Category: reading

Bibliography update

I’ve added sub­stan­tially to this blog’s bib­li­og­ra­phy. It will con­tinue to grow; com­ing next are not just new entries, but annotations!

As the bib­li­og­ra­phy grows, it will of neces­sity become more tech­ni­cal. How­ever, I have tried to keep the gen­eral reader in mind, and offer items that will reward the effort of read­ing them.

Lin­guis­tics is unfor­tu­nately jargon-​​laden; lin­guists love to play with their own lan­guage, and every the­o­rist has his or her own spe­cial­ized vocab­u­lary. How­ever, they do not observe any dis­ci­pline about defin­ing or using tech­ni­cal terms. This means that the same term will be used or defined dif­fer­ently. Worst of all, they often won’t tell you that they’re doing it! That sug­gests they are not self-​​aware of their own lan­guage use or are speak­ing to their own col­leagues (or just to them­selves!); the result is sloppy writ­ing and so sloppy think­ing! One aid to this prob­lem is Crystal’s A Dic­tio­nary of Lin­guis­tics and Pho­net­ics[1]. It does not solve all ambi­gu­i­ties, but it helps. Read­ing its var­i­ous arti­cles also is use­ful for gain­ing an overview of var­i­ous the­o­ries and posi­tions on spe­cific lin­guis­tic concepts.

[1] D. Crys­tal, A Dic­tio­nary of Lin­guis­tics and Pho­net­ics, 4th ed., Oxford, UK: Black­well, 1997.
[Bib­tex]
@BOOK{Crystal1997,
  title = {A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics},
  publisher = {Blackwell},
  year = {1997},
  author = {David Crystal},
  address = {Oxford, UK},
  edition = {4th},
  annote = {Linguistics is laden with technical terms and ordinary terms used
  in a technical sense. Linguists and different linguistic traditions
  can use the same terms differently. This book is a guide and map
  through this wild and untamed territory. Not only is it useful as
  a quick lookup of a term's meaning, the articles themselves are often
  encylopedic in their coverage of a topic. A must have on the bookshelf
  of every serious reader of linguistic literature.},
  date-added = {2010-08-15 09:45:51 -0400},
  date-modified = {2010-08-21 11:03:51 -0400},
  keywords = {Linguistics},
  owner = {klowery},
  timestamp = {2009.02.05}
}