(Part 3) Top products from r/linguistics

As someone who also recently got into Linguistics at the university level, I can sympathize. Since my degree isn't Linguistics I didn't need to take a language for two years, but I would (personally) go for either Sanskrit or Greek.

General Advice: As someone else said, definitely work on IPA and sentence diagraming/sentence trees. Both are (in my opinion) extremely fun and interesting. I give this link to anyone asking for help with IPA. A TA of mine sent it to me, and it has been invaluable. Sentence diagramming can be tricky to pick up. One of the textbooks I used was the Longman Student Grammar and it is packed with information on various parts of English syntax. For 30 bucks on Amazon, it's definitely worth it (unless one of your classes uses a similar text, in which case, I would suggest waiting because textbooks are way too expensive).

Other than that, my only other suggestion is to get to know your Linguistics professors. Applied Linguistics is such a huge field (I assume most of your professors will belong to it), and each one of them I guarantee has a different specialty. Two of my professors specialize in speech pathology, one specializes in corpus research, another in syntax, and there are more that I won't list. Figure out what you really enjoy doing since it's so broad, and try to focus in on that (while obviously getting a broad knowledge of the other fields). Best of luck!

edit: I also meant to say, try to get involved in an internship with the department at some point in your college career. Much of linguistics is research, and having a research assistant internship on a future resume would stand out.

I'm going to reply to this in a rather obtuse and general manner and just link with as many resources as I can, as I don't currently have time to fully explore the subject, and I'm not overly familiar with the philosophy of language and/or communication studies.

As to your opening comments, "how communication takes place and forms" makes me think you'd be really interested in Conversational Analysis - this Wiki article sources a lot of excellent resources.

1. Yes, of course, we both study language. I'm sorry I can't speak overly to specifics here, I don't know exactly where they intersect. I would guess somewhere in the Anthropological Ling, CogSci, or Sociolinguistics specializations, though I could most definitely be wrong here.
   
   
2. Pragmatics and Semantics are your best bets here, and likely the Conversation Analysis page I've already linked.
   
   
3. Wiki has an OK overview, but to me it has always seemed very fragmented and confusing. The Linguistics Society of America has a good Why Should I Major in Linguistics? page, though I'm not sure it's exactly what you're looking for. There is also this Linguistics Careers PDF that I stumbled across a while back that might have some useful info for you. Honestly, taking an Intro to Ling class is a good place to start if you're interested, as it's about the only way to really get a good grasp. You could also try just buying a textbook for a Ling 101 class, or browsing a nearby (University) Library's linguistics section. If you want a book, the most basic overview I can find on my shelf (most of the classes I take now are very specialized) is The Linguistic Wars, which does a good job of summing up the last 50 years of Linguistics in a decently accessible format without going overboard. David Crystal's Encyclopedia of Language is also interesting, but it's not really a page turner IMO. Encyclopedia is the right word.
   
   I'd be happy to answer more questions if you have any, though I am sorry I am not more familiar with Communication Studies and Philosophy of Language.

I don't think it's necessary, no. But if you're the kind of person that benefits from this kind of thing, it can be beneficial. Sorry for being tautological =)

If you was about to learn new swimming styles, are you the kind of person who would go to the library and research on books about sports science as applied to swimming? If learning the guitar, do you brush up on music theory and try to understand the patterns of notes and chords in the fretboard? Before reading poetry, do you study about metrical forms and the history of styles? If you're that kind of person, you might have fun studying some linguistics and then trying to apply it to the languages you learn. Ocasionally it might even be useful!

As for book recommendations, I think one of the most useful areas you can investigate is phonetics and phonology, the study of linguistic sounds. Spoken languages are made of sounds that you hear, and you decode writing into sort-of "mental sounds" (assuming you're not congenitally deaf). Unfortunately these two processes have complications.

• Adult non-natives often fail to perceive and produce sounds in the new language (L2) that aren't present in their mother tongue (L1).
  
  Due to personal experience, I'm a supporter of the theory that this can be remedied by explicitly learning to notice the different sounds (Schmidt's Noticing Hypothesis). That means you need to understand how you yourself produce linguistic sounds, so that you can adapt your vocal gestures to those of other languages.
  
  To be able to do that, first of all, you have to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). No, seriously, you need it. The Wikipedia articles are quite decent, and so is IPA's own handbook. Wikipedia also has recordings for all sounds—and so does this interactive table. Some beginners think of IPA as a writing system, and try to learn to "read" it as a whole. This is a mistake. Think of it as a table of possible sounds, classified on various dimensions (in the case of consonants, which are easier to introspect, there are three: place, manner, and voice). Once you understand how each dimension explains part of a gesture, the values of each symbol become a recipe of how to produce it: do this with my tongue here, turn on voice, and… voilà!
  
  If you're familiar with language X, look at the Wikipedia article "Phonology of X", and try to refer to the table and understand it by reproducing the sounds. (In the case of English, be sure to locate your own dialect/accent). Then try to understand the corresponding articles for the languages you're learning. You don't need to care about the rest of the table.
  
  As you get familiar with the IPA, try to learn the basics of articulatory phonetics and phonology. Online articles are probably good enough to help with language learning, but if you like technical books and want to dig deeper, I benefited a lot this and this and this one. If and only if you like physics, then this too.
  
  
• It's nontrivial to deduce the sounds from the writing (witness how much trouble computer people have with speech synthesis). All writing systems assume that you already know the language. Some assume just a little, like Finnish or Czech (and are therefore foreign-friendly); and some are basically unpredictable, like English and French; most are somewhere in-between.
  
  The best solution to this is to make sure you get lots and lots and lots of exposure to the spoken language. If you can learn the spoken language before writing, so much the better (it's how natives learn, after all). If you're curious about how writing systems work, I'd recommend Rogers as a first stop, but I think the Cree/Blackfoot sillabaries shouldn't give you any trouble.
  
  

I would read some more "casual" or pop linguistics books to really cement your interest in linguistics before any of the more heady pieces of literature scare you off. As a side note, I'd learn the English IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) chart before you pursue further literature. Not knowing would be like performing math calculations without knowing what any of the operator signs were. As a high schooler, this is your time to read. God knows you won't have as much time to do it in college. Only after you get a general feel for what linguists actually do and study, would I recommend making a choice, it's certainly not for everyone :)

Great story demonstrating just how different certain languages can be.
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335511683&sr=8-1

If you want a great pop introduction that'll really help you tap your toe on the vast ocean surface known as linguistics, I'd give this a try too http://www.amazon.com/The-Stuff-Thought-Language-Window/dp/0143114247/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335511905&sr=1-2

If you like what you read, and think it would be admirable to contribute to the swiftly growing pool of knowledge we currently have in this wonderful field, then pursue more academically oriented sources, and as others said, maybe narrow your interests further by contacting a certain professor or researcher. Hope this helped :)

As far as I know, the most popular introductory textbook is Fromkin's. You can get an older edition for cheaper. I studied with the 5th edition less than 3 years ago and it was fine. For something less unwieldy and more practical to carry around with you, Barry Blake's All About Language is really good. Less than 300 pages and manages to cover a huge amount of stuff clearly.

Personally, I think that historical linguistics is a really fun and relatively easy way to get into Linguistics as a whole so I'd recommend Trask's Historical Linguistics. I know that the Campbell and Crowley textbooks are also very popular, but I don't have personal experience with them. Maybe somebody else can weigh in on which is easiest for a beginner?

I have to plug my professor Kate Burridge here who has written some excellent pop-linguistics books: Gifts of the Gob, Weeds in the Garden of Words and Blooming English. Her more serious books are also written in a highly accessible manner and she is probably one of the world's experts on Euphemism and taboo. Here's a clip of her in action.

Some fun linguistics-related videos:

TED - The Uncanny Science of Linguistic Reconstruction

Pinker on Swearing

David Crystal on British tv

Another fun way to learn would be to listen to this song and look up all the terms used in it.

The NLTK book is a good hands-on free introduction that doesn't require you to understand a whole lot of math.

Other than that, the "big two" textbooks are:

• Speech and Language Processing by Jurafsky & Martin (there are some chapter drafts from the upcoming 3rd edition here!
  
• Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing by Manning & Schutze
  
  They're a lot more math-heavy than the NLTK book, but if you're interested in computational linguistics/NLP, then your math and statistics should be solid.
  
  Honorable mention:
  
  
• Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing by Emily Bender aims to give an overview of stuff from pen-and-paper linguistics that are good to know in the computational linguistics world.
  
  Hope this helps!

If you're interested (especially) in why people "do the things they do," I recommend Ray Jackendoff - Patterns in the Mind, as well as pretty much any Steven Pinker book you can get your hands on -- The Blank Slate was an excellent read that goes well beyond basic linguistics as well. These two are some of my favorite "layman" authors for psycholinguistics. Enjoy!

I respectfully disagree with the statement that
>the increased use of auxiliary verbal tenses, especially passé composé, is probably due to Germanic influence.

First, according to the language histories I've consulted (by Romance scholars Ralph Penny and Rebecca Posner), the compound past tense (with habere) was already present in spoken Latin.

Second, in contrast to the "not universal" claim in Wikipedia, Posner states that "nearly all the Romance languages make some use of a compound perfect".

Third, Posner (former Chair of Romance Linguistics at Oxford, and a great writer!) specifically disparages the Germanic hypothesis:
>Some commentators have implausibly attributed the use of the ESSE auxiliary with some intransitive verbs to the influence of German, where the distribution of haben and sein auxiliaries is similar, but others have linked it to stative and passive uses of the ESSE auxiliary.

Finally, according to Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva's World Lexicon of Grammaticalization the evolution from a possessive to a perfective is "mostly confined to European languages," meaning that it's also found elsewhere. I wish they were more specific on this point; the only other language they give as an example is Cantonese. I also wish they discussed the être-based passive.

A few ideas: Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought is a good layman-level introduction to language and cognition, if he's interested in that.

He might appreciate a book on writing systems since he knows languages that use a variety of them. I hear this is a good one. I think it's the text we use at my university.

I have a book from a class I took in first year called Languages and their Speakers, which profiles a few selected languages which have really interesting features on all kinds of levels, including Japanese. It's a really good text.

A documentary called Nim Chimpsky just came out on DVD (or will soon? I forget); it's about a misguided attempt to raise a chimp as a human and teach him ASL.

From what I understand, programs like the University of Arizona's Master of Science in Human Language Technology have pretty good job placement records, and a lot of NLP industry jobs seem to bring in good money, so I don't think it would be a bad idea if it's something you're interested in.

As for books, one of the canonical texts in NLP seems to be Jurafsky and Martin's Speech and Language Processing. It's written in such a way as to serve as an intro to computer science for linguists and as an intro to linguistics for computer scientists.

It's nearing being 10 years old, so some more modern approaches, especially neural networks, aren't really covered, iirc (I don't have my copy with me here to check).

Really, it's a pretty nice textbook, and I think it can be had fairly cheap if you can find an international version.

Recommended these a while back, great, assessable reads.

The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/The-Language-Instinct-Mind-Creates/dp/0061336467/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343383543&sr=8-1&keywords=the+language+instinct

Patterns in the Mind by Ray Jackendoff
http://www.amazon.com/Patterns-Mind-Language-Human-Nature/dp/0465054625/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343383561&sr=1-1&keywords=patterns+in+the+mind

And if you are into etymology, check out

The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, by Bill Bryson
http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-English-How-That/dp/0380715430/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343383614&sr=1-1&keywords=the+mother+tongue

The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour Through Mankind's Greatest Invention, by Guy Deutscher
http://www.amazon.com/The-Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-Invention/dp/0805080120/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343383676&sr=1-2-fkmr0&keywords=guy+deucher+language

Again, all superb books.

That's... a big ask. Lots of people seem to like Ortega's book (disclaimer: I like Ortega's book).

But like, it would be easier to recommend readings if you could tell us your objectives. The Ortega book is mostly useful for pedagogy IMO, but it synthesizes the literature quite well. Anyway, hope this helps.

/u/NOT_AN_ALLCAPS_ACCT summed it up well.

If you want to get a decent crash course in the topic, track down this book.

To give an example: In Chinese the way to make a plural form of a pronoun is to add "men". So "ta" is "he", then "ta men" is "they". But in Old Chinese this "men" word didn't exist, so where did it come from? The most widely accepted proposal is that it itself is a contraction or "mei ren" meaning "every person". ta mei ren => ta meiren => ta men. In the modern language "Men" is a plural marker, but one that can only be applied to a handful of words referring to people (e.g. pronouns, "student", "comrade"). mei ren can still exist and be grammatical, but it's separate from men.

There are a billion great examples from IE languages as well, but I lack the ability to give good examples.

>Do you either know if there is previous research similar to this, or have ideas of how I could develop the necessary axioms for getting the robots to communicate?

This is definitely linguistics related (and close to my research interest!).

You may want to look into Evolutionary Game Theory and agent based modeling. If you don't have any experience with those, Tadelis is a good intro to Game Theory, and McElreath is a good introduction to EGT.

I can't think offhand whether Robin Clark has anything about this in Meaningful Games. You're going to want to look into Evolutionary Game Theory, and into agent based modeling. What you're talking about is an iterated cooperative game. Of course, you wouldn't have to build robots, given that you could just simulate the whole thing in NetLogo (or Python or whatever...).

You may also be interested in Gareth Roberts' work, especially the lab he's setting up as part of the evolution cluster at U Penn.

If you'd like to learn more about linguistics, I often recommend Pavey's "The Structure of Language: An Introduction to Grammatical Analysis". It goes over a myriad of syntactic and phonetic phenomena in language structure with easy to follow definitions, example data and exercises. If you're really dead set on books for a general audience, then maybe Anthony's "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World", might appeal to you as a tie in for this thread's topic concerning the historical development of PIE into the early IE languages. It was written by a anthropologist, and also concerns cultural development in early eastern Europe/Eurasia. If you want more accounts from field linguists like Everett, then Dixon's "Searching for Aboriginal Languages" and Robinson's "Microphone in the Mud" will be up your alley. If you'd like to learn about the recent history of linguistics as a field and what hypothesis are contentious and what rival schools of thought exist, then Harris's "The Linguistics Wars" is a great account of all that.

As for your second question, I, like many others here, would have no problem re-explaining our answers with a less technical audience in mind, if asked to do so. Just tag me as 'will reexplain linguistics stuff if asked'. :)

You might be interested in in Don Ringe's Historical Linguistics: Toward a Twenty-first Century Reintegration, and Kenstowicz and Kisseberth's Generative Phonology.

There is some evidence that slips in timing of articulatory gestures is one reason for sound change, but I wouldn't necessarily characterize that as laziness or lessening the articulatory expenditures -- timing misfires go a long way toward explaining things that cannot be explained by laziness, like epenthesis (e.g. /kʌmpftrbl/ for "comfortable" [forgive the lack of diacritics for syllabic r and l] -- it is not easier to produce the cluster "mpft" than "mft").

K&K are great for understanding phonological tiers (which can explain things like vowel harmony), and Ringe's textbook is really just incredible in every way and an absolute must-own...but relevant to this discussion has a few chapters on the causes of sound change and its spread.

You'd probably be better off giving them the Handbook for the IPA. IPA flashcards would be cool, but the IPA is pretty straightforward, and I would fear that the IPA flashcards would become obsolete a week in. The Handbook basically includes phonologies for every language and is wonderfully useful in the future for ESL classes since you can look up the phonology of an ESL student's native tongue and get some more perspective.

Good call on both those books. I'd also recommend Phonetic Data Analysis and Elements of Acoustic Phonetics, both by Ladefoged. The first is a really good introduction to phonetic analysis specifically geared towards fieldwork. The second is a fairly simple introduction to acoustics, but you might be better off going with the Johnson book.

Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain is definitely a must. Great read, too!

EDIT: Notice that it's not about the development of language in evolution, but how language and evolution co-evolved. If you're into human vs animal communication, neuro-stuffs, even semiotics, this book will be for you. Oh, and yeah, he criticizes Pinker, Chomsky, et al. So if you already know about generativism, this will be a good gateway towards modern cognitive science and cognitive linguistics.

Fellow English major/amateur linguist here. (Don't be sad, literature is cool too!) Geoff Pullum and Mark Liberman write an incredible blog, Language Log, which has taught me at least as much about the subject as any particular university class.

Also recommend Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct for a basic, high level overview of the different fields--syntax, semantics, phonetics, phonology, morphology, etc. Pinker has a bias toward his particular school of psycholinguistics and he has some not-so-nice things to say about English (the discipline), but he is nonetheless a highly entertaining read.

I'm reading the volume on Romance languages from The Cambridge Language Surveys and the author consistently uses the term "dialect", despite recognizing their mutual unintelligibility, the indisputable language status of Sardinian and Friulian, and the fact that:

> The diverse dialects are 'Italian' only in the sense that they are spoken in Italy: their linguistic relationship to the standard arises from interaction rather than deed-seated and ancient affinity.

So I guess the usage is hesitant on whether to talk about "Italian languages" or "Italian dialects", despite consensus on stuff like mutual intelligibility.

I took a class in undergrad about languages of the world. One of the textbooks we used was The Atlas of Languages. It had a lot of helpful overview information and the class was open to non-majors so the book was pretty easy to understand.
I couldn't find the newer version (it was updated in 2008), but amazon has an older edition for less than $15:
Here!

I realize this isn't the book you're looking for, but you might find the Atlas of Languages interesting as well.

If construction grammar is interesting, you might try looking into exemplar theory too. Most of what I'm familiar with in the framework is morphophonology, but there's some stuff on syntax too.

Also, you might be interested in Michael Tomasello's book on language acquisition, for a different perspective from what you got in your class.

I very much enjoyed The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker.

Check out Don't sleep, there are snakes by Daniel Everett , a fascinating look at another culture with a language so different to what we consider the norm.

Here is a video snippet

I believe it's a copular sentence [this chain] [is/=] [made of gold]. So, a subject w/determiner [this chain] + copular [is] + verb phrase functioning adjectivally/as a complement [made of gold]. I could also see it being an adjective phrase functioning adjectivally as a complement, but that's about all I got. Sorry I'm a bit rusty with this, but I would highly recommend the Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English for more insights.

Seconded, and after you've finished that, try Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the structure of English by Radford. It gets a bit dense after the first few chapters, which is why you should read Carnie first. In fact, there's so much info, it makes a pretty good reference book.

Make sure you don't get English Syntax: An Introduction by mistake. It's also by Radford, and uses a lot of the same material, but it's for a much different audience.

If you don't ride the UG train, The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon is a good read. Some of his biological speculation is a little questionable, but all the semiotic stuff is solid and sensible.

One name you should definitely be citing a lot is Michael Tomasello: link (from 2005, an overview of the indequacy of Chomskian approaches to language acquisition) and link (from 1995, a critical response to Steven Pinker's pop-Chomskian book "The Language Instinct") and link (from 2004, a brief note on the question of universal grammar's falsifiability), just for starters. Usage-based linguistics is the major counterweight to generative linguistics these days and Tomasello is at the forefront.

Bish, bash, and bosh.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language is actually very readable even though it's an "encyclopedia." Probably not exactly what you were looking for, but I'd suggest taking a look at it. It's expensive, but perhaps a local library has it.

Searching For Aboriginal Languages by R. M. W. Dixon fits the bill.

We used Kenstowicz & Kisseberth's Generative Phonology. The practice questions are brutal for our first introduction to phonology.