Linguist Forum
General Linguistics => Linguist's Lounge => Topic started by: Corybobory on December 26, 2013, 02:51:07 PM
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What book on linguistics holds a special place on the shelf for you? Is there a particular book that has really influenced you in your curiosity about language?
For my I have to credit Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, because when I read it at 17, it was the first book to introduce me to the concept of linguistics and made me decide I wanted to study it at university. Reading the book again years later it also charged my curiosity in the origins of language.
Another book that I keep revisiting is The Articulate Mammal by Jean Aitchison. On psycholinguistics, it deals with a lot of (in my opinion!) the most interesting and absorbing questions about language. I dip in and out of it regularly, it seems, no matter what I'm thinking about!
What about you?
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I can't really say I have a main book, not one like you do because I keep changing my mind and one thing I like at one moment is always tarred somehow by something I read/discover later on and I don't see this dark, winding path ending anytime soon. Probably the standard introductory book all linguistics students read: Contemporary Linguistics. That really stuck with me as being the book that took me from being a curious outsider to really giving me the resolve to dive in at the deep end and not turn back.
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It's hard to say. I'm pretty picky (and questioning) about what I believe, so there are few books that I find especially solid. It's certainly not any of my intro textbooks, and that's where I started. Interesting question, though. I can't really think of a single book that changed my view after that, either.
In terms of books I'd recommend (on specific topics), the three that come to mind are:
1/2. Comrie's Tense and Aspect (the short red reference guides). Very well done, good data, easy to read. Good mix of typology and theory.
3. Janson's The History of Languages: An Introduction, because the first and last chapters are very clear and interesting. Admittedly the middle of the book gets a little farther into sociolinguistics than my interests, but that's ok.
There are certainly some articles that deserve honorable mention as well-- "The Myths of Language Universals" for one.
In terms of books that have made me more determined to contribute better theories to the field... don't get me started :P
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Not really a "book" as such, but J. Pokorny's "Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch". It continues to fuel my interest in Proto-Germanic, Proto-Indo-European, and language chane, and as I'm a data-driven practical linguist — rather than theoretical — it has, and continues to do so, helped me with many etymologies.
Almost 55 years old, yet I would still place it on the must-have list of any linguist dealing with Indo-European languages.
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When I was thinking about writing a PhD thesis, I began to muse about a literary analysis of the Swiss-German writer Max Frisch who fascinated me at that time (and still does to-day). My brother in law, the late English linguist, Julian Dakin (here is some information about him, for the interested: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/research/collect/elt_archive/dakin_collection/), asked me why on earth I was going to write a thesis on literature. I said that as a "humanist", I was interested in the human soul in its best clothing, namely art, and specially, Literature with a big
L.
Being British, Julian agreed by saying: "Oh? How interesting!" adding: "And why is Literature a piece of human soul for you?". Well, I gave him all sorts of reasons; however, like Cory, he wouldn't care less about the words I said, but went on along his idea: "Don't you think that Literature would be impossible without words?". "Well, obviously", I said. "So", he went on, "perhaps, to study the way words are organized in human minds would be a better move to find out about the human soul, don't you think?". I didn't know what to say, but I had hated the prescriptive and the structuralist philology/linguistics I had done at school, and the idea of writing a thesis on that awful material did not look very attractive to me.
Seeing my reluctance, Julian gave me a book by one Japanese named American Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action (http://www.amazon.com/Language-Thought-Action-Fifth-Edition/dp/0156482401), and recommended me to read it. I liked it so much, that I passed it on to my sister and brother ... and to my mother who was also enthralled by it. We began talking about this book among ourselves for a couple of months and Julian acted as a webmaster without a web, solving all our problems, extending some points, etc.
He was the first to make me like Linguistics (Semantics, it was). I used the book as obligatory assignment in my first classes at the University, when I was teaching English language, instead of literary works, and slowly by slowly got the idea to write perhaps a linguistic thesis. In the meantime, Julian died of heart attack, and i went to Edinburgh where my sister lived, etc.
I have never re-read Hayakawa's book again. I am sure that I would not like it half as much today. But it is still, for me THE most important linguistics book in my life. I wish that as a Linguistics instructor, I should have had the same success that Julian had wit me with at least one of my students!