Synopsis
The aim of this book is to provide a succinct, accessible and comprehensive guide to linguistic concepts and names. 'Linguistic' here does not mean the technical terminology of linguistic sciences, but language in a more everyday sense. Terms are drawn from the various applied areas of language study, such as language teaching, speech pathology, stylistics, typography, and lexicography, as well as from core topics such as grammar, figures of speech, and basic phonetics. The dictionary sets out to answer questions people are likely to ask about language, such as 'Which language(s) do they speak in such-a-country' (all the countries of the world are included), and 'How many people speak X?' (several hundred languages are included). There are entries on 'knowledge about language', and 'LINC', and the ongoing developments in corpus compilation (COBUILD, British National Corpus). A great deal of background is given to the language profiles (e.g. early literary history). Pronunciations of language names (and of several other terms) are given. A small number of entries deal with linguistics, in particular the main schools of thought and basic concepts (e. g. competence, morphology). Abbreviations are included. In all, there are almost 2750 entries and there are c. 5000 cross-references, to give readers a wide range of access points to the information.Carefully chosen illustrations show things that cannot easily be expressed in text, such as alphabets. A selection of cartoons reinforces the author's conviction that language study can be fun.
From Library Journal
Both students and the general public should welcome this dictionary by the editor of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language ( LJ 5/1/88). It defines hundreds of terms connected with language, from A to Zoosemiotics. Many entries are the names of languages, language groups, or countries. Others cover such topics as writing systems, punctuation, traditional grammar, and poetics, while still others are terms from phonetics, language typology, transformational grammar, case grammar, neurolinguistics, and related fields. Illustrations include audiograms of two forms of hearing loss, Chinese characters, and the Indo-European family tree. Recommended especially for academic and larger public libraries.
- Catherine V. von Schon, SUNY at Stony Brook
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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