Linguistics: A Guide to the Reference Literature, 2nd ed.

Citation

Hurych, J. (2001), "Linguistics: A Guide to the Reference Literature, 2nd ed.", Collection Building, Vol. 20 No. 1, pp. 36-38. https://doi.org/10.1108/cb.2001.20.1.36.4

This guide covers the reference literature from 1957, a year considered a turning point for linguistics, because this is when Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures was published. The first edition of this guide was published in 1991 and included material published between 1957 and 1989. The second edition extends coverage through 1998, with a few works and Web sites from early 1999. This new edition contains 1,039 entries, about 500 of them new.

The focus of the work is on reference and bibliographic sources rather than on general scholarship in the field, and the emphasis is on materials in English, although a few selected works in other languages are also added. Inclusions are mostly monographs and serial titles, with some exceptions, for example, Web sites and professional and research organisations. Chapters, parts of books, individual issues of journals, and articles are generally excluded.

The guide is divided into three parts. Part 1, on general linguistics, encompasses such areas of linguistics as historical and comparative linguistics, morphology, phonetics, phonology, semantics and syntax. It does not include speech and hearing or language disabilities and also excludes, perhaps surprisingly, stylistics. Part 2 covers relatively new areas of the field, such as mathematical and computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, semiotics and sociolinguistics. Language teaching, in general, is covered, as is teaching English as a second or foreign language. Part 3 deals with whole groups or families of different languages. Materials on languages are organised in a hierarchical structure that is the author’s own and does not necessarily follow the standard classification of languages.

De Miller claims that she has personally examined almost all materials cited. Her evaluative annotations, pointing out strengths and weaknesses of individual items and their features, such as indexes, bibliographies, and illustrations, make the guide extremely useful. This most comprehensive guide to the study of linguistics is designed to meet the needs of students and scholars, in both theoretical and applied linguistics, as well as the needs of academic librarians for collection building and reference work.