(Part 2) Top products from r/asklinguistics

Regardless of what your program's focus is, my best advice is to bone up on syntax and morphology. Of course, if you're studying more practical/clinical stuff like language acquisition, phonology will also be indispensable.

Either way, you're definitely going to need an understanding of the basic principles of syntax. My 400-level class used Grammar as Science by Richard Larson. I liked the diagrams. Another class I TA'd used the O'Grady textbook, which someone else mentioned here, and I'd definitely recommend that, with the caveat that it's designed for 100-level stuff. So start with O'Grady, then move on to other things.
A suggestion: are you into conlanging at all? Because that's a great way to get your feet wet. It's also super fun.

Paul Elbourne's Meaning: A Slim Guide to Semantics is fun, simply-written, and a great way to start thinking carefully about language!

A simple answer.

There's a conference in Geneva by Saussure, published in his Writings in general linguistics (from p. 136 in the version I have), regarding this same issue. I'll be translating from Spanish since I couldn't find it in English, so please excuse me if it's not as good as it could be.


>When we consider a given language state^(1), such as XIX century French, and a previous given language state^(1), for instance Augustus' century Latin, we are first struck by the great distance that keeps them apart and, I dare add, even more so we are struck by the different names given to them, when calling this Latin and that French. Then we are led to fancy there are two things, one of which has succeeded the other. There being a succession is inevitable and evident, but there being two things in that succession is what is false, radically false and dangerously false, from the point of view of every conception derived from it. Let's just think a moment, for this observation has got it all: each individual uses on the next day the same language they spoke on the eve and that's how it's always been. No such day exists on which Latin's death certificate could have been issued and the birth of the French language registered. Never have the inhabitants of France woken up saying good morning in French, after going to sleep on the eve saying good night in Latin.
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>French doesn't come from Latin, but it is Latin, Latin as spoken in a given date and is such or such given geographical limits. Chanter doesn't come from the Latin cantare, but it is the Latin cantare.
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>There are no daughter languages, there are no mother languages, there are none in any place nor has there ever been. In each region of the globe there's a language state^(1) slowly transforming, from one week to the next, from one month to the next, from one year to the next, from one century to the next, as we will see later, but there has never been anywhere a birth nor procreation of a new language by a previous one [...].
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>A language cannot have a natural death and on their bed. It can only die by violent death. The only way for it to cease is by being deleted by force, by a cause completely external to the facts of language. [...] But in these cases there are no linguistic causes. It never happens that a language dies from internal exhaustion, after finishing its established trajectory. In itself a language is undying, this is, there's no reason for its transmission to stop for a cause due to that language's organization.

1.- I didn't know whether to write stage or state, the last being what is written in my version.

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I didn't quote all of it cause it's quite long, but these are some of the points made by Saussure when arguing about languages dying. Hope you find they shed some light over the question.