![]() The text is consistent in the claims made about how language works. Technical jargon is necessary and it is explained. The language is very accessible for someone without prior knowledge of linguistics. The content is up-to-date but not overly trendy and this will not be dated in the near future. I sometimes refer to that as a bias but I do not mean that in a pejorative sense. It is grounded in a particular theoretical perspective of language and is consistent. The author does not state that theoretical bias explicitly but that is common practice in linguistics. This text is grounded in an individualist, brain-centered approach to linguistics. There could be more exercises at the end of each chapter but I have plenty of supplementary problems and that is likely what the author intended.Īlthough in an introductory textbook, we cannot expect a range of theoretical perspectives to be even outlined but the theoretical grounding should be made explicit because students want to know. That said, I like the fact that there is a separate chapter on indigenous languages of North America. Rather than treating topics like psycholinguistics or language acquisition in separate chapters, EOL has those topics interspersed throughout the textbook in relevant places. We have 10-week terms and find that in that amount of time we can only use about one third of the material in many introductory textbooks. But what can actually be learned in one class of all that material is questionable. Introductory textbooks often attempt to have a chapter on all areas of linguistics and those texts can serve as reference books for students. The bias against language use (like many other introductory textbooks) is seen here with no mention of speech act theory or interaction. ![]() The section on Gricean Maxims and indexicality are better than many other introductory textbooks, (except for the one odd comment about what counts as personal deixis). The coverage of the five key areas (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics) is all pretty complete for an introductory textbook. Reviewed by John Hellermann, Professor, Portland State University on 9/1/22Įssentials of Linguistics is a fine online textbook to introduce the basics of linguistics to any university-level student without prior knowledge of linguistics and I thank the author for making it available at no cost to students. Journalism, Media Studies & Communications +. ![]()
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