Language: Its Structure and Use

Rating:
Summary: Admirable Academically, Lacking Aesthetically
Review: As an English Major, I enjoyed the science and research that went into Finegan's work. Surely, no other subject such as language has been studied with such verve and clearness.

However, whoever designed the book, please take note: Chapter numbers at the top of the pages would be appreciated. It is very difficult to find a particular chapter without them. Also, the paper is too...too...WHITE. The black type against the blaring white of the bleached paper gives one tired eyes after only a few moments of study. Also, a bit of color would be appreciated in the charts and graphs to enable a student to clearly note the divisions Finegan makes in language.

Overall, academically, Finegan's is a decent book; design-wise, it is in vast need of an over-haul. Now that I have violated several language maxims, I bit you all a good night.

Rating:
Summary: There are better alternatives
Review: The prose style of this book (LISU), from which I helped teach an introductory linguistics course (as a Graduate Student Instructor), is quite charming. The tone is chatty and informal, and the presentation is accessible. However, I did not find this textbook to be pleasant to teach from, and cannot recommend its use to others.

My students found it easy to understand but difficult to use. The rather diffuse style makes it hard to use as a reference, and the lack of examples made it difficult for them to translate the topics discussed into actual phenomena. I, on the other hand, was embarassed by the many innacuracies in the book. Of course, any introductory textbook necessarily contains oversimplifications, but ideally these should serve some pedagogical purpose. LISU contains an unfortunate number of misrepresentations that are difficult to justify. Here are a few (based towards areas in which I feel confidant to judge):

1. The chapter on historical linguistics (though it starts of strong with a very cogent demonstration of the comparative method using Malayo-Polynesian languages) degenerates into something less commendable in the section on language families, concentrating on the language families I know best, I note the following problems (by page):

479: It is claimed that of Sino-Tibetan languages, only Tibetan and Burmese have speaker populations of over a million. This is simply untrue (see the case of Meithei [=Manipuri], for example).

484: It is claimed that Cambodian is the largest language in the Mon-Khmer family. This claim is based upon the curious assumption that Vietnamese is not Mon-Khmer, which does not reflect the consensus of scholars in the field.

Later (p. 486), it is even claimed that Vietnamese "does not have any clear genetic relationships," which is false--little could be more clear than the relationship between Vietnamese and the other Vietic languages. And all these languages are clearly Mon-Khmer.

If one is looking for distant relatives of Mon-Khmer, one should start with the Munda languages (a language family of India, with millions of speakers), which most everyone now agrees are related to Mon-Khmer.

485: There is a curious mishandling of the Tai family: "Tai languages may be related to a number of languages spoken in Vietnam, with which they may form a Kam-Tai family." What the author seems to mean is that "Tai languages are related to a number of languages in China (the Kam-Sui languages), with which they form the Kam-Tai family. Kam-Tai, in turn, may be related to a number of languages of China and Vietnam, with which they may form a Tai-Kadai family."

2. In the section on writing systems, the text presents a largely discredited notion of where writing systems came from. Of course, this is true of most linguistics textbooks that treat this subject, so it is not a failing peculiar to LISU. But note that on p. 432, a cuneiform symbol is both misidentified and rotated at a peculiar and misleading fashion.

3. In the chapter on phonetics, flaps and trills are grouped, inexplicably, with clicks, despite the fact that they share few articulatory properties and do not even employ the same airstream mechanism.

I hope that these errors and misrepresentations, which seem quite dense in certain parts of the text, are not representative of the accuracy of the text as a whole. It is true, of course, that these specific criticisms pick at nits. But why is it better to mislead students than to leave them in ignorance?

There are better introductory linguistics textbooks, although these too have their failings. The Fromkin et al. is great for an in-depth course, and Fromkin and Rodman is fine for a survey course. O'Grady, Dobrovolsky, and Aaronoff has some nice strengths, as well. Any of these three books makes a better text for an introductory linguistics course than LISU. LISU, however, would probably be a better choice than these books for individuals who want to learn some linguistics outside of a structured course, a fact which is reflected in some of the positive reviews on this page.

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive and well-balanced
Review: This book is an excellent text for introductory linguistics courses or courses about language and society. It consists of two sections, both of which are well developed: Language Structure and Language Use. The Language Structure section covers the standard linguistic divisions of phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax, but it also has good coverage of pragmatics, universals and typology, and historical linguistics. The Language Use section contains chapters on speech acts, writing and graphology, sociolinguistics, the history of English, and language standards. Language acquisition, included as part of the introductory chapter, is the only topic given short shrift, while languages and the brain are not covered at all. Examples are provided throughout the book, not just in English or European languages, but from a wide range of world languages. A glossary is included and the index is quite useable. The language of the text is relatively easy to understand (compared with Akmajian, et. al's introductory text, for instance). Each chapter includes exercises (which seem to be rather difficult) as well as suggestions for further reading and references. The syntactic analyses use the Transformational Grammar terminology from the 1970s, but this seems to be entirely adequate for beginning students. Of the various introductory linguistic texts on the market, this is the most well-rounded and clearly written. I would recommend it for any introductory course, although the exercises may need to be supplemented with an additional workbook.