Re: Textbook choices

On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, dirk elzinga wrote:

> I use the Akmajian et al, text (and accompanying workbook) for my
> Intro to the Study of Language course for several reasons:
>
> 1)  It presents a theoretically coherent point of view to the study of
> language (not all texts do; Language Files from the Ohio State U comes
> to mind!).
Now you're scaring me!  Unfortunately, as it turns out, I won't be able
to take intro linguistics my last semester at Cornell...but I can
probably bully someone at grad school into letting me audit, or buy up
their texts.  Assuming the grad school I end up at even offers
linguistics.  (My boyfriend and I hope to go to the same grad school, but
since he's physics and I'm math, the humanities/social sciences might get
thrown by the wayside....)

> 2)  It focuses on English, and therefore makes discussion of
> theoretical issues *easier*, since students don't need to interpret
> data from "exotic" languages before the principle is uncovered.
Does it also have examples from non-English languages?

I like having both: examples in English so I can see what's going on with
a familiar language, and then examples in other languages so I can learn
how to apply what I've learned.  One of the things that I really disliked
about Macaulay's _The Social Art_ was that it focused almost exclusively
on English, and I wanted to know about how *other* languages worked, not
just English.

> Some points which are less advantageous:
>
> 1)  The phonology and syntax chapters present way too much formalism
> for an introductory course. I have my students skip that material.
>
> 2)  The writing style is rather dense (though no more so than the
> O'Grady, Dobrovolsky, and Aronoff text commonly used).
>
> 3)  It's expensive!
>
> All in all, I find it to be a reasonable and useful textbook.
<G>  I'll see if I can find it myself; from all I've heard it sounds like
a good thing to have around.

The cheapest textbook I've ever found is my _Introduction to Topology_.
$10 and it's pretty thorough, if a bit on the concise side (but that's
what profs are for).  Thank heaven for Dover paperbacks...I wonder if
they print cheap, good linguistics books...?

YHL