<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Sloppy publishing, questionable models kill book
Review: (Let me say up front that I took Linguistics of English from Disterheft using this book. I look at textbooks as standalone products. Any book can be influenced by a professor's skill or lack of skill. But I'm writing about the book on its own merits in order to show one student's view of a book to any professor's selecting books.)"Advanced Grammar" is a great example of what happens when a book loses focus as well as a lesson in why we have multiple editions. The book is laid out near perfectly. The progression is logical, prose is clear, headings are easy to see and indices work great. There are summaries at the end of the chapter for students to review what they just learned, and the exercises are great at reinforcing this. The historical notes are nice asides and the frequent charts summarize information nicely. Of particular note, there is a wonderful appendix that is a great refresher for anyone just getting back into grammar or curious about what word class a word belongs to. I said near perfect, but the cases where layout fails can be catastrophic. Usually, this is from inadequate editing and/or computer error. Sometimes words are changed, left-out, or switched around in such a way that the concepts aren't understandable or are simply described wrong. Furthermore, some of the charts are missing parts. Some of the columns are cut off from the sides or some rows have been cut off from the bottom. Once again this isn't just bad because it is ugly. It affects learning. This is nothing that can't be fixed with a second edition. But I'd hold off until then or be aware that those problems are there and be prepared to correct them. The book advertises a companion website. But neither the link on the cover of the book nor on the Prentice Hall website is up yet (Dec 03). This should have been up before press time, not after and definitely not a few months after. Getting perilously close to false advertising there PrenHall. "Advanced Grammar" is a descriptive linguistics text. It isn't seeking an explanatory level of adequacy and says so in the introduction. Still some of the simplifications are odd and can even cause confusion. In particular, the way possessives and names are handled could have used a little more complexity. That little bit more would have made the student's grammatical framework more complete and, in the end, easier to pick up. The simplification has more mundane effects as well. For a book titled "Advanced Grammar" there really isn't a lot to it. This book is used to teach 400-level English classes and 500-level Linguistics classes at our school. But a fairly intelligent high school student could pick this up without a problem. It isn't a theoretical linguistics course but there are tools in modern descriptive linguistics that an upper-level textbook really should address. Bar theory is a particularly glaring omission, but there are others. In addition to the simplifications, some of the analyses come off as awkward. Grammar is by necessity part syntax and part semantics and Disterheft addresses both of these. But at times it seems she is using semantic analysis for syntactic concepts. This used to be common among prescriptive grammarians, but most modern linguists take a more functional approach. More importantly, while this may work as a general rule, the exceptions are frequent enough that students can be confused. "Advanced Grammar" also doesn't do a very good job of showing the relationship between the two and how it affects the language. Students are left wondering why they are tackling semantics in the first place. Finally, Disterheft's particular research areas have more influence on the models in the text than they probably should. Disterheft's research concentration is historical linguistics. Throughout the book, certain words are accorded different statuses or multiple statuses because of their origins, even though functionally they don't behave any differently. The linguist wonders if historical linguistics really has that much influence since speakers don't have access to that information. The student new to the field just wonders what the heck is going on. "Advanced Grammar" has many good points and lots of potential. The layout is well thought out and exercises accurately reflect the information. But poor editing, confusing models, and the author's own whims make this very hard to recommend. In the end, it is just too confusing and sloppy for the little information it has to offer.
<< 1 >>
| 
