Linguistics · 9 modules · 24 steps
Linguistics
The science of the thing you have used every day without noticing. It starts where descriptive linguistics actually started, with Panini's grammar of Sanskrit two thousand years before Europe attempted anything comparable, and goes on through sound, writing, structure, meaning, acquisition and change to the politics of whose speech gets called wrong. The last module stages a real disagreement between two linguists about whether your language shapes your thought. The promise is that ordinary sentences will stop looking obvious.
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Language as a System
Three books that establish the field's central claim: that language is a structured system you know without being able to state, and that it can be studied like anything else in nature.
The Language Instinct
Steven PinkerPinker's case that language is a biological adaptation rather than a cultural invention. Contested, brilliantly written, and the standard way into the subject.
Open the core textPinker making the argument himself at length, including the objections he takes seriously.
Open companionLinguistics: A Very Short Introduction
P.H. MatthewsThe sober counterweight to Pinker: what the discipline actually consists of, its subfields, and where the disagreements are.
The map of the field, so you know which module of this pathway is doing what.
Open companionHow Language Works
David CrystalCrystal covers speaking, listening, reading, writing, signing and everything between, in short chapters. The reference to keep beside the rest of the pathway.
An orientation to the subfields with examples of the kind of question each one asks.
Open companionThe First Grammarian
Descriptive linguistics was invented in India, in about the fifth century BCE, and finished. Europe got there two thousand years later.
A New History of the Humanities
Rens BodBod opens with Panini, whose grammar of Sanskrit uses roughly four thousand rules and a formal metalanguage, and places him alongside the Greek, Chinese and Arabic traditions.
A Cambridge doctoral student resolving a rule conflict Panini left, which shows how the system actually operates.
Open companionEmpires of the Word
Nicholas OstlerA world history of languages: which spread, which died, and why the answer is almost never that one language was better than another.
One case worked through in detail, which shows the mechanisms Ostler describes across the whole book.
Open companionSounds and Scripts
The physical substrate. How the mouth makes distinctions, and how those distinctions got frozen into marks that outlive the people who made them.
Vowels and Consonants
Peter LadefogedThe phonetician's introduction, with recordings. After this you will be able to hear and describe what your own mouth is doing.
The International Phonetic Alphabet taught as a usable skill rather than a chart to memorise.
Open companionThe Writing Revolution
Amalia E. GnanadesikanWriting invented independently a handful of times and borrowed everywhere else. Gnanadesikan takes one system per chapter and shows what problem each was solving.
The invention of the alphabet traced through Egypt and the Levant, drawn out step by step.
Open companionWords and Grammar
Structure. The rules you follow perfectly and could not state, and the argument about where they come from.
Understanding Syntax
Maggie TallermanHow sentences are built, using data from a wide range of languages rather than English with footnotes. Do the exercises.
Open the core textConstituents and tree structure explained on the board, which makes Tallerman's diagrams readable.
Open companionWords and Rules
Steven PinkerTwo hundred pages about irregular verbs, and genuinely gripping. Pinker argues that words and rules are handled by different systems, and uses went and goed to prove it.
Pinker on why irregular verbs survive and what they reveal about how the mind stores language.
Open companionSyntactic Structures
Noam ChomskyThe 1957 monograph that reorganised the field, and the source of the sentence about colourless green ideas. Short, dry, and historically decisive.
What generative grammar claims and why it was such a break from what came before.
Open companionMeaning
What is said, what is meant, and what happens when a language turns out not to have the features the theory said all languages must have.
Pragmatics
George YuleImplicature, presupposition, politeness and speech acts: the study of how people convey far more than their words contain.
Implicature and speech acts with examples, which is the fastest way into Yule's terminology.
Open companionMetaphors We Live By
George Lakoff and Mark JohnsonThe argument that metaphor is not decoration but the structure of thought: argument is war, time is money, and you cannot talk your way out of either.
The conceptual metaphor thesis and what follows from it for politics and reasoning.
Open companionDon't Sleep, There Are Snakes
Daniel EverettA missionary-turned-linguist on thirty years with the Piraha, whose language appears to lack recursion, number and colour terms. If he is right, universal grammar has a problem.
Everett on what he found in the Amazon and what he thinks it means for linguistic theory.
Open companionHow Children Learn Language
Every child does in four years what no adult learner manages in twenty. Two books on how, one of them about a language that was invented by children.
How Children Learn Language
William O'GradyAcquisition explained without jargon: what children get right, the errors they reliably make, and what those errors reveal about the system being built.
The stages of acquisition with recordings of children at each one.
Open companionTalking Hands
Margalit FoxA Bedouin village where deafness is common and everyone signs, using a language that emerged from nothing within living memory. The best natural experiment linguistics has.
A linguist on the same village and how grammatical structure appeared in the sign language generation by generation.
Open companionLanguage Change
Languages are not decaying, they are moving. Three books on how the movement works, and one that reconstructs a language nobody ever wrote down.
The Unfolding of Language
Guy DeutscherHow complex grammar builds itself out of erosion and reanalysis, with no designer. The most satisfying book in this pathway.
Open the core textThe erosion and regularisation processes Deutscher describes, shown in English.
Open companionThe Power of Babel
John McWhorterHow one language becomes many, why dialects and languages cannot be cleanly separated, and why creoles matter more than their status suggests.
Open the core textWhether languages simplify as they spread, which is one of McWhorter's central questions.
Open companionThe Horse, the Wheel, and Language
David W. AnthonyArchaeology and linguistics used together to locate the speakers of Proto-Indo-European on the steppe. A reconstructed language, tied to actual graves and wheels.
The archaeological evidence and the current state of the argument about where the speakers came from.
Open companionLanguage, Gender and Power
Who gets told they speak badly, and what the telling accomplishes. Three books on the social edge of the subject, where the science meets people's lives.
Language and Woman's Place
Robin LakoffThe 1975 book that started the field, arguing that women are trained into hedges, tag questions and apology, and then judged for using them.
The deficit model and the specific features Lakoff identified, with the criticisms it later attracted.
Open companionYou Just Don't Understand
Deborah TannenTannen's reply to the deficit account: not worse speech but different conversational goals, report talk against rapport talk. Read the two books as an argument.
Tannen on the rituals that cause the misunderstandings, in her own words.
Open companionEnglish with an Accent
Rosina Lippi-GreenHow accent discrimination operates in schools, courts, workplaces and cartoons, and why the standard language everyone is measured against does not exist.
John Baugh on the experiments showing people are refused housing by telephone on the basis of accent alone.
Open companionLanguage and Thought
Does the language you speak change what you can think? The pathway ends on an unsettled question, with two linguists who disagree about it set directly against each other.
Through the Language Glass
Guy DeutscherDeutscher's careful case for a weak version: colour terms, spatial systems and grammatical gender do measurably affect what speakers notice and remember.
Open the core textLera Boroditsky presenting the experimental evidence for the effects Deutscher describes.
Open companionBecause Internet
Gretchen McCullochWhat typing did to writing: punctuation as tone, the death of the full stop, and why the internet is the largest corpus of informal written language ever assembled.
McWhorter arguing that texting is a new spoken register rather than a decline in writing.
Open companionThe Language Hoax
John McWhorterThe reply. McWhorter argues the relativity effects are real, tiny and consistently oversold, and that the popular version patronises the speakers it claims to celebrate.
The evidence weighed on both sides, which is the fairest short statement of where the argument stands.
Open companion