Alternative Intro Ling courses
jlmendi at unizar.es
jlmendi at unizar.es
Wed Dec 8 15:37:42 UTC 2010
Dear Johanna:
I think George Yule's popular handbook fits most of your requierements
(I've used the second edition, but there's a new one, the fourth,
published in 2010):
Yule, George. The Study of Language. Cambridge University Press
Best regards:
José-Luis Mendívil
Johanna Rubba <jrubba at calpoly.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Is anyone else out there looking for a textbook for intro
> linguistics for non-majors that does not take an exclusively
> generative line? Does anyone know of books that deal primarily with
> aspects of language that are practically useful for non-majors?
> Well-educated citizens need to know about things like
> language/dialect prejudice, myths concerning bilingual education,
> myths concerning first-language acquisition, some information about
> language history and the history of English, the horrendous state of
> grammar instruction in our schools, the fakeness of "language
> experts" like John Simon, propaganda techniques, results of critical
> discourse analysis concerning things like racism, sexism and
> heterosexism, language policy, the role of frames/schemas in
> everyday life, pragmatics and speech acts, a deeper understanding of
> semantics beyond entailment, implicature, semantic features,
> utterance vs. sentence meaning, and the "nyms," the role of
> information flow in discourse structure, and perhaps a basic
> understanding of how linguistics can be applied to the study of
> literature (for English majors, at least; most of my intro students
> are English majors).
>
> I know that a number of these topics are covered in existing
> textbooks, but a number are not. Also, existing textbooks do a poor
> job of addressing the lexicon, if they address it at all. The work
> that has been done on the network model, usage-based models,
> prototypes, categorization, and the role of schemas/frames in word
> definition are lacking in most textbooks (some allude to prototype
> theory, but very cursorily).
>
> Intro textbooks, even those that advertise themselves as being for
> non-linguists, such as Parker & Riley's _Linguistics for
> non-linguists_ and Denham and Lobeck's _Linguistics for everyone_,
> fill their pages mostly with the core subjects (phonetics,
> phonology, morphology, syntax, and the poor treatment of semantics
> described above). They do have a significant amount of space devoted
> to some of the above topics, but I don't think teachers can deal
> with all of them in a single term (and especially not a ten-week
> quarter, which it is my fate to teach in). And too many textbooks
> teach generative theory as god's truth; they address
> counterarguments minimally, and often by trundling out old data,
> like island constraints. They bring in data that, from their point
> of view, prove modularity and Universal Grammar, but they never
> address specifically any arguments that non-generativists make; they
> simply say that the data (e.g., genetic language disability or
> "linguistic savants") prove their theory beyond the shadow of a
> doubt. One could easily get the impression that they don't think of
> their theory as theory (whether they intend this or not), but as
> proven fact, with any challenges not being worthy of their attention.
>
> People are still writing these textbooks as though we are training
> future linguists who already have an intrinsic interest in the
> details of language structure. I have ten weeks to give my students
> their only introduction to the scientific study of language. I don't
> see any point in these students learning to solve phonology
> problems or draw tree diagrams for a tiny fraction of the sentence
> types that exist in English. I don't see the point of having them
> learn how to build a linguistic argument based on structural data.
> I'm not even sure how important it is for them to understand speech
> articulation in the detail seen in most intro ling textbooks. I'd
> far prefer that they learn to think critically about the language –
> and language about language – that exists around them. I'm sure this
> would engage them far more (my most popular course is Language and
> Gender). When I do exit surveys in my classes, I ask for the most
> important single idea they will take away from my course. The vast
> majority of the students respond with something about dialect
> prejudice. Many, many say they will never again judge a person based
> on the way they speak. There may have been some students who have
> mentioned learning to solve phonology problems or drawing tree
> diagrams, but I could count them on one hand. Students seem to
> *want* the understanding of language that they *need*.
>
> It would be interesting to know what most linguists believe is
> necessary knowledge about language for the non-major. Many, many
> linguists work at institutions at which they never train graduate
> students and have teaching loads and service obligations that
> severely limit their research efforts (like me; I teach nine courses
> in the typical year, and do an average amount of committee work,
> which I actually like to do). Many of us teach only courses that
> require no previous linguistics training.
>
> I'm teaching intro ling to English majors in winter quarter (starts
> early Jan.). I'm going to spend my winter break thinking up field
> exercises or activities that will "sex up" the course. And I'm using
> Language Files 10th edition. Not a great book, but I haven't found
> a better one for undergraduates. Finegan's _Language: its structure
> and use_ covers a lot of the territory I'm looking for, but it's
> not easily managed on a quarter system, the chapters on phonology
> and syntax are confusing, and the level may be above what my
> undergrads can handle.
>
> Any thoughts, suggestions, practices you'd be willing to share? Or: Help!
>
> Best,
> Jo
>
> Dr. Johanna Rubba, Professor, Linguistics
> Linguistics Minor Advisor
> English Department
> California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
> E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu
> Tel.: 805.756.2184
> Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
> Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
> URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
>
>
>
--
Dr José-Luis Mendívil-Giró
General Linguistics
Universidad de Zaragoza
Spain
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