 Required Reading, 2008-07-11
Very thorough and detailed. May not be most exciting book ever written, but it serves its purpose excellently.
2 of 2 customers found the following review helpful:
 A Well-Written, Easy-to-understand Intro, 2007-02-16
I have an earlier edition of this text that I used in a linguistics course several years ago, and I understand that the 5th edition is very similar.
This book is clearly, simply written, making some very complex and abstract concepts clear and understandable. I'm currently working on my Masters in Linguistics, and I regularly refer back to this text in my higher-level classes for clarification of things like Theta roles and x-bar theory (syntax), morphology, phonology, etc.
The text is fairly comprehensive, covering all the major sub-categories of linguistics. It doesn't pretend to cover any of the subjects in depth, but it does provide an excellent foundation for anyone who wants to understand the basics.
2 of 4 customers found the following review helpful:
Good introductory text, 2006-06-07
This book provides a good introduction to many areas of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, language acquisition and computational linguistics. The approach is basically Chomskian.
I would give the book about 3-1/2 stars. It touches on a wide range of linguistic issues, at varying degrees of depth. The description of concepts is fairly sensible. However, there are some issues not treated in adequate depth. For example, early in the book various irregularities in English are discussed which do not fit into their linguistic model--here it would make a lot of sense to explain the historical reasons for these irregularities. Also, the treatment of computational linguistics is weak; some good AI texts do a better job. On the other hand, it could be argued that an introductory text at this level can only include so much material.
In short, I found this to be a profitable overview of the field and would recommend it to others.
An Excellent Introduction, 2001-11-24
I am not a Linguist, but this book helped me to appreciate all of the differing theories and various fields within what is known as linguistics. If you are seeking a book that is simple to read, yet very comprehensive, I recommend this volume. If you enjoy languages, speech development, regional dialects, language acquisition, theory of language, language trends, and more - this book is for you.Major disciplines coverd include: phonetics, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Also included in this new addition are new chapters on second language acquisition and psycholinguistics. One of the best features of this text is how well it is laid out. It is a pleasure to peruse and even study because of it's logical and user friendly format. If you love anything about language- whether knowing it's origins, or what part of the mouth is used to create certain sounds, or how language changes over time and for what reasons, or a host of other curiosities, you will certainly enjoy the wealth of information within Contemporary Linguistics!
52 of 53 customers found the following review helpful:
Excellent introduction to linguistics, 2000-07-11
"Contemporary Linguistics" (CL) is a wonderfully clear and accessible introduction to the field of linguistics. The authors begin by introducing the methodological assumptions that underlie present day Chomskyan linguistics and then reserve a chapter each for almost all major research directions within linguistics.One thing in particular that I liked about the format of CL was the treatment of more advanced material (marked "Advanced") in each chapter. The "Advanced" sections augment the material in the rest of the chapter and are placed in logical sequence with the rest of the material instead of appearing in an appendix at the end of the chapter. For example, a section marked "advanced" on X' (read X-bar) Theory appears fairly early in the syntax chapter. Having some knowledge of X' Theory allows the reader to proceed to examine the rest of the material with the knowledge that there exists an intermediate level of structure between lexical categories (N, V, ...) and phrasal categories (NP, VP, ...). Most chapters in CL are pretty well written and technical tools to treat linguistic phenomena are almost always introduced at the correct juncture. However, CL does not treat Innateness properly (why Innateness and arguments for and against Innateness), and has a weak chapter on semantics. The reader would do well to augment the material in CL by reading Pinker's "The Language Instinct" or Jackendoff's "Patterns in the Mind" for a non-technical introduction to some ideas in linguistics, as well as sections of De Swart's "Intro to Natural Language Semantics" to get an idea of how semantics is done. If the reader is interested in looking at language from a cognitive science perspective, she would also do well to read most of Gleitman et al's "An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Language". All in all, CL provides a relatively painless initiation into linguistics and I highly recommend it.
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