Re: Textbook choices

> [monstrous snippage to the beginning of Dirk's comments]
>
> 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!).
Granted.

>
> 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.
This really is useful, even to me.  I know Romanian very well and know
Spanish reasonably well, but even so when it comes to making judgements
about grammaticality and naturalness, essential when discussing syntax,
only an L1 will do.  Of course, there are several L2 speakers of English
in our class - I feel sorry for them.

>
> 3)  The data to be examined, while never complete or comprehensive,
> are presented with a degree of accuracy which not all texts achieve.
Our teacher usually has us do exercises from other books, which I
enjoy.  We've had to do a morphology exercise that involved extracting the
roots and relevant inflectional morphemes from a corpus, and similar
exercises in phonology.  It was all pretty simple to me, but I enjoyed
it.  I actually think that many of the exercises were from "Language
Files."

> 4)  The phonetic transcription scheme presented for English is
> extremely useful for discussion of tense/lax oppositions--especially
> when I turn the discussion to syllable structure and stress patterns.
> Having tense vowels presented as branching nuclei allows the
> generalization that syllables with branching rhymes attract stress in
> English. This point is difficult to make with other transcription
> systems. It is a relatively simple matter to remind students that not
> all languages have a tense/lax opposition like that found in English,
> and that using the tense/lax transcription conventions may not be
> appropriate elsewhere.
We haven't gotten to the syllable structure parts yet, and I'm looking
forward to it, since it's one of the few areas I don't already know.  I
don't really mind the tense/lax distinction in English as a *phonological*
feature, but it makes for very bad *phonetics*.  Plus, the book goes with
Chomsky's SPE in suggesting that [tense] should be a feature for *all*
languages, which is nonsense.


> Also, it should be remembered that *all* transcription schemes are
> arbitrary. This is equally true for the alphabet of the IPA as it is
> for the common scheme in use in North America. I often have students
> who have previous experience with the IPA's system (usually vocal
> performance majors and international students) and who therefore
> prefer to use it in appropriate contexts. I have never had a problem
> with that, as long as they are consistent in using it.
All transcriptions may be arbitrary, but at least some systems are
universal.  IPA is recognized by pretty much every linguist on the globe,
while the North American system is only used in this continent and only
used for English.  For the limited purposes of this book, I guess it
suffices, but that doesn't make me like it.

>
> As for Jesse's "retaliation," all I can say is that if I had a student
> who was that motivated and ambitious, I would weep for joy.
Heh.  My teacher (really just a bewildered grad student) told me to "stop
showing off."  I think he was joking though--he wrote a little smiley on
the side.  BTW, where do you teach, Dirk?

> 5)  The presentation of syntax, while overly complex in parts, begins
> with an extremely useful discussion of Yes/No Question formation in
> English. This discussion then allows me to generalize about how a
> linguist might arrive at a particular hypothesis about a syntactic
> phenonmenon.
The syntax section, or at least what I've looked at, *is* good, although
it's almost exactly like something I read a while ago in an "Intro to
Generative Grammar" book I picked up.

> 1)  The phonology and syntax chapters present way too much formalism
> for an introductory course. I have my students skip that material.
What do you mean?  I've enjoyed learning the phonological feature marking
(even if it *is* the flawed SPE) more than
anything else, since I never really mastered it before.

> 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!
Not so bad used.  I spent more for a Psych textbook that I never plan to
use again.

>
> All in all, I find it to be a reasonable and useful textbook.
>
> Dirk
>
> --
> Dirk Elzinga
> dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu
>
Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
"It is of the new things that men tire--of fashions and proposals and
improvements and change.  It is the old things that startle and
intoxicate.  It is the old things that are young."
-G.K. Chesterton _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_