Linguistics

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This New York Times bestseller is an exciting and fearless investigation of language Bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and... (read more)

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North American Icelandic evolved mainly in Icelandic settlements in Manitoba and North Dakota and is the only version of Icelandic that is not spoken in Iceland. But North American Icelandic is a dying language with few left who speak it. North American... (read more)

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Here, Robert Burchfield, editor of the four-volume Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, offers a brief survey on the development of English. He expertly stresses the flexibility of the English language, tracing its ever-changing face from the 5th... (read more)

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Righting the Mother Tongue tells the cockamamie story of English spelling. When did ghost acquire its silent 'h'? Will cyberspace kill the one in rhubarb? And was it really rocket scientists who invented spell-check? Seeking to untangle the twisted story... (read more)

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A superb resource for writers that packs an extraordinary amount of information in a convenient, affordable paperback format, this second edition of the Pocket Oxford American Thesaurus features a new text with more than 15,000 main entries and more than... (read more)

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This book, derived from the acclaimed Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages, describes the ancient languages of Asia and the Americas, for the convenience of students and specialists working in that area. Each chapter of the work... (read more)

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This book provides a theoretical account of a variety of different communicative aspects of silence and explores new ways of studying socially-motivated language. A research overview shows the influence of related work in the fields of media studies... (read more)

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This book provides a basic introduction to the fundamental concepts on phonetics and phonology, the foundation of most courses in linguistics. The reader is introduced first to articulatory and acoustic phonetics, and then follows a smooth progression in... (read more)

From Powells.com
"Everything, it seems, is interesting to Bill Bryson. The marvel is that he can make it all interesting to us....Bryson's book, Mother Tongue...is the one that convinced me he could probably write informatively and with humor about anything. I mean, who... (read more)

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Walter Benjamin was one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century. Illuminations includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's... (read more)

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"Human beings were never born to read," writes Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and child development expert Maryanne Wolf. Reading is a human invention that reflects how the brain rearranges itself to learn something new. In this ambitious... (read more)

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In this classic study, the world's leading expert on language and the mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about languages: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it envolved. With... (read more)