Linguistics For Beginners

$14.95

21 in stock

Imprint: For Beginners
Availability: In stock

Book Details

Pages

128 Pages

Size

6 x 9

Format

Trade Paperback

Pub. Date

07/22/2008

ISBN

978-1-934389-28-7

Publisher

For Beginners

Authors

  • Illustrated by Susan Willmarth

  • Author W. Terrence Gordon

    W. Terrence Gordon has published more than twenty books, including Linguistics for Beginners, McLuhan for Beginners, and Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding. He has been the editor of the Marshall McLuhan Publishing Program at Gingko Press for the past twelve years, and is currently a professor emeritus at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Lynsey Hutchinson is a freelance illustrator and musician from Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work was first published in the award-winning graphic novel Burke & Hare, and she is one of the creators behind the Southern Gothic anthology Bayou Arcana: Songs of Loss and Redemption. Both Lynsey and her artwork appeared in the BAFTA-nominated 2011 independent Scottish film Electric Man.

Linguistics For Beginners is the first book to ever make the arcane labors of linguistics accessible to general readers. It begins with a lucid definition of language and proceeds to examine how it becomes the subject matter of linguistics. Key topics include the contrast between writing and speech, and elementary lessons in analyses ranging from simple sounds to entire sentences. Absurd fictions such as Eskimos having hundreds of words for snow are exploded, and the borderlands between linguistics and philosophy are investigated.

Linguistics For Beginners teaches concise lessons using wit and whimsy making for a memorable learning experience. The reader will learn about language acquisition, ancient languages, little-known languages, tonal and whistle languages, linguistic engineering, structuralism, language origins, the anthropological approach to linguistics, kinship semantics, color lexicons, geographical linguistics, and much more! Linguistics For Beginners is the key tool for linguistic students of any level.

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