Recommendations for books on linguistics

I am studying person-centred and existential counselling, and have become very interested in linguistics, semantics, and all that jazz.

I know nothing about any of it, other than I was wiki-hopping and found loads of cool pages linked from Nietzsche, including aphorism, antanaclasis, metonymy, rhetoric etc right down to all the different sorts of pun.

In short, it really floated my boat. I would love to know more but not sure where to start. I have some vouchers from Christmas which means I have about £60 to spend on books; I’m planning on going shopping this weekend.

Can anyone recommend any books, authors, topics, further internet reading, anything at all that is related to what I have described? Many thanks.

Also if this should be in IMHO instead(I wasn’t sure), mods please move it. Thanks again.

There are a few professionals around, who will be along shortly, I’m sure. Until then, let me recommend How Language Works by David Crystal as an excellent overview. In addition, it’s broken into short chapters on focused topics, cross-referenced, so you can skip around if some topics are of more interest to you than others.

Twickster’s recommendation of Crystal’s How Language Works is an excellent primer for someone new to linguistics. How Language Works is a distillation of Crystal’s earlier work The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, which is beefier, but still accessible to non-professionals. I’d look over the Cambridge Encyclopedia in a library or bookstore first before purchasing to see if you find it engaging enough to buy.

Another excellent ground-level reference to the field is Language: The Basics by the late Larry Trask. Trask’s writing is a tiny bit more academic than Crystal’s, but nowhere near enough to get in the way.

Most of the other linguistics books I’ve read are slanted in the direction of phonetics (sounds of human language) and grammar (e.g. Steven Pinker’s works). I’m not sure those will be up Lo-Slung’s alley, but I’ll be happy to expound if there is interest.

Thanks for this. Good job it’s a slow day at the office today! :slight_smile:

Twickster, I had a look at the link for the David Crystal book, and was pleased to note I could peek in the book! I liked what I saw. Seemed to be just what I am looking for - starting with the basics. The whole reason I was wiki-hopping was because one article would say that a homograph can be a homonym or heteronym, then I had to look up both of those words and try to understand them, it was taking ages.

bordelond, I have looked up Steven Pinker previously as I understood he had some thoughts on mental health which is my current professional background, so I would be very interested in anything else you have to say! Perhaps I should give a little more info - I’m looking for anything that would be helping in terms of interpreting use of language in a therapeutic setting. I would like to direct the focus of my therapeutic work on to grasping the meaning and feeling expressed by words, sounds, emoting with body language. I should note that although I have considered getting some Pinker’s works, I’m not so interested in grammar unless you think it is pertinent; I feel that as the interaction is verbal I don’t need to focus on that so much.

IMHO, Pinker is way more technical, and not in ways that would be helpful to you.

I concur with the David Crystal recommendations.

You might also want to wade into sociolinguistics. Deborah Tannen has written for general audiences as well as more scholarly works.

Certainly he can be a bit hard to follow, but I found a lot of stuff in The Language Instinct fascinating – like the ways the children will invent languages, and how people with very low IQs can have amazing language skills and vice versa, and how most “language mavens” are full of crap – since the OP has some Christmas money to spend, a think a used or other inexpensive copy might be a good investment.

If you’re interested in how languages change and evolve, I’m in the middle of reading The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher, and it is quite good. Easy to understand, interesting examples, and the author’s tone is not dull and is occasionally amusing.

A vote for Pinker’s Words and Rules

Thanks for all the pointers, I’m off to support my local independent bookshop, thanks to National Book Tokens!