Linguistics

Books

Allen, J. P. B., Van Buren, Paul. Chomsky: Selected Readings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Baker, Mark C. The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Component parts of language.

Brown, Cecil H. Language and Living Things. Uniformities in Folk Classification and Naming. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984.

Feibaum, Christina. Introduction to WordNet: An On-line Lexical Database. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. WordNet has nearly half a million terms lexically analyzed and freely available.

Jurafsky, Daniel, Martin, James H. Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Learning, and Speech Recognition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000. How humans generate and interpret speech. Contains much information on phonemes.

Kodish, Susan Presby, Kodish, Bruce I. Drive Yourself Sane Using the Uncommon Sense of General Semantics. Pasadena: Extensional Publishing, 2001. How words affect our thoughts.

Lakoff, George, N ez, Rafael E. Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Lakoff's theory that our ability to process mathematics is based on our physical being (not our 10 fingers, but more basic).

Maher, John, Groves, Judy. Introducing Chomsky. New York: Totem Books, 1996.

Pinker, Steven. Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Author of How the Brain Works takes on how we process language. Much great information on the interplay of what parts of language we have to memorize and what we compose.

Trask, R. L. Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics. London: Routledge, 1999.

Wardhaugh, Ronald. Introduction to Linguistics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. Good introductory text.

Wierzbicka, Anna. Semantic Primes and Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. One of the pioneers of the semantic prime theory, which states that there are a small number of concepts (about 50) that are too basic to be defined and that we know everything else in terms of these concepts.

Magazine and Web Articles

Harvey, Kaolin R. 12-Dec-01. Bloomfield, Korzybski, and the Meaning of Language Science: A Tale of Two Scholars. Thesis. Available at http://www.plaza.powersurfr.com/krh/writing/korz0.html.

Richards, I. A. 6-Oct-02. The Meaning of Meaning. Web article: http://www.colorado.edu/communication/meta-discourses/Theory/richards/sld001.htm.