how he was made into something symbolic or representative of a structuralism that isn't "in" the Cours. Try to read something about Jakobson and what Levi-Strauss saw in structuralism. I can't emphasise this enough: trying to figure out what "structuralism" is by reading Saussure and then inductively reading the 101 different ways the French seem to have used the term is a recipe for a lot of wasted time. Read a good summary or overview instead, so you can separate the chaff from the wheat and decide what you want to read from there (hint: probably not Barthes).
Also, if you read Saussure, get this version. It's the newer one with corrections of some confusions in the old translation. Reading Saussure is easy, also. This isn't even a full book really. You can get the famous "Saussurean" parts in like an hour.
In general I never trust the French to develop or convey an idea honestly. Their obsession with signs and signifiers, semiotics, structuralism, all of it can be condensed easily. I just want to save anybody else getting into it the pain I endured by taking it at face value.
Saussure didn't seem that difficult to understand back when I first encountered his ideas in a Philosophy of Language classs. Structuralism
Chomsky's works might have a slightly higher barrier to climb over in order to be understood, mostly because he makes use of terminology and notation taken from formal logic and linear algebra that not all Humanities/Social Sciences students might be acquainted with. I found it easier to understand the purpose for Chomsky's transformational grammar by thinking about how computers have to process text.
This is a pretty good list.
If you want a serious low-level undergraduate survey, get Fromkin et al.'s An Introduction to Language. It's updated with new editions periodically, so you might want the most recent.
>What’s a good introduction to linguistics?
Knight C. - Decoding Chomsky. Science and Revolutionary Politics (2016) (explaining why Chomsky is crap)
Martin Haspelmath (read everything by him)
https://research.uni-leipzig.de/unicodas/martin-haspelmaths-publications/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hopper
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272816392_Emergent_Grammar
Campbell L. - Historical linguistics. An introduction (2013)
Trask L., McColl R. - Trask's Historical Linguistics. 3rd ed (2015)
Joseph B.D., Janda R.D. - The Handbook of Historical Linguistics (2003)
Jenset G.B., McGillivray B. - Quantitative Historical Linguistics. A Corpus Framework (2017)
Biber D, Reppen R. - The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (2015)
Gries S. Th. - Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R. A Practical Introduction (2009)
Gries S.Th. - Statistics for Linguistics with R. A Practical Introduction (2013)
[not linguistics, but related] Jockers M.L., Thalken R. - Text Analysis with R. For Students of Literature (2020)
[not linguistics, but related] Crawley M.J. - Statistics. An Introduction Using R (2014)
[not linguistics, but related] Crawley M.J. - The R Book (2012)
Ahlsen E. - Introduction to Neurolinguistics (2006)
Traxler M.J. - Introduction to Psycholinguistics. Understanding Language Science (2011)
Christiansen M.H., Chater N. - Connectionist Psycholinguistics (2001)
Spivey M., et al. - The Cambridge Handbook of Psycholinguistics (2012)
[not linguistics, but related] Turner S.P. - Cognitive Science and the Social. A Primer (2018)
Milroy L., Gordon M. - Sociolinguistics. Method and Interpretation (Language in Society) (2003)
Birner B.J. - Introduction to Pragmatics (2012)
Noveck I. - Experimental Pragmatics. The Making of a Cognitive Science (2018)
Croft W., Cruse D.A. - Cognitive Linguistics (2004)
Heine B., Narrog H. - The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization (2011)
Hoffmann Th., Trousdale G. - The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar (2013)
Imo, W. (2015). Interactional Construction Grammar
Auer P., Pfänder St. - Constructions. Emerging and Emergent (2011)
Booij G. - The Grammar of Words. An Introduction to Linguistic Morphology (2007)
Booij G. - The Construction of Words. Advances in Construction Morphology (2018)
This is the only good post in this thread so far.
OP, you should read a recently written textbook that covers a broad range of linguistic subfields to get an overview. Then you can dive into specific subfields or primary sources. The subfields it should cover at the very least are phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Pragmatics has become increasingly important in recent decades and I think should also be included. There are a lot of other subfields and subdivisions.
Don't start by reading Saussure, Sapir or anything else written in the last century. They're great, but you will appreciate them more later once you have the knowledge to contextualize them. They're also at least partly outdated, so you will have to unlearn some things if you read them first.
Chomsky can be very challenging at first, also he works within a specific framework, so he won't help you learn about linguistics in general. Contrary to what the post I'm replying to is saying, Chomsky is not "crap" though. His influence on linguistics as a field cannot be overstated. It's just that we've moved on from a lot of his theories and that his understanding of language is pretty reductive. Knowing what he worked on and what his critics are saying is essential imho.
I, too, recommend Campbell's book on historical linguistics and Haspelmath's work. Also Birner's book on pragmatics is good. Especially since you're interested in foreign languages, which means you'll probably like historical and comparative linguistics.
look at this ancient homie how tf is this man alive
Aristotle,
De Interpretatione
Analytica Priora
Analytica Posteriora
Topica
De Sophisticis Elenchis
based
good post
>mostly because he makes use of terminology and notation taken from formal logic and linear algebra that not all Humanities/Social Sciences students might be acquainted with.
That certainly did frick with me
>De Interpretatione
>Analytica Posteriora
And if you don't want to read everything (Prior Analytics is not as important for example, as it focuses on the rules of propositional logic), these two are the prime reads.
learn latin, its basically an undergraduate degree in linguistics once you've been studying it for a year
Latin books don't really include much content on phonetics, even though they've got loads on grammar, and some stuff about etymologies, which may offer some hints on how words evolve over time in different places.
Although Latin grammar is certainly similar to that of other Indo-European languages, only the broadest sentence division categories and parts of speech that are present in Latin are also present in languages like Chinese.
In addition, linguistics undergraduate degrees usually have classes that touch upon subjects like sentence trees and computerized analysis of language, which only began to exist somewhere around the mid 20th century and would for that reason not be found in older Latin books (or indeed, in older writings on grammar/philology/linguistics).
t. doesn't know shit shit about linguistics
unironically learning Ancient Greek got me into linguistics
Someone please just put Chomsky out of his misery...
>phonetics
Jallings F. - A Fan's Guide to Neo-Sindarin. A Textbook for the Elvish of Middle-earth (2017)
If you have autism, then you should check out pragmatics.
Linguists on this board actually know their shit, I've seen that a couple of times and I'd like to get some insight here. I've been wondering about the state of the art in what we know about meaning (simple semantic meaning, nothing grandiose). You know, out of the three acts of the mind (meaning of a word, truth value of a proposition, validity of the argument), this one seems to be the hardest to study, yet most relevant. Disagreement among the educated and well meaning must be located there, it's not like reasonable people will have differing views on the modus fricking ponens. It seems like all of logic (including modal logic and "semantics" of modern logic) is doing everything to not address the issue. Are we doomed to understand meaning intuitively or is anyone studying this?
Linguists are all moronic. If you want to know more about language than any "linguist" just study languages. Practical experience with a handful different languages like Latin, Greek, and others of your choosing always trumps theories of no consequence if you want to know the true nature of language.
>inb4 monolingual linguistics undergrads start frothing
Learning languages instead of studying linguistics is like learning mathematical equations by heart instead of trying to understand math on a more fundamental level.
That being said, I think everyone, especially linguists, would profit from studying a language completely unrelated to their own. I've never met a linguist who isn't at least a bit interested in foreign languages. Seeing linguistics "in action" by actually using a language is pretty exciting. In the same vein I'd also expect a car mechanic to enjoy driving nice cars.
Adding to this, so nobody gets this wrong:
I'm talking about if you want to learn about language fundamentally. You can study foreign languages for different reasons, like reading literature in different languages, travelling, etc. So there are cases where learning foreign languages is a worthwhile endeavor for cultural reasons imo
I'd say learning languages after learning about basic concepts in linguistics is more akin to learning about how cars work after having learned about mechanics and electromagnetism. Even though car mechanics might not have in-depth knowledge of classical mechanical theory, they might be able to inspect a car and repair or exchange broken parts, but an automotive engineer would almost certainly have to know the interplay of all the forces that act upon a car.
Likewise, a person may learn a language with a minimal understanding of grammar (perhaps even without being able to name the elements of a paradigm) and only know the sounds of the language by ear, but might not be able to use the proper IPA symbols for them or know rules in the language regarding which combinations of vowels and consonants are possible and which ones are not, but a person who'd want to make a conlang would by all means need to know all these ideas in order to be able to create a language with defined rules and relatively predictable behavior.
A lot of linguistics thinking is clearly rooted in traditional grammar and a few European languages though. It's mostly describing those and when it comes to other languages they are reframes/reduced to those. English language linguistics dominates the world and almost all of such linguists are monolingual and it shows. Because so much of linguistics is very limited in scope or basically just vague convention, they are not well-positioned to accurately take on actual languages. But this is bad because it becomes about the made up stuff and readily not grounded in anything. Knowing another language to conversational fluency, especially a non-European language, is needed for perspective. Knowing about a language, rather than knowing a language, doesn't count. That part is also why classical language experts are deficient and may be misled.
Would you mind being a bit more specific on what you believe linguists are missing by not studying non-European languages? I've learned Japanese, which is not a European language, but is one from a culture with an extremely extensive literary tradition that has both a spoken and a written standard dialect, and I wouldn't say it really changed my views on how languages work. There's signs, signifiers, and signifieds. Signs can be put together in determined ways in order to convey distinct meanings, and they can have their order shifted for the sake of emphasizing certain elements. Words can have several different pronunciations and ways of being written, which may have slightly different connotations.
I know I have a rather narrow reference set, since I don't know any languages spoken by small groups of people that have no standard dialect or orthography, but I can't imagine in what way might they possibly have a different way of working from languages I already know.
I’m a linguistics undergrad and I know English, Latin, Ancient Greek, Italian, and some Polish and Hebrew. You are moronic. have a nice day.
And if you know anything about the phenomenon of language its probably because of learning those languages than studying linguistics.
I doubt you’ve studied languages or taken any linguistics whatsoever. Anyhow I think I know better than you about what I’ve learned and where.
Believe what you want, sweetie
If you are just starting out, check out Ling101 coursebooks and look em up on libgen. Introduction to Linguistics - there are probably four or five books with this title and they all go over the key concepts. You should also, assuming English is your native language, find a book that goes over English linguistics as it should make the topic more clear with examples from your own language.
Once you have the basic intro, start looking into specialist areas. Pro-tip: Chomsly xbar type shit is dull as dishwater and will put you off unless you are an uber autismo. Start with any book on language typology. It's very interesting, easy to grasp and a good entrypoint. Sociolinguistics is another area that is normie-friendly.
If you want more of a narrative-type text that deals with linguistic concepts, I recommend David Crystal and Nicholas Ostler as two authors of merit.
What do classical linguists generally think about cognitive linguistics?