Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

£2.96

As the title says: A very short introduction - As the title suggests, this is a very short introduction to Linguistics. What I particularly liked about this book is that it gives insight to what this study is in general about. It also makes the reader wonder about many aspects of one s language that may be taken for granted but in reality are very sophisticated. I recommend this book for absolute beginners in the field of linguistics. Otherwise, it may be wiser to invest in a book that covers the subject in more detail.

Linguistics - the science and the mystery - Linguistics (lin gwistiks). Hmmm... not always such exciting stuff, judging by one particularly dull book read in student days. But this one is told with zest. It manages to let the reader approach the subject in a personal and meaningful way, and is a bit like sharing the voyage of discovery made by Humbert Humbert on the opening page of Lolita, where the obsessing narrator contemplates the tongue s subtly-shifting journey when pronouncing the name of his teenaged femme fatale. Two maybe rather trivial things occurred to me while reading. First, how inadequate western alphabets are as systems of representing the myriad sounds produced in human speech (hence all those arcane symbols linguists use, most of which this keyboard is incapable of replicating.). Secondly, a question. Would a linguist as expert as P.H.Matthews be able to understand meaningful speech simply by studying its spectrogram?Matthews is particularly interesting when dealing with the relationship between cultures and their language, and on vowel shifts (especially on the results of Labov s studies in the department stores of New York). Such modern, observable phenomena shed much-needed light on more distant equivalents like the Great Vowel Shift of Middle English.Linguistics has often been described as the science of language. This book deals with the physics, biology, psychology and anthropology of speech. That it also deals with the mystery of language as well as the science is one of its great strengths. Sections on the origins of language and on language and the brain are intriguing if, necessarily, speculative. As good a taster as you re likely to meet even in so excellent a series as this.

• Introducing Linguistics (Introducing...)
• Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
• The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics (Oxford Paperback Reference)
• Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
• The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind (Penguin science)