[Corpora-List] Suggestions for textbook for Intro to Language/Linguistics

[Eric Atwell]

Linda,

this isnt the answer you're looking for, but maybe you'll think about
it: why not use the NLTK (Natural Language Tool Kit) online teaching
materials, inclduing demos and tutorials, at 
http://nltk.sourceforge.net/teach.html
??  - This gives an overview of language for beginners, and basic
concepts and approaches to grammatical description - from a
computational, corpus linguistics perspective.  There's even links to 30
University courses worldwide whcih use NLTK, so you can chat to and learn 
from colleagues teaching with the same materials - nearest to you is
Univesity of Texas at Austin I guess.

Admittedly this doesnt cover all your syllabus, you'd have to find other
sources to cover language history, acquisition and social and regional
variation.  But maybe you could wriyte these as additional NLTK
tutorials and contribute hem to th OpenSource project?!

Eric Atwell, Leeds University

PS in case you didnt spot it, this was a tongue-in-cheek answer;
plently of linguists out there may well respond that Intro to Language
is not just intro to Computational Linguistics :-)


On Tue, 27 Jun 2006, Linda Bawcom wrote:

> Dear friends, collegues and  list members,
>
> First, my apologies for using the forum for this question, but  I  was wondering if anyone could recommend a good intro to language/linguistics textbook as I'm going to be teaching a course entitled Introduction to Language for the first time at the University of Houston-Downtown.
>
> The course description states: An introduction to linguistics sciences. The course gives an overview of language; it's use and development. Basic concepts covered are approaches to grammatical description, history, acquisition and social and regional variation.
>
> I have run across the following two books which seem promising:
>
> 1)Language Files from the Department of Linguistics at Ohio State.
> 2)An Introduction to Language and Linguistics by Fasold and Conner-Linton.
>
> Has anyone used these textbooks, or is  anyone using one which he or she has found interesting and fairly easy for students with no prior knowledge in this area? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I am not particularly concerned with whether or not it is American in origin (although perhaps I should be?), shipping, however, is a concern, as classes begin th 21st of August.
>
> Kindest regards,
> Linda Bawcom
>
>
>
>

-- 
Eric Atwell, Senior Lecturer, Language research group, School of Computing,
Faculty of Engineering, University of Leeds, LEEDS LS2 9JT, England
TEL: +44-113-3435430  FAX: +44-113-3435468  http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/eric