Language: The Basics
Author: R.L. Trask
ISBN: 978-0415340199
Good but rather short introduction.
Review
This not a book about learing a language but if you want to know more about what makes language work and how people acquire a language as small children this a good book to start. It explains all fundamental concepts in linguistics and is written in a pleasent and sometimes humorous style that makes it easy for a novice to understand those concepts and if you want to know more about some subject you can use this books extensive literature list. The only thing that is really missing is adequate coverage of computer linguistics (a.k.a. natural language processing). This gap is a serious ommision, the more so as this field has shown serious progess in the last decade.
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(a litle bit more depth and coverage would have been nice) |
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(paperback) |
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