I’ve never studied another field, so I don’t know if this is true in other technical disciplines, but linguistics is infamous for having extremely poor undergraduate materials. Now, there are some very notable exceptions: anything written by Peter Ladefoged is bound to be good, and his A Course In Phonetics should be required reading for anybody who wants to learn a new language. Whitney’s The Psychology of Language is also quite good. However, in general it tends to be pretty hard to find really good textbooks. Most instructors I’ve met tend to either mix and match quite heavily, or skip the textbook entirely and simply assemble reading packages with various articles.
Anyway, I was wondering how people who’ve taken linguistics courses would rate the various books they’ve come in contact with.
As for me, I know Rene Kager’s Optimality Theory is a pretty standard companion to undergraduate phonology courses, and it’s a really way to teach yourself how markedness-oriented grammars work once you know phonology. (the section on metrical stress in particular is pretty neat.) However, I’m of the opinion that anyone who forces undergrads to read Kager should be shot, as Optimality Theory is also astoundingly difficuilt to read. It’s dense, occasionally contradictory, and Kager has the habit of circling around a point for forty minutes before he finally puts it out of its misery.
Like I said, anything written by Ladefoged is a must-read. His stuff tends to be very information-rich, yet it’s written in a laidback, easy to read manner and the format really lends itself to self-directed study; it’s one of those rare textbooks that teach themselves. *A Course In Phonetics * is used by practically every university, and his Elements of Acoustic Phonetics is also quite good. (That one really needs a companion though; it’s easy to read, but it only gives you part of the story.)
Matthews’ Morphology is a pretty neat book… it’s a little dense, so it’s the kind of thing that works best when you have an instructor or TA to present the content in a different way; hearing it once from the book and once or twice from the profs tends to cement things pretty well.
And for syntax… yeesh, I have no frickin’ clue. (For those of you who are lucky enough to have never taken a Syntax course, it’s an unbeliveably sticky subject that a lot of extremely smart people do in radically different ways. It’s also sufficiently complex that most undergrad programs don’t have time to introduce general linguistics students to everything that’s out there. Most just settle for introducing one comprehensive framework over one or two years, then leave it to the students who are interested to go from there.)
Andrew Carnie’s Syntax: A Generative Introduction is better than nothing, but even that fails to adequately cover everything. Honestly, the most effective syntax course I ever witnessed was a team-taught seminar where the two instructors played good cop/bad cop: term 1 we had a kind, patient, extremely friendly English man with an encyclopedic knowledge of his subject. He spent the entire term patiently talking everyone through the rudiments of syntax as seen through the eyes of the Principles and Parameters framework and, with the exception of his sadistically difficult tests, was extremely popular with his students. The next semester, they handed everyone off to a short, extremely angry German woman who started by telling the class that anything they couldn’t personally justify was bullshit. After that, she spent the semester making the class build their own rendition of the Principles and Parameters framework, guiding them through the discussion and argumentation necessary to go from nothing to a fairly workable theory. She did head off non-P&P approaches pretty quickly, but she did so by saying “That won’t do well with the rest of the framework we’re constructing, but it’s a valid approach; come talk to me later if you want to build on it”.
So, um yea. I’ve got nothing for a good syntax primer.
So… anybody else?