Re: THEORY: Required Reading?

> On Thu, 31 May 2007 09:35:46 -0400, Douglas Treadwell
> <epicureanideal@...> wrote:
>
>> Are there any books you would recommend as a sort of "required
>> reading list" to be adequately informed on the subject?
>
>> Are there any particularly good books on alphabets, grammars,
>> language in general?
The other lists posted were good. I find linguistic typology very
useful for conlanging. Greenberg started it:
Language Universals: With Special Reference to Feature Hierarchies
by Joseph H. Greenberg

I like the 3-volume Language Typology and Syntactic Description
ed. Timothy Shopen

Lots of example from Australian languages, covers different kinds of
language phenomenon, not too tightly bound to any one syntactic
theory. I wish I owned this, but I've checked it out from Brown's
library for months at a time when I had mroe active conlanging time.

I have long liked Langacker's Fundamentals of Linguistic Analysis,
which is unfortunately out of print. It's a resource book for a
freshman course in Linguistics that features short, relatively theory-
neutral overviews of topics and lots and lots of examples for
analysis -- so you get many language phenomena in the form of data
that you must analyze to find the rules. A good way to learn, and to
see features that you might  want to steal. You might find it on ABE.

   -- David

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