A Manual of English Phonetics and Phonology: Twelve Lessons with an Integrated Course in Phonetic Transcription (Narr Studienbücher)

This is a fully integrated course book aimed at university students of English in the German-speaking region. It presents a staged and clearly developed introduction to the theory of pronunciation combined with a wealth of transcription exercises and an accompanying CD. The book requires no prior knowledge of linguistics

Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Rim (The Politics of Language Series)

In Linguistic Ecology, Peter examines the transformation of the Pacific language region under the impact of colonialization, Westernization and modernization. By focusing on the linguistic and sociohistorical changes of the past 200 years, he brings a new dimension to the study of Pacific linguistics, which up until now has been dominated by questions of historical reconstruction and language typology. Mühlhausler focuses on the cultural and historical forces which drive language change, looking at how language ecologies have functioned in the past to sustain language diversity and discussing what happens when these ecologies are disrupted.

The Balancing Act: Combining Symbolic and Statistical Approaches to Language (Language, Speech, and Communication)

This volume is worth it for the opening paper, Steve Abney's brilliant "Statistical methods and linguistics". Reading this paper in Chris Manning's statistical NLP class at CMU changed the way I think about the field. I believe it should be required reading for *linguists*. In my experience, most computational linguists either don't care about mainstream theoretical linguistics, have evaluated it and dismissed it as useless, or have taken on Abney's arguments; the remainder use logic and formal language theory without statistics. I considered myself in that remainder before reading this paper.

 

Memory-Based Language Processing (Studies in Natural Language Processing)

Memory-based language processing--a machine learning and problem solving method for language technology--is based on the idea that the direct re-use of examples using analogical reasoning is more suited for solving language processing problems than the application of rules extracted from those examples. This book discusses the theory and practice of memory-based language processing, showing its comparative strengths over alternative methods of language modelling. Language is complex, with few generalizations, many sub-regularities and exceptions, and the advantage of memory-based language processing is that it does not abstract away from this valuable low-frequency information.

Language from the Body: Iconicity and Metaphor in American Sign Language

What is the role of meaning in linguistic theory? Generative linguists have severely limited its influence while cognitivist and functionalist linguists believe that meaning pervades and motivates all levels of linguistic structure. This dispute can now be resolved conclusively by evidence from signed language. Language from the Body rebuts the generativist linguistic theories that separate form and meaning and asserts that iconicity can only be described in a cognitivist framework where meaning can influence form.