An Introduction to Language

Rating:
Summary: Miserable to learn from, and miserable to teach from
Review: Priscilla Oppenheimer says it all. I couldn't wait to give my copy away. The phonetics chapter is such a disaster that I had to ask a friend to teach me phonetics! I hope that a publisher comes out with an alternative so the beginning linguistics students don't have to suffer anymore.

Rating:
Summary: A real loser
Review: Priscilla Oppenheimer says it all. I couldn't wait to give my copy away. The phonetics chapter is such a disaster that I had to ask a friend to teach me phonetics! I hope that a publisher comes out with an alternative so the beginning linguistics students don't have to suffer anymore.

Rating:
Summary: Linguistics
Review: This book is unimaginably boring and stupid. It is filled with cartoons and the text is redundant. What this text really amounts to is a class in common sense. I am a CS/Math major and had been led to believe that Linguistics was a real science, probably because Noam Chomsky teaches at MIT, but I discovered that it is actually a wretched humanity (U Chicago agrees) and that little could be gleaned from a text in such a muddled discipline such as this one. Don't make the mistake I made! Take Physics instead!

Rating:
Summary: This book is illogical and has way too many editing mistakes
Review: This book makes learning linguistics very difficult. There are too many cases where the author compares apples and oranges or mixes up unrelated concepts. There are also many long sentences where it's difficult to determine which verb a final clause is modifying. There are many cases where the summary in a chapter disagrees with the chapter and a definition in the glossary disagrees with either the summary or the text in a chapter. Finally, there are numerous typos and editing mistakes.

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Summary: This is the BEST INTRODUCTOR Book of Linguistics.
Review: This book uses lots of funny cartoons and its use of words is quite easy and udnerstandable. So it's good for non-English speakers as well as native speakers. This book gave me all the basic concepts of linguisitcs, and no matter you have lingusitics background or not, you will get much through careful reading.

Rating:
Summary: Miserable to learn from, and miserable to teach from
Review: Those other bad reviews are right on the mark. I have taught from this book a couple of times at the university level, and I found it a shameful piece of junk. There are many cartoons included in it,which make it appear user-friendly at first glance, but it is so poorly written, and it explains things so poorly, that even many of my brighter students had trouble understanding it. (One colleague of mine, who insists on using it, feels the need to hand out copious explanatory notes with each chapter.) The book is full of glaring errors -- not only in linguistic matters but even in general knowledge, such as in the meaning of certain common acronyms (just one example). Even though these errors are easily spotted and corrected, they remain in the book from one edition to the next. The section on Language and Gender (among others) is pitiful, consisting mainly of research from the 1970s on language phenomena that have probably not been common since the 19th century. (When is the last time you heard a prostitute called a "laundress" or a "needlewoman"? The book goes out of its way to explain how unjust such monikers are, even though they are dead. Besides, my grandfather could recount cases from the turn of the century of call girls claiming they had arrived at Mr. So-&So's apartment to "take the laundry.") Some portions of the book are so inaccurate and badly written that I suspected that they were written by textbook editors and not by linguists. My students found this book a torment to learn from, and I found it a torment to teach from. An instructor would be better off choosing Finegan's "Language: Its Structure and Use" or Yule's "The Study of Language". While these texts have their own problems, they are infinitely better than this one.