book reviews in linguistics

100 Best Linguistics Books of All Time

We've researched and ranked the best linguistics books in the world, based on recommendations from world experts, sales data, and millions of reader ratings. Learn more

The Language Instinct

How the Mind Creates Language

Steven Pinker | 5.00

Simon Baron-Cohen It’s a really wonderful example of what you can do: take research into something as fundamental to human nature as language and make it accessible to a wide audience. (Source)

Lane Greene There are two achievements in this book. One is to smuggle Linguistics 101 into a popular book, which is just fantastic. The other is his own argument about the nature of language, and the title says it all. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

The Power of Babel

A Natural History of Language

John McWhorter | 4.85

The Mother Tongue

English and How It Got That Way

Bill Bryson | 4.84

Through the Language Glass

Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

Guy Deutscher | 4.79

Lane Greene Yes – ish. Deustcher does a great job of first taking on those old notions. He goes back to the romantic 20th century ideas, in particular to a writer called Benjamin Lee Whorf. Whorf was an amateur linguist, he was largely self-taught but spent a lot of time doing research on this topic. Whorf famously claimed that the Hopi Indians of the American Southwest did not have a concept of time like... (Source)

Metaphors We Live By

George Lakoff, Mark Johnson | 4.78

Kate Raworth I became aware of all the metaphors embedded in the way I speak and, therefore, the way I think about what is and what isn’t possible. (Source)

In the Land of Invented Languages

Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius

Arika Okrent | 4.71

Lane Greene I love this book. People have been inventing languages for hundreds of years. Think of Esperanto, or even the Na’vi language in Avatar. People have been doing this for a really long time and the underlying story – which is a funny, sweet, and sad one – is that many people have felt that existing languages were bad for one reason or another. They fall into two camps. Some people feel their natural... (Source)

The Stuff of Thought

Language as a Window into Human Nature

Steven Pinker | 4.67

Dominic Steil [One of the books that had the biggest impact on .] (Source)

Melissa Mohr This is about language more generally, but it has a great chapter on swearing. It’s a really good shorter summary, where he hits all the highlights about swearing and physiology in terms of how it works in the brain and the effects it has on your body. (Source)

Because Internet

Understanding the New Rules of Language

Gretchen McCulloch | 4.58

Laura Helmuth @audubonsociety @asher_elbein @NicoSGonzalez @JasonWardNY If you enjoy how birb and floof and snek and other fun words and fonts and linguistic cleverness spreads through social media, you'll love @GretchenAMcC and her book Because Internet https://t.co/wyzMUECeft (Source)

Owen Williams if you like words, and are curious about how the lexicon of the internet grows and evolves language itself, i can't recommend 'Because Internet' enough, it's such a great book and you should buy it https://t.co/8XroyXUgLI (Source)

Andy Baio "Because Internet" is out today! @GretchenAMcC's book is an insightful look at how the internet is changing language, and I love it. Highly recommended! https://t.co/vWVR1fRJyF (Source)

Empires of the Word

A Language History of the World

Nicholas Ostler | 4.57

Henry Hitchings It’s a history of all languages – some have called it a macro-history. The ambition of this book is really extraordinary. There have been lots of histories of English, and there are lots of histories of other languages in those languages, but actually to try and write a history of the whole of language is an incredibly audacious thing, and Ostler pulls it off. (Source)

The Unfolding of Language

An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

Guy Deutscher | 4.55

Don't have time to read the top Linguistics books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.

Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

• Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
• Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
• Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.

The Elements of Style

William Jr. Strunk | 4.51

Tobi Lütke [My] most frequently gifted book is [this book] because I like good writing. (Source)

Bill Nye This is my guide. I accept that I’ll never write anything as good as the introductory essay by [the author]. It’s brilliant. (Source)

Jennifer Rock If you are interested in writing and communication, start with reading and understanding the technical aspects of the craft: The Elements of Style. On Writing Well. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. (Source)

Course in General Linguistics

Ferdinand de Saussure, Roy Harris | 4.47

The Etymologicon

A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Mark Forsyt | 4.47

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

The Untold History of English

John McWhorter | 4.47

Made in America

Sam Walton, John Huey | 4.44

"Here is an extraordinary success story about a man whose empire was built not with smoke and mirrors, but with good old-fashioned elbow grease." (Detroit Free Press)

Jeff Bezos Expounds on the principles of discount retailing and discusses his core values of frugality and a bias for action—a willingness to try a lot of things and make many mistakes. Bezos included both in Amazon’s corporate values. (Source)

Rob "Crypto Bobby" Paone @tmac604 Read it earlier this summer, a great book 👍 and also hilarious to compare to current corporate excess ala WeWork (Source)

The Professor and the Madman

A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

Simon Winchester | 4.42

Peter Gilliver W.C. Minor was a member of the public, but he just happened to be a murderer who was banged up in Broadmoor. (Source)

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Lynne Truss | 4.42

Syntactic Structures

Noam Chomsky | 4.37

An Introduction to Language

Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams | 4.36

Fluent Forever

How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It

Gabriel Wyner and Dreamscape Media, LL | 4.36

How Language Works

How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning, and Languages Live or Die

David Crystal | 4.34

The Stories of English

Nicholas Ostler David Crystal is a friend of mine. Conveniently he has said in print that English may find itself in the service of mankind forever. When I challenged him he said: “I only said it may”, suggesting that he also thinks it may not. From my attempt to show that the world’s linguistic future may be very diverse, he’s a useful straw man to attack. But he’s an extremely estimable linguist and knows he... (Source)

Words and Rules

The Ingredients of Language

Steven Pinker | 4.33

The Study of Language

George Yule | 4.33

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes

Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle

Daniel L. Everet | 4.32

The Sense of Style

The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

Steven Pinker | 4.32

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things

What Categories Reveal About the Mind

George Lakoff | 4.31

On Language

Noam Chomsky, Mitsou Ronat | 4.31

The Art of Language Invention

From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves, the Words Behind World-Building

David J. Peterson | 4.30

Word by Word

The Secret Life of Dictionaries

Kory Stamper | 4.29

A Language Spotter's Guide to Europe

Gaston Dorre | 4.29

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language

How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

David W. Anthony | 4.29

An Informal History of the English Language in the United States

Bill Bryson | 4.27

Gödel, Escher, Bach

An Eternal Golden Braid

Douglas R. Hofstadter | 4.25

Steve Jurvetson [Steve Jurvetson recommended this book on the podcast "The Tim Ferriss Show".] (Source)

Seth Godin In the last week, I discovered that at least two of my smart friends hadn't read Godel, Escher, Bach. They have now. You should too. (Source)

Kevin Kelly Over the years, I kept finding myself returning to its insights, and each time I would arrive at them at a deeper level. (Source)

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

David Bellos | 4.23

Historical Linguistics

Lyle Campbell | 4.22

The Riddle of the Labyrinth

The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

Margalit Fox | 4.20

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language

David Crystal | 4.20

The Language Hoax

Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language

John H. McWhorter | 4.20

Language and Mind

Noam Chomsky | 4.20

The Story of English

Robert McCrum, Robert Macneil, William Cran | 4.20

The First Word

The Search for the Origins of Language

Christine Kenneally | 4.20

Lane Greene This is a book about words and language and evolution. Christine Kenneally, the author, starts off by describing how, surprisingly enough, this subject was completely ignored by linguistics for a really long time. One of the big official international linguistic bodies in the late 19th century banned all study of the topic, saying that it was unknowable. Even when most intellectuals accepted... (Source)

The Loom of Language

An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages

Frederick Bodmer, Lancelot Thomas Hogben | 4.19

Eric Weinstein [Eric Weinstein recommended this book on Twitter.] (Source)

Words on the Move

Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still (Like, Literally)

John McWhorter | 4.18

The Story of Human Language

The Adventure of English

The Biography of a Language

Melvyn Bragg | 4.17

The Elements of Eloquence

How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

Mark Forsyth | 4.17

Bill Liao The human world occurs in language so best get good at it! (Source)

The Story of English in 100 Words

David Crystal | 4.17

Introducing Linguistics

A Graphic Guide

R.L. Trask and Bill Mayblin | 4.16

How to Do Things with Words

J. L. Austin, J. O. Urmson, Marina Sbisà | 4.14

Stephen Breyer JL Austin was an ordinary language philosopher. When I studied in Oxford, I went to one of his classes and I read his books. How to Do Things with Words teaches us a lot about how ordinary language works. It is useful to me as a judge, because it helps me avoid the traps that linguistic imprecision can set. If I had to pick a single thing that I draw from Austin’s work it would be that context... (Source)

Comparative Grammar of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French

Learn & Compare 4 Languages Simultaneously

Mikhail Petrunin | 4.13

The Lexicographer's Dilemma

The Evolution of "Proper" English, from Shakespeare to South Park

Jack Lynch | 4.13

The Atoms Of Language

The Mind's Hidden Rules Of Grammar

Mark C. Baker | 4.13

Language Myths

Laurie Bauer, Peter Trudgill | 4.12

Stories of Your Life and Others

Ted Chiang | 4.12

Naval Ravikant I’m rereading Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. It’s one of my favorite sci-fi novels. (Source)

Meltem Demirors finally reading Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and i have basically been crying since i opened my kindle such a beautiful writer and such profound topics. division by zero was my favorite of the collection, but the story the book is titled after is stunning 😍 https://t.co/2c5SuDEfkh (Source)

Ryan Len One of the best sci-fi books I’ve read in my life! (Source)

The Articulate Mammal

An Introduction to Psycholinguistics

Jean Aitchison | 4.11

Lost in Translation

An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World

Ella Frances Sanders | 4.11

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell | 4.11

Reid Hoffman Reid recommends studying Ludwig Wittgenstein, about whom he's taught a course at Oxford. "One of the bedrocks of modern analytics philosophy is to think of [language] ... if you're trying to talk to someone else about some problem, and you're trying to make progress, how do you make language as positive an instrument as possible? What are the ways that language can work, and what are the way that... (Source)

Sonia Micu The book I read many times already is Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Don’t say it’s pretentious. It is beautiful. Some even say it’s poetry. I am far from understanding his complicated genius, but I think I’ve learned how to read it and I think I’ll never stop going back to it. (Source)

Tom Stoneham Wittgenstein’s book is about how we understand the thinkable and the unthinkable, which is a traditional philosophical problem. (Source)

Spoken Here

Travels Among Threatened Languages

Mark Abley | 4.10

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language

David Crystal | 4.10

The Blank Slate

The Modern Denial of Human Nature

Steven Pinker | 4.09

David Brooks An argument against the old view that there is no such thing as human nature, that we’re all culturally determined. He brings together a ton of evidence that that’s wrong. (Source)

The Symbolic Species

The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain

Terrence W. Deacon | 4.09

Proust and the Squid

The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

Maryanne Wolf | 4.09

Peg Tyre Read this and you will never again hand your iPhone to your child in the stroller. You will start talking to them and pointing out colours. (Source)

Lost Languages

The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts

Andrew Robinson | 4.09

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax

Noam Chomsky | 4.08

A Little Book of Language

David Crystal | 4.08

A Generative Introduction

Andrew Carnie | 4.08

Talking Hands

What Sign Language Reveals about the Mind

Margalit Fox | 4.07

What Language Is

And What It Isn't and What It Could Be

John McWhorter | 4.07

The Code Book

The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

Simon Singh | 4.07

Stephen Kinsella @gavreilly @SLSingh Love that book (Source)

Language in Thought and Action

S.I. Hayakawa, Alan R. Hayakawa, Robert MacNeil | 4.06

The Secret Life of Pronouns

What Our Words Say About Us

James W. Pennebaker | 4.06

How the Mind Works

Steven Pinker | 4.06

Dan Kaminsky @DanielMiessler @balajis How The Mind Works being the formative book of my intellectual career makes this particularly interesting. I don’t always agree with Pinker but that’s not a requirement. (Source)

The Language of Food

A Linguist Reads the Menu

Dan Jurafsky | 4.05

How Languages are Learned

Patsy M. Lightbown, Nina Spada | 4.05

Contemporary Linguistics

An Introduction

William O'Grady, John Archibald, et al. | 4.05

Bastard Tongues

A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages

Derek Bickerton | 4.05

Sociolinguistics

An Introduction to Language and Society

Peter Trudgill | 4.05

American Sign Language Dictionary

Martin L.A. Sternberg | 4.04

The Horologicon

A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language

Mark Forsyth | 4.04

Speech and Language Processing

An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Speech Recognition

Daniel Jurafsky, James H. Martin | 4.03

Babel No More

The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners

Michael Erard | 4.03

Garner's Modern American Usage

Bryan A. Garner | 4.03

Mark Nichol This book is the closest thing Americans have to a national authority. (Source)

Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

The Essential Guide for Progressives

George Lakoff | 4.03

Ryan Holiday These two books are the two best books of political thinking and theater from both the left and the right. Regardless of ideologies, both are experts in influencing and leading public perception through image and words. It actually matters whether we’re talking about illegal immigrants or undocumented workers, or whether we describe the problem as climate change or global warming. Strategists... (Source)

The World's Major Languages

Bernard Comrie | 4.02

Language Death

David Crystal | 4.02

A Course in Phonetics

Peter Ladefoged | 4.02

EASY-TO-READ CROSSWORD PUZZLES FOR ADULTS

LARGE-PRINT, MEDIUM-LEVEL PUZZLES THAT ENTERTAIN AND CHALLENGE

Jenny Patterson | 4.02

George Yule, H. G. Widdowson | 4.02

The Last Speakers

The Quest to Save the World's Most Endangered Languages

K. David Harrison | 4.02

The Pun Also Rises

How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics

John Pollack | 4.02

The Languages of Tolkien's Middle-Earth

Ruth S. Noel | 4.02

The ABC's of LGBT+

Ashley Mardell | 4.02

A Brief History of Swearing

Melissa Mohr | 4.01

You Are What You Speak

Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

Robert Lane Greene | 4.01

The Story of French

Jean-Benoit Nadeau, Julie Barlow | 4.01

The Only Grammar Book You'll Ever Need

A One-Stop Source for Every Writing Assignment

Susan Thurman and Larry Shea | 4.00

Embassytown

China Mieville | 4.00

Intuitive Editing

A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing

Tiffany Yates Martin | 4.00

Language Change

Progress or Decay?

Jean Aitchison | 4.00

• Search Menu

Sign in through your institution

• Advance articles
• Author Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Open Access
• Why Submit?
• About Applied Linguistics
• Editorial Board
• Advertising and Corporate Services
• Journals Career Network
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Dispatch Dates
• Terms and Conditions
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic
• < Previous

Book Reviews and Forum Contributions in Applied Linguistics—Continuity and Change

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

Alison Sealey, Book Reviews and Forum Contributions in Applied Linguistics—Continuity and Change, Applied Linguistics , Volume 36, Issue 4, September 2015, Pages 478–487, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amv036

• Permissions Icon Permissions

This short article reflects on issues in applied linguistics from the perspective of the editor of the Book Reviews and Forum sections of the journal.

Personal account

• Sign in with email/username & password
• Get email alerts
• Save searches
• Purchase content
• Activate your purchase/trial code
• Add your ORCID iD

Institutional access

Sign in with a library card.

• Sign in with username/password
• Recommend to your librarian
• Institutional account management
• Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

• Click Sign in through your institution.
• Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
• When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
• Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

• Click Sign in through society site.
• When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

• View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
• View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Short-term Access

To purchase short-term access, please sign in to your personal account above.

Don't already have a personal account? Register

Email alerts

Citing articles via, looking for your next opportunity.

• Recommend to your Library

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 1477-450X
• Print ISSN 0142-6001
• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Rights and permissions
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

• NONFICTION BOOKS
• BEST NONFICTION 2023
• BEST NONFICTION 2024
• Historical Biographies
• The Best Memoirs and Autobiographies
• Philosophical Biographies
• World War 2
• World History
• American History
• British History
• Chinese History
• Russian History
• Ancient History (up to c. 500 AD)
• Medieval History (500-1400)
• Military History
• Art History
• Travel Books
• Ancient Philosophy
• Contemporary Philosophy
• Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Great Philosophers
• Social & Political Philosophy
• Classical Studies
• New Science Books
• Maths & Statistics
• Popular Science
• Physics Books
• Climate Change Books
• How to Write
• English Grammar & Usage
• Books for Learning Languages
• Linguistics
• Political Ideologies
• Foreign Policy & International Relations
• American Politics
• British Politics
• Religious History Books
• Mental Health
• Neuroscience
• Child Psychology
• Film & Cinema
• Opera & Classical Music
• Behavioural Economics
• Development Economics
• Economic History
• Financial Crisis
• World Economies
• Investing Books
• Artificial Intelligence/AI Books
• Data Science Books
• Sex & Sexuality
• Death & Dying
• Food & Cooking
• Sports, Games & Hobbies
• FICTION BOOKS
• BEST NOVELS 2024
• BEST FICTION 2023
• New Literary Fiction
• World Literature
• Literary Criticism
• Literary Figures
• Classic English Literature
• American Literature
• Comics & Graphic Novels
• Fairy Tales & Mythology
• Historical Fiction
• Crime Novels
• Science Fiction
• Short Stories
• South Africa
• United States
• Arctic & Antarctica
• Afghanistan
• Myanmar (Formerly Burma)
• Netherlands
• Kids Recommend Books for Kids
• High School Teachers Recommendations
• Prizewinning Kids' Books
• Popular Series Books for Kids
• BEST BOOKS FOR KIDS (ALL AGES)
• Books for Toddlers and Babies
• Books for Preschoolers
• Books for Kids Age 6-8
• Books for Kids Age 9-12
• Books for Teens and Young Adults
• THE BEST SCIENCE BOOKS FOR KIDS
• BEST KIDS' BOOKS OF 2024
• BEST BOOKS FOR TEENS OF 2024
• Best Audiobooks for Kids
• Environment
• Best Books for Teens of 2024
• Best Kids' Books of 2024
• Mystery & Crime
• Travel Writing
• New History Books
• New Historical Fiction
• New Biography
• New Memoirs
• New World Literature
• New Economics Books
• New Climate Books
• New Math Books
• New Philosophy Books
• New Psychology Books
• New Physics Books
• THE BEST AUDIOBOOKS
• Actors Read Great Books
• Books Narrated by Their Authors
• Best Audiobook Thrillers
• Best History Audiobooks
• Nobel Literature Prize
• Booker Prize (fiction)
• Baillie Gifford Prize (nonfiction)
• Financial Times (nonfiction)
• Wolfson Prize (history)
• Royal Society (science)
• Pushkin House Prize (Russia)
• Walter Scott Prize (historical fiction)
• Arthur C Clarke Prize (sci fi)
• The Hugos (sci fi & fantasy)
• Audie Awards (audiobooks)

Make Your Own List

Nonfiction Books » Language » Linguistics

The best books on language and thought, recommended by daniel l. everett.

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel L. Everett

The linguist argues that all language has a basis in culture and explains how Chomsky is like Freud: crucial, but crucially wrong. He chooses five of the best books on linguistics.

Interview by Nigel Warburton

Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech by Edward Sapir

Language In Relation To A Unified Theory Of The Structure Of Human Behaviour by Kenneth Pike

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax by Noam Chomsky

On Understanding Grammar by Talmy Givón

Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing & Discursive Commitment by Robert Brandom

1 Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech by Edward Sapir

2 language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behaviour by kenneth pike, 3 aspects of the theory of syntax by noam chomsky, 4 on understanding grammar by talmy givón, 5 making it explicit: reasoning, representing & discursive commitment by robert brandom.

H ow did you get interested in studying language and its relation to thought?

The way you describe it makes it sound very straightforward but I’ve read your book,  Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes , and being chased by an anaconda can’t be a straightforward thing! 

There was a lot of adventure and there was tremendous trauma in coming to the realisation that I was no longer a believer and what would that mean to my family, and my income. I was commissioned as a missionary and generally they don’t want to support people that don’t believe in God. At the same time, I was living for about eight years with the Pirahã people, hunting in the jungle, fishing, helping people make fields. I had many encounters with snakes and spiders and anacondas and jaguars and all sorts of things.

But the upshot of all of that was that I was fascinated with how this people had constructed a way of life over time and spoke a language unrelated to any other known human language that was alive — is alive. For a number of years I was able to just do my linguistics because it was considered part of Bible translation and I even started and translated the Gospel of Mark. But I realised that the relationship of trust I had built up with the people didn’t allow me to knowingly tell them things I didn’t believe as though I did believe them. I had this crisis of conscience and eventually left the mission. I’m very happy that I have had the experience in the Amazon that has affected my thought about the relationship between language and culture and the mind so profoundly.

Not least, presumably, because the Pirahã had such an unusual language. As I understand it, they don’t have numbers do they?

No, they don’t have any numbers. All the claims that I’ve made about the Pirahã have been subsequently tested. So, I made the claim they don’t have numbers and they don’t even have the number one; that’s now been tested by three separate teams in publications in Cognition , Cognitive Science , and Science . I claimed that their language didn’t have recursion — that’s been very controversial.

Recursion is this crucial proponent of grammar proposed by Chomsky as what distinguishes the human communication system from all other communication systems. But we actually have a new paper — several MIT brain and cognitive sciences faculty and students and me — in which they’ve spent the last three years rigorously going through the data testing my claims and are prepared now to come out and, in effect, say that I seem to be correct.

They agree with me that the language of the Pirahã not only lacks recursion but is what was considered to be an impossible human language: a finite language. Chomsky made his claim long before talk of recursion in saying that human languages were not finite. So, here we have an example of what looks to be a finite human language.

They also have a very strange sense of the past tense, don’t they?

Yes, they don’t talk about the past. They don’t have past tense; they don’t have any tenses. But, that doesn’t mean they can’t think yesterday I was doing this and tomorrow I’ll be doing this , it’s just they don’t talk about those things. There are certain things we don’t talk about in mixed company or in certain situations – we all have social constraints – but there’s a general cultural constraint in Pirahã that you don’t talk about the distant past or the distant future and you also don’t generalise more than is necessary.

Get the weekly Five Books newsletter

So that gets right into our first book in a way because Sapir was famous for the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis about the relationship between language and thought.

Yes. Sapir’s 1921 book Language is still to me the most important pioneering book ever written on linguistics and I’m probably unique in holding that perspective. Everybody knows it’s important but I just think it’s massively important. In it Sapir talks about bi-directional influences between culture and language and thought. A lot of people only give him credit for the idea that the language we speak can affect the way we think, which then became known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Whorf actually learnt this from Sapir.

But Sapir didn’t stop with that, he said that just as language can influence thought, culture can influence language. He argued that language clearly has some computational aspects that cannot be reduced to culture but there are a number of broad characteristics we find in individual languages that reflect the culture that they emerge from. I find that to be extremely pioneering – extremely prescient – and just incredibly innovative.

I can’t think of anyone in the history of the study of language that has been more innovative in thought about language than Edward Sapir. He died in 1939 at the age of fifty-four, right at the beginning of World War Two. I think that’s one reason he had less influence. He hadn’t been at Yale that long and was replaced shortly thereafter by his arch rival in the field: Leonard Bloomfield. Bloomfield took his position at Yale, got a number of students, and had much more influence in the next decade or so, especially after the war when people were coming back and Sapir was a distant memory and Bloomfield was the active scholar, the leader of American linguistics.

A lot of people, myself included, have this kind of caricature of Sapir’s approach to language as if you don’t have the word for it you can’t think about it . Is that wrong? That’s not the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis at all?

That is one possible interpretation. You can take the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and it has two manifestations: one is linguistic determinism and one is linguistic relativity. Linguistic determinism is the idea that the language we speak determines the way we can think. Linguistic relativity is a much weaker hypothesis and suggests that the language we speak affects in some way some of the ways we think when we need to think quickly. And this is confirmed in experiments.

Actually, my son has a new book out on linguistic relativity and he shows in a number of experiments that people have to make decisions and think very quickly online and that their language shows greater effects on the way people think than if you give them more time to think about the problem. This suggests that language is a tool for thought but it isn’t thought.

Support Five Books

Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount .

So we definitely think without language and I think that has to be true because otherwise we have no explanation of animals. The more we equate thinking with language, the less able we are to cater for the thought that my dog clearly has when she comes to me to go for a walk or understands the dozen or so words that I speak to her that I know she understands. 

Also, pre-linguistic children presumably have thoughts?

Yes. So you have other species that clearly have thoughts; they have beliefs, they have intentions, and you have pre-linguistic children that clearly have thoughts and intentions. Language is a great facilitator of thought but it also affects it. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been caricatured for so long so that the philosopher Donald Davidson wrote an important article called ‘ On the very idea of a conceptual scheme ‘ in which he argued that it really doesn’t make any sense to say that there are people who think so differently than us that they can’t understand us because, if that were the case, we wouldn’t know if they were thinking or speaking because we’d have no basis of comparison.

Let’s go on to the second book. This is by Pike; it’s Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behaviour – bit of a mouthful as a title! 

The book is incredibly large and the most common use to which I’ve seen it put is as a doorstop and paperweight. Kenneth Pike was my first professor in linguistics and he taught me how to do the monolingual field demonstrations that I do in different places.

I’m not saying it’s the best written book. I don’t like it because every word is a jewel and couldn’t possibly be removed—it could be removed by thirty percent and would pretty much say the same thing.

But what Pike does is offer an integrated theory—I prefer to think of it as suggestive ideas rather than a theory—about how our understanding of language could serve as a basis for the understanding of culture. So, language is designed or language has features – Pike was a theist so he did believe language was designed and many parts of language in his theory have triune effects, I think that the trinity affects his thought in there.

If you take “John sees Bill”: John is the subject as an actor so he has a slot; he has a semantic role: actor; the slot has subject, and he has a category: he’s a noun-phrase. “Sees” is the same thing: it’s a verb-phrase as a predicate in the predicate position, and then you have the object which is also a noun-phrase which is an undergoer. This is his basic theory of language – these are fundamental components – but he says let’s look at culture and see that if I’m an interviewee, I’m playing a certain role. I have other roles that I play and I have a certain category that I belong to, however we choose to do this. Pike said that this idea that language has slots and fillers that can then be arranged in a matrix and looked at statically or dynamically works for culture too.

I don’t think he worked it out really well. In fact that’s largely the basis of my new book. I use Pike’s theory – the key idea that Pike had was emicization. I’ll give you the etymology: phonetics is the study of physical properties of sounds; phonemics is the study of the sounds that are meaningful to the speakers. Pike took the ends off those words – etic and emic – and this has become incredibly influential in anthropology though much less so in linguistics, ironically.  The basic idea is ‘etic’ is the perspective of the outsider: I go and I can say ok, here are the sounds that I hear in the language – I’m a phonetician – I don’t know what these mean to the speaker until I do some analysis . Once I’ve done the analysis, I’ve got the perspective of the insider and now I’m doing phonemics. So etics is the outsider, emics is the insider, and emicization is the process of going from alien to insider. 

So, participant observation in a sense?

Yes, participant observation but more than that because I become part of it; my judgements become native judgements. So think of a child – that’s the ultimate participant observer – the child is born an alien and within a period of time not only learns language but learns culture, learns values. This entire concept of culture as a process of turning people into insiders, making them part of a group, and how this works with language and culture to me is probably the most important idea of language, as Pike wrote.

Which is our next choice, actually, so we might as well seamlessly segue in there.

Chomsky started his bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania with Zellig Harris who was one of the leading structural linguists of the time – still unsurpassed in many ways. Chomsky is unusual among linguists in that he had the same advisor for BA, Master’s, and PhD.

That sounds like a bad idea, pedagogically. 

One could say so. There are interesting historical reasons for this, but Chomsky started with Zellig when he was nineteen and finished his PhD when he was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. In 1965, after Chomsky had already been well-established, he published two completely different landmark books. American Power and the New Mandarins is a deeply well-thought-out and insightful criticism of US foreign policy in Vietnam and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax is by any measurement an absolutely beautiful, astounding work of genius. It has made Chomsky, in most people’s minds – not in mine but in most – the most important linguist of probably all time.

If it’s not Chomsky , who is the most important linguist?

I would say Sapir.

That’s interesting. With Aspects of the Theory of Syntax , obviously a hugely influential book, what’s the essence of the book?

The essence of the book has these brilliant ideas of deep structure. Every sentence in every language starts off at one level in which the literal meaning is represented, and then gets transformed by operations at that basic phrase-structure. When a phrase like “John saw Bill” is derived for a particular purpose you might get “Bill was seen by John”, so you’ve gone from an active to a passive. In the early days, the passive was derived from the active in a sense. This deep structure idea was hugely influential – Chomsky doesn’t believe in it any more but it was hugely influential at the time. The concept of transformation looked like it worked; it looked like not only did it work but it had psychological implications. One hypothesis that emerged from this that was heavily tested in psychology was: the longer the derivation takes to get from deep structure to surface structure, the more difficult it should be for a native speaker to process the sentence.

Would that be like switching tenses or complicated hypotheticals?

If you go back to the simple active-passive pair, the passive ought to be more difficult for people to understand – “Bill was seen by John” – than the active – “John saw Bill” – because the passive requires an additional transformation that is not required by the active. A lot of the earlier results seemed to support this so it was incredibly exciting. Psychologists got involved and Chomsky laid out – prior to this book but he referenced it in this book – what is now known as the ‘Chomsky hierarchy of grammars’ showing where languages fall along a scale from finite-state to context-sensitive without countenancing the possibility that a language could be finite. Well, actually, that’s the result that we’re getting in the new paper: we have found human languages that are finite.

Just to get clear what a finite would be, this is something at the level of the deep structure is it? Something that is, as it were, a proto-language?

Well, no. What it means is that there’s an upper-bound; you can say this language does have a longest sentence. In English, there is no longest sentence. Any sentence you can think of, you can make larger by preceding it with something like “Mary said…”

A finite language is one that has very clear limits as to what can be said. You can’t keep generating new sentences ad infinitum ? 

That’s right. I mean, you can make new sentences but you can’t make a given sentence longer than a certain limit. That’s highly unusual, and that was exactly what Chomsky said no language can be. That was a fascinating result because nobody had ever thought of languages in these mathematical terms. Nobody had ever thought about language as a computational system and a grammar as the underlying computational system of thought. This work was incredibly rich. My view of it, in retrospect, is that in the intervening fifty years – we’re now fifty years from the publication of that book – it doesn’t seem to have panned out. One cannot criticise it for that. To me, in some ways, this book is like Freud’s first book on the unconscious. I don’t buy the ego, the id, and the superego any more, and I don’t buy the Oedipus complex, but I think that Freud was the most marvellous writer on the unconscious that ever lived. That fact that he was wrong is almost irrelevant because he got people thinking about things they never thought about before. To me, Chomsky is the same; I think he’s wrong on a lot of this stuff but nobody thought about language in this way before he came along.

The most usual way of describing the Chomskyan approach is to talk about it in terms of universal aspects of grammar which is somehow innate in all human beings that give us a propensity to learn a certain kind of structural form of language.

Yes. Interestingly enough, it didn’t come out in the earlier writings. It came out later and around the time of the publication of Aspects , Chomsky was talking about it much more – this idea that language is acquired so quickly and is so similar across the world’s languages that it must come from a common genetic core: the ‘universal grammar’. I don’t think that’s panned out either; I think there are a lot of arguments against. Still, it’s a beautiful, plausible idea and it’s a wonderful hypothesis. So like Freud’s unconscious, Chomsky’s universal grammar was an important idea in the history of thought. The fact that it’s wrong – that’s just the way things turn out sometimes.

He doesn’t think it’s all wrong now though, presumably?

No, he doesn’t at all. He defines it in different ways according to the kinds of criticism that come. I have a number of articles in which I have ongoing discussions about this stuff. Sometimes I am cast as this person that hates Chomsky because I am disagreeing with him so strongly and my answer to that is that this debate is only possible because he laid out the terms on which we can have this debate. I have learnt tremendously about Pirahã because I’ve had to think about it in Chomskyan terms. I think Sapir is more important because his ideas are less startling and headline-grabbing – although Sapir-Whorf is pretty exciting – they are basically just right. They seem to be working out really well. On the one hand, you have these great ideas that are extremely well-expressed that didn’t turn out and on the other, you have other great ideas that are well-expressed that did turn out. That’s why I choose Sapir. I actually think Pike is much greater than people give him credit for and I think he’s criticised and not given enough credit because a) he was a strong Christian and b) he didn’t write very well. Those counted against him but the people who’ve worked with him and who knew him understood that his knowledge of language was astounding and his ideas, once you get through the verbiage, are actually pretty good. That’s another reason that the book is so important to me.

Were you ever taught by Chomsky?

Yes, I spent a year as a visiting scholar at MIT and sat in on Chomsky’s classes. My office was next to his and he and I met several times during the course of the year. He wrote a letter of recommendation for my first job and he wrote a letter of recommendation for my tenure-case at the University of Pittsburgh. So, he was very supportive of me and I used to get all of his papers, in the days before the internet, when it was quite a coup to be getting Chomsky’s unpublished manuscripts for comments. Even though I lived in Brazil, I would go to the post office once in a while and there would be a big manila envelope from MIT with Chomsky’s most recent stuff in it.

Out in the Amazon?!

Let’s go on to the fourth book: Givón’s On Understanding Grammar . Again, we’re talking about syntax and grammar. Is this a technical book?

This is a fairly technical book. So, Tom Givon—also known as Talmy Givón—had training as a biologist and did his Master’s in biology, but then he went on to do a PhD at UCLA and was hired as a faculty member at UCLA.

Chomsky’s most controversial claim is that form is distinct from meaning; the form of a grammar is independent of what it means. Givon said this doesn’t make any sense – we can never understand grammar unless we take meaning to be the core. He was following in the footsteps of several others, as all of us are, but he still came up with this original proposal that the forms of language are driven by the functions they have to perform. So, you get into this form/function controversy that exists across so many disciplines.

So it’s like the style/content argument is it? The idea that you can’t separate style from what’s being said?

Exactly. It’s more of an architecture: is the building form totally independent of the function the building has to perform? Basically, these ideas come into language and Givon was the first one to write a book-length treatment that was considered to be a serious challenge to the ruling theory of the day which was Chomskyan theory. And that book, On Understanding Grammar , affected my thought and profoundly affected the thought of many others. By the way I know all of these people quite well except Sapir, and Givon is also a top old-time fiddle player and he and I have played a lot of music together.

Oh brilliant! You play the guitar don’t you?

Yes, I play the guitar. So, Givon launched an entire research programme and became, in my opinion, the most important voice in the research programme known as functional linguistics which was diametrically opposed to formal linguistics which was Chomsky’s theory. It’s not that there is no formalisation of functional linguistics, it’s just that formal linguistics means I take form to be the basis – that’s what I’m trying to explain; it’s a form of structuralism. Chomskyans, of course, get upset when I say this but they’re a continuation of structuralism. Getting back to semantics and meaning as the basis of form was what Givon was advocating.

Does that mean that every syntactical aspect of a language has meaning?

Yes. Everything has meaning in one sense or another. Givon does a pretty good job of explaining why the preposition ‘beyond’ has two syllables and the preposition ‘to’ has one syllable. He explains this in terms of their role and how frequently they’re used and how much information they have. One idea is that the more information something has the longer the word is. Obviously, you can think of exceptions in English; it has so many different words from so many different languages that you have to think about the original language and not English per se .

Well ‘ floccinaucinihilipilification ’ is a bit redundant in terms of the syllables for the meaning conveyed…

(Laughs) Exactly! But why do we elongate things? Actually, George Zipf argued that the things that are used more frequently are shorter than things which are used less frequently because it takes too much time and too much effort if we’re always saying prepositions like ‘to’ to have it somehow be polysyllabic. In fact, when we hear people talk, it disappears. I don’t say always in American English “I want to go”, I say “I wanna go” and this preposition has been reduced to a vowel.

So it’s a somewhat utilitarian account of language – I mean the utility of brevity. 

Let’s take the last book: Bob Brandom’s Making it Explicit .

Like Pike’s book, it’s enormous. It’s a very large, 750 page, incredibly detailed presentation of what he calls ‘inferentialist semantics’. Unlike Pike’s book, the words all seem to be necessary; it doesn’t seem that you can cut this book down much. I’ve read some of the reviews that said you could have cut it in half, but that’s like when the emperor of Austria told Mozart that his piece had too many notes and Mozart said “which ones should I take out?” I’m not comparing Brandom to Mozart but it’s a really important book. Basically, the idea is we don’t know a concept unless we know how to use it. Stop and think about the implications of that. There’s another book on concepts by Sue Carey in which she doesn’t dispute that knowing how to use a concept is important but argues it’s native and that concepts are inborn. Brandom makes it difficult to think of concepts as inborn because if you don’t have a concept unless you know how to use it, then you can’t be born knowing how to use it; you’ve got to learn how to use it, in inferences. That’s wherer the ‘inferentialist’ in ‘inferentialist semantics’ come from.

Do the inferences come from culture? There’s a pattern of inferences you’re expected to make?

He doesn’t refer to culture but it fits very nicely with my view of the fact that inferences do come from culture. You would need to know the culture to understand the concepts and to understand how to speak and how to understand these things. That’s my own extrapolation from what he said but what he does is to show that, within the linguistic context alone, you have to know how to use something. There’s no representation that shows that this means x and I just put it in a spot in a sentence. He says sentences are constructed and inferences are the crucial part of the construction. In my view, sentences are the result of dialogue and negotiation. If I ask you did your parents arrive yet? and you answer there were fish in the river , it’s not clear how those two are related but I will damn-well make an effort to figure out how that could possibly answer my question. I understand then that that obviously enters into other philosophical traditions as well. Brandom’s book lays out the importance of inferences and use and – for me – culture for understanding concepts. There’s been this long distinction in philosophy between knowing-how and knowing-that; I know how to ride a bike and I know that it is Tuesday. But if Brandom’s right, that distinction is done away with because I can’t know that unless I know how to use that word.

So ‘Tuesday’ is a word – a tool like any other word. Is that a Wittgensteinian influence?

Yes. Very heavily influenced by Wittgenstein and Wilfrid Sellars – there’s a long tradition of this. Wittgenstein’s work is so useful to my view of language as use and language in culture, and Brandom is a further articulation. The other thing that I love about Brandom’s book is that it fits in the pragmatist tradition – the American pragmatist tradition going back, according to some, to the American Indians but certainly starting with William James and Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey. Brandom’s thesis advisor was Richard Rorty who was another leading pragmatist. To me, today, in philosophy Brandom was probably the leading American pragmatist. It’s not the same as James’s pragmatism but is language as use and language as function. It fits very well with the tradition and I think that it probably, of all the books I’ve listed, it’s one of the most important books of the last twenty or thirty years on language. In my personal thought, it’s been one of the most influential and important books.

So, here we have a picture going from the first book to the last book, beginning with somebody who looked at the importance of the connection between language and culture but at the same time took both of them seriously as separate entities that overlapped and interacted. To me it wasn’t one supervening on the other but a symbiotic relation; they help form each other. Then you move to Pike who tried to develop this model further, he was influenced by Sapir; you move to Chomsky who presented a totally different perspective and got people thinking in a different way. Givon’s book was a reaction to that. He said sure we do need form, but we need to get it back to meaning. Brandom’s was, for me, the ultimate statement of how meaning arrives in grammar – ultimate is probably too strong, but it’s one of the most important statements that has been made on that since Wittgenstein. 

January 27, 2015

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Daniel L. Everett

Daniel L. Everett he has been the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University since 2010. He lived in the Amazonian jungle for nearly eight out of the last thirty years, studying more than a dozen little or never previously studied Amazonian languages. He has published more than 100 scientific articles and eleven books. His new book, Dark Matter of the Mind: How Unseen Forces Shape our Words and World , is published this year by the University of Chicago Press.

Daniel L. Everett's Profile at Bentley University

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.

© Five Books 2024

BOOK REVIEW article

Book review: data collection research methods in applied linguistics.

• School of Foreign Languages, Northeast Normal University, Jilin, China

A Book Review on Data Collection Research Methods in Applied Linguistics

Heath Rose, Jim McKinley, and Jessica Briggs Baffoe-Djan (London: Bloomsbury Academic), 2020, 296 pages, ISBN: 978-1-3500-2583-7

Choosing the appropriate data collection methods is the key to obtaining reliable and valid research data. Data Collection Research Methods in Applied Linguistics highlights the importance of data collection, presents a variety of approaches for obtaining data and provides practical guidance for applied linguistics researchers with ample examples from published articles and books.

This book contains 12 chapters. Chapter 1 briefly introduces various research designs, including experiments, surveys, and case studies in applied linguistics. Chapters 2 to 9, which form the main body of the book, describe direct and indirect data collection methods. Chapters 2 to 5 analyze direct ways of acquiring data on participants, including language elicitation tasks (Chapter 2), introspective and retrospective tasks (Chapter 3), tests (Chapter 4), and observations (Chapter 5). Chapters 6 to 9 consider indirect ways of collecting data on participants through self-reporting, including interviews (Chapter 6), diaries, journals, and logs (Chapter 7), questionnaires (Chapter 8), and focus groups (Chapter 9). Chapters 10 and 11 outline direct and indirect techniques for obtaining spoken and written discourses to construct and use corpora, such as the British National Corpus. Finally, Chapter 12 discusses how to improve data validity and reliability by using triangulation and how to ensure research transparency, which allows future researchers to replicate studies.

This book makes itself distinctive from other research methodology books in terms of its explicit focus on data collection, unique categorization of data collection methods, and structural components promoting reader interactions. First, this book primarily presents data collection methods without associating them with particular research designs. This explicit focus on data collection creates more space to feature a variety of approaches, including widely used methods, such as questionnaires, and less commonly used methods, such as logs and focus groups. Thus, this book can encourage researchers to flexibly and creatively integrate various data collection methods within a research design.

Second, this book categorizes data collection methods based on whether the data are obtained from participants directly, such as through role playing and storytelling, or indirectly, such as through written interviews. Compared with other research methodology books, such as those that classify data collection methods according to whether the data are primary or secondary (e.g., Kothari, 2004 ) or quantitative or qualitative (e.g., Dörnyei, 2007 ), this new classification approach aims to “provide guidance in this area by squarely focusing on the things researchers do to obtain data in their research projects” ( Rose et al., 2020 , p. vii).

Third, this book's structural arrangement includes reflective activities and instructive examples to foster reader interactions. Each chapter starts with pre-reading activities, which involve thinking, discussing, and imagining, and ends with post-reading activities, which involve reflecting, expanding, and applying, in order to provoke contemplation and further discussion. Each chapter also explains key concepts and provides specific ways to improve data reliability and validity. For example, Chapter 8 introduces many strategies to reduce bias when constructing questionnaire, such as writing concise items, using simple language, avoiding negative and multiple choice questions, and considering the order effect and the response rate. To provide readers with practical guidance, data collection methods are analyzed using instructive examples from published studies, which involve not only quantitative and qualitative designs but also mixed-method designs. For instance, Chapter 9 contains six examples of studies that employed focus groups as a data collection method in different research designs, including quasi-experimental and mixed-method research.

Meanwhile, some aspects of this book could benefit from further development in future editions. For instance, Chapter 5 introduces many observation instruments, such as the Motivation Orientation of Language Teaching ( Guilloteaux and Dörnyei, 2008 ); however, the brief explanations may make it difficult for novice researcher to apply these instruments effectively. Novice researchers would benefit from the inclusion of complete observation sheets and more detailed depictions of what to observe and how to record observations.

In summary, novice researchers and postgraduate students will find this book as an essential reference as they embark on their research journeys in applied linguistics. By introducing a variety of data collection methods, this book can inspire researchers and students to creatively adopt different approaches to obtain data when conducting research, such as using questionnaires and observations in a case study.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

This paper was supported by the Project of Discipline Innovation and Advancement (PODIA) - Foreign Language Education Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University (Grant number: 2020SYLZDXM011) and the Project of the Tertiary Education Reform at Northeast Normal University titled Empowering the English Micro-teaching Class via PBLI (Grant No. 421-131003198).

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Dörnyei, Z. (2007). Research Methods in Applied Linguistics: Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Methodologies . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Guilloteaux, M. J., and Dörnyei, Z. (2008). Motivating language learners: a classroom-oriented investigation of the effects of motivational strategies on student motivation. TESOL Q . 42, 55–77. doi: 10.2307/40264425

CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Kothari, C. R. (2004). Research Methodology: Methods and Techniques, 2nd Edn . New Delhi: New Age International.

Google Scholar

Rose, H., McKinley, J., and Baffoe-Djan, J. B. (2020). Data Collection Research Methods in Applied Linguistics . London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Keywords: data collection, applied linguistics, qualitative research method, quantitative research method, mixed-method approach

Citation: Zhang Y (2021) Book Review: Data Collection Research Methods in Applied Linguistics. Front. Psychol. 12:668712. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.668712

Received: 17 February 2021; Accepted: 01 March 2021; Published: 24 March 2021.

Edited and reviewed by: Xuesong Gao , University of New South Wales, Australia

Copyright © 2021 Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Yu Zhang, zhangy435@nenu.edu.cn

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

• Architecture and Design
• Asian and Pacific Studies
• Business and Economics
• Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Computer Sciences
• Cultural Studies
• Engineering
• General Interest
• Geosciences
• Industrial Chemistry
• Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies
• Jewish Studies
• Library and Information Science, Book Studies
• Life Sciences
• Linguistics and Semiotics
• Literary Studies
• Materials Sciences
• Mathematics
• Social Sciences
• Sports and Recreation
• Theology and Religion
• Publish your article
• The role of authors
• Promoting your article
• Abstracting & indexing
• Publishing Ethics
• Why publish with De Gruyter
• How to publish with De Gruyter
• Our book series
• Our subject areas
• Your digital product at De Gruyter
• Contribute to our reference works
• Product information
• Tools & resources
• Product Information
• Promotional Materials
• Orders and Inquiries
• FAQ for Library Suppliers and Book Sellers
• Repository Policy
• Free access policy
• Open Access agreements
• Database portals
• For Authors
• Customer service
• People + Culture
• Journal Management
• How to join us
• Working at De Gruyter
• Mission & Vision
• De Gruyter Foundation
• De Gruyter Ebound
• Our Responsibility
• Partner publishers

Your purchase has been completed. Your documents are now available to view.

Stefania M. Maci, Michele Sala: Book Review on Corpus Linguistics and Translation Tools for Digital Humanities: Research Methods and Applications

Fulu Liang is a PhD candidate in Translation Studies at College of Foreign Languages, Nankai University. With a strong background in in-house translation spanning five years, he has gained extensive translation experience in industries such as metallurgy, automobiles, and wind power. His research interests are diverse, with a particular focus on the established field of technical translation and cutting-edge topics such as computational translation studies, digital translation studies, and language technology.

Reviewed Publication:

Book Review on Corpus Linguistics and Translation Tools for Digital Humanities: Research Methods and Applications, by Stefania M. Maci Michele Sala Bloomsbury, 2022, xiv+249 pp.

1 General introduction

As digital humanities (DH) gradually moves from the niche to the mainstream, its impact has been felt by an increasing number of disciplines in the humanities – including corpus linguistics and corpus-based translation studies. Although both DH and corpus linguistics or corpus-based translation studies involve the use of computers, they have developed independently of each other with little interaction until after 2010. The second decade of the 21st century witnessed the boom of disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, blockchain, and virtual reality, resulting in heightened awareness of applying computer technologies to humanities research (e.g., Zheng et al., 2022 ). This transformation offered an impetus to DH, which then flourished worldwide. Many disciplines hastened to embrace it with a view to borrowing computational methods from DH to foster interdisciplinary activities, improve the digital literacy and data literacy of the humanities, or enhance computational thinking in the field. Arguably, DH will shed light on the latter two and be reinforced in return. However, there is little consensus on the best practices of DH-informed corpus linguistics and corpus-based translation studies that can help us clarify where we are, where to go, and how to go. Fortunately, Corpus Linguistics and Translation Tools for Digital Humanities: Research Methods and Applications , edited by Stefania M. Maci and Michele Sala, was published at an opportune time and will hopefully lay the foundation on which future research can be based.

2 Book introduction

This book brings together the three strands DH, corpus linguistics, and corpus-based translation studies. It mainly comprises case studies of various research topics from a variety of research fields. In 10 chapters, this book begins with an introductory chapter (Chapter 1), which is followed by Part 1 (Chapters 2–5), which focuses on corpus linguistics and DH, and Part 2 (Chapters 6–10), which focuses on corpus-based translation studies and DH.

In Chapter 1, the editors justify their reasons for choosing such a theme for the book by viewing corpus linguistics and DH as being in a part–whole relationship after a critical review of their differences and similarities. According to the editors, “DH is the overarching term for the macro-area of research which analyses texts” (p. 3), while corpus linguistics refers precisely to the ‘plethora of methods’ mentioned in DH, namely, “the set of principled approaches and tools” (p. 3). The editors then provide a brief introduction to Part 1 (the connection between DH and corpora) and Part 2 (the connection between corpora and translation studies). The rest of this chapter is devoted to briefing readers on the content of each chapter in order to enable them to better follow the thoughts of the authors.

Furthering the discussion, Chapter 2 by Paola Catenaccio discusses two main strands of DH – i.e., (i) the study of computer-mediated communication (CMS) in its various forms and (ii) the use of computer-based techniques for text analysis. It highlights that the traditional theories of CMS do not fully account for emergent technology-derived issues, such as multimodality and multisemiotics. Therefore, Catenaccio puts forward an “adaptive theory approach” to DH, which means that theory development in DH should be adaptive not only to capture the evolution of the object of analysis but also in the sense that it must rely on evidence emerging from corpus-driven (or data-driven) investigation.

In Chapter 3, Marina Bondi demonstrates the use of corpora in cross-cultural genre studies with a case study of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports. The author first lays the foundation for further discussion by necessitating the integration of lexical categories with semantic and functional, pragmatic perspectives and the employment of corpus linguistics. After a critical review of the cross-cultural analysis of CSR reports aiming to elicit the research question and determine the type of corpora (in this case, full corpus and comparable subcorpora) to be adopted, Bondi reports on the language, size, representativeness, source, and comparability of the corpus. For the detailed analysis, a top-down lexico-grammatical analysis of the generic structure of CSR reports is adopted, followed by a bottom-up semantic and pragmatic analysis using keywords and concordance.

In Chapter 4, Miguel Fuster-Márquez discusses the application of corpus to the extraction and operationalization of lexical bundles (LBs), which broke grounds with the compilation of Biber et al.’s Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (1999). Fuster-Márquez distinguishes between the phraseological approach and the probabilistic approach in studies on LBs and then focuses on the latter. He highlights that the probabilistic approach is an inductive bottom-up approach to the identification of LBs, which relies entirely on corpus techniques. Further, the core features for the identification of LBs are reported. Fuster-Márquez ends the chapter with a discussion of bundle size, frequency threshold, and dispersion, which are shared criteria for the two main operational approaches to LB identification: frequency-defined bundles and association-defined bundles.

Furthermore, Chapter 5 by Stefania M. Maci investigates the dissemination of the ketogenic diet (KD) discourse on Twitter. After reviewing related literature on the KD, Maci provides a detailed description of the methodology. The data generated during a designated period of time were collected by searching for keywords and hashtags using Social Bearing, a free Twitter analytics application. Then, quantitative-based analysis was performed on the data with Sketch Engine to identify typical linguistic characteristics. To triangulate the data, another quantitative-based analysis was performed on the data with WMatrix 4 to determine the semantic domains. The research findings exhibit Twitter users’ understanding of and attitudes towards KD, shedding light on the dissemination of e-health discourse on digital platforms.

Moving on to corpus linguistics and translation studies, Chapter 6 by Patrizia Anesa examines the use of digital corpora for professional legal translation from the perspective of DH. To begin with, Anesa extends DH from academics to the professional setting of legal translation by situating the area of practice between legilinguistics, translation studies, and corpus linguistics within the overarching concept of DH. She then overviews some existing legal corpora employed in legilinguistics and legal translation and offers a glimpse into the evolving relationship between corpora and specialized legal translation. At the conclusion of this chapter, she discusses in detail the use of corpus in translation tools and processes, translation practice, and translator training.

In Chapter 7, Cinzia Spinzi and Anouska Zummo present a comparative study of emotive language in English and Italian migrant narratives to assess the intention and effect of linguistic choices. To be specific, they adopted the Appraisal Theory and focus on its Affect dimension, which comprises five semantic domains for emotions: un/happiness, in/security, dis/satisfaction, surprise, and dis/inclination. After acknowledging the contributions of DH to the availability of data and software, among others, Spinzi and Zummo report on the data collection from digital museums and the design of the corpus. The interrogation of the corpus was conducted with AntConc (version 3.5.9), focusing on the polarity and strategy of emotive language. The conclusion was drawn by comparing and interpreting the results from the English subcorpus and the Italian subcorpus.

Then, Chapter 8 by Francesca Bianchi et al. introduces us to the set of terminology management affordances with built-in learning analytics for interpreter training. Bianchi et al. first identify the needs of a glossary tool linked to monitoring and self-monitoring tools (for teachers and students, respectively) and possibly supported by learning analytics technologies. Then, they provide an overview of the existing tools supporting terminology management. According to Bianchi et al., the affordances tailored to their needs comprise a glossary tool, web search tracking and logging functions, and a learning analytics system. Bianchi et al. then demonstrated the performance of the affordances in interpreter training at the University of Salento. They end the chapter with insights into the possible uses of the affordances in the future.

Chapter 9 by Gianmarco Vignozzi applies corpus linguistics to the analysis of the construction and translation of characters in the four English original films of Little Women and their Italian dubbed versions. Vignozzi paves the way for further exploration by reflecting on the efficacy of corpus linguistics in assessing the translation of multimedia texts. Following an overview of the big-screen adaptations of Little Women , he proceeds to detail the development of the corpus using Sketch Engine. Further, the analysis of the March sisters’ speech was conducted in two stages, with a focus on the implicit textual cues identified by Culpeper’s characterization model. Initially, a quantitative character-based analysis was performed by extracting keywords whose results were then subjected to a qualitative analysis. Besides, the concordance lines were examined to evaluate the translation of the dialogues.

In the last chapter of this book, Alessandra Rizzo investigates the linguistic features of dialogues and subtitles of TV crime dramas and their translations. She begins the chapter by situating this study within DH. A parallel corpus made from three episodes of three different TV crime dramas set in different geographical locations was compiled for the analysis. She then undertook a two-level analysis of the linguistic features of orality: one centred on examining language choices drawing on the theoretical framework of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and the other on the translation strategies of linguistic features. Rizzo finally concludes with an interpretation of the outcomes and provides concluding remarks on the constraints and prospects of this study.

3 Critical evaluation

This book presents corpus linguistics and corpus-based translation studies as being within the purview of DH. It provides not only theoretical reflections on the burgeoning fields of research nested in DH, corpus linguistics, and translation studies with computers as pivotal components but also concrete case studies covering a wide range of research topics. Answering the call for the humanities to engage with digitalization, this seminal work touches the nerves of those seeking to operate in this interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary realm by paving the way for further discussion.

The biggest merit of the book is that it brings to the fore the nexus between corpus and DH and promises to consolidate the area. Although “corpus” and “corpora” are widely used in the literature on DH, it is surprising that corpus linguistics has been slow to embrace DH. A simple search with the keywords “digital humanities” in the SSCI & AHCI journals International Journal of Corpus Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory indexed in CNKI Scholar academic database returns no results. It was only in the third decade of the 21st century that the relevance of DH to corpus linguistics began to be recognized. As a matter of fact, The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics (2020) dedicates a new chapter to corpora and DH, while in the 2010 edition, no instance of “digital humanities” is found.

In fact, this trend is also true of corpus-based translation studies. Tanasescu (2021) astutely highlights that it was only as recently as 2018–2019 that DH-inflected research started to gain more and more ground (in Translation Studies). Her observation coincides with the situation in China. Hu (2018) wrote an introductory article titled “Progress and Prospects of Translation Studies from the Perspective of Digital Humanities”. In the same year, the Research Center for Digital Humanities led by Hongwu Qin, another distinguished scholar in corpus-based translation studies in China, was founded at Qufu Normal University. This edited volume resonates with the academic circle and will undoubtedly promote related research.

Another major merit is that it provides some case studies against which future research can be benchmarked. First, the wide-ranging case studies indicate what can be counted as DH. For example, Chapter 8 demonstrates the use of learning analytics in interpreter training, suggesting that the quantitative analysis of students’ learning data is also a relevant component of DH. As online learning is becoming one of the most significant trends in educational settings ( Mei et al., 2022 ), viewing learning analytics as being part of DH will shed light on the analysis of students’ online learning data. Second, it provides procedural guidelines for this line of research, which usually comprise corpus design, data collection, data processing, concordance, and the interpretation of results with relevant theories, among others. Further, issues encountered during these processes and their corresponding solutions will be of reference value. For example, in Chapter 9, a mixed method of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis is adopted to compensate for the limitations of each method. Third, it brings together many different areas of research such as legilinguistics, e-health, and films, allowing cross-referencing between these areas to adapt tools, methods, theories, and topics to their specific requirements. In summary, since the article by Jensen (2014) was published, other articles have touched upon the relationship between corpus linguistics and DH; however, books dedicated to this topic with specific case studies have been few and far between. From this perspective, this book is a pioneering scholarly work that promises to inspire the adoption of DH.

Despite the aforementioned merits, this book is not without certain flaws. First, the title is slightly confusing. It seems to suggest that translation tools are included, but in fact, by tools, it means corpus tools for translation studies rather than computer-aided translation tools. Second, the relevance of DH to each chapter should be articulated explicitly. While some chapters provide discussions on the significance of DH, there are several chapters whose connections with DH are not explicitly stated, resulting in a certain degree of disjointedness between respective chapters and the volume as a whole; this is especially true of Part 1. Third, the tools and methods used in this book are still very limited and mostly confined to traditional corpus linguistics, as opposed to kaleidoscopic data processing and analysis tools and methods in DH. In the future, importance should be placed on adapting advanced tools and methods from DH and computational linguistics, among others, to meet the needs of this interdisciplinary field of research. Fourth, the connection between case studies and DH needs to be deepened. To be specific, DH has evolved into a field of research with domain-specific discourse comprising research topics and terms, among others. Future research carried out with DH in mind should incorporate DH discourse for cross-fertilization. Nevertheless, this book combines the corpus linguistics approach and the DH approach with humanities research, making it a ground-breaking seminal work for scholars of humanities in the digital age.

About the author

Hu, K. (2018). 数字人文视域下翻译研究的进展与前景 [Progress and prospects of translation studies from the perspective of digital humanities]. Chinese Translators Journal , 39(6), 24–26. https://doi.org/10.21037/cco.2018.05.03 Search in Google Scholar

Jensen, K. E. (2014). Linguistics and the digital humanities: (Computational) corpus linguistics. Journal of Media and Communication Research , 30(57), 115–134. 10.7146/mediekultur.v30i57.15968 Search in Google Scholar

Mei, F., Lu, Y., & Ma, Q. (2022). Online language education courses: A Chinese case from an ecological perspective. Journal of China Computer-Assisted Language Learning , 2(2), 228–256. https://doi.org/10.1515/jccall-2022-0017 Search in Google Scholar

Tanasescu, R. (2021). Complexity and the place of translation in digital humanities: Post-disciplinary communities of practice in the translation studies network. In K. Marais, & R. Meylaerts (Eds), Exploring the implications of complexity thinking for translation studies (pp. 30–72). Routledge. 10.4324/9781003105114-3 Search in Google Scholar

Zheng, C., Yu, M., Guo, Z., Liu, H., Gao, M., & Chai, C. (2022). Review of the application of virtual reality in language education from 2010 to 2020. Journal of China Computer-Assisted Language Learning , 2(2), 299–335. https://doi.org/10.1515/jccall-2022-0014 Search in Google Scholar

© 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

• X / Twitter

Supplementary Materials

Please login or register with De Gruyter to order this product.

Journal and Issue

Articles in the same issue.

• DOI: 10.1016/J.JEAP.2013.05.001
• Corpus ID: 145732442

A genre-based investigation of applied linguistics book reviews in English and Brazilian Portuguese

• Luciana Junqueira
• Published 1 September 2013
• Linguistics
• Journal of English for Academic Purposes

26 Citations

Metadiscourse in book reviews in english and brazilian portuguese: a corpus-based analysis.

• Highly Influenced

A Comparative Study of Saudi and International Journals of Applied Linguistics: The Move–Bundle Connection Approach

In search of the generic identity of the book review:a chronological and pragmatic study, genres in the forefront, languages in the background: the scope of genre analysis in language-related scenarios, register, genre, and style, meta-discourse markers in the book reviews published in isi and non-isi journals of applied linguistics, self-mention and engagement mechanisms of (negative) evaluation in linguistics academic reviews: a diachronic insight, generic variation & private intention: a multi-dimensional exploration of book reviews and prefaces, exploring interaction in academic book reviews across different disciplines: a comparative study, written registers, genres, and styles, 20 references, a study of critical attitude across english and spanish academic book reviews, the textual organisation of research article introductions in applied linguistics: variability within a single discipline., genre analysis: english in academic and research settings, research article introductions in english for specific purposes: a comparison between brazilian portuguese and english, academic discourse in portugal: a whole different ballgame, identification impossible: a corpus approach to realisations of evaluative meaning in academic writing, “this seems somewhat counterintuitive, though…”: negative evaluation in linguistic book reviews by male and female authors, reporting and evaluation in english book review articles: a cross-disciplinary study, disciplinary discourses: social interactions in academic writing, structure-based interpretation of scholarly book reviews: a new research technique, related papers.

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers

The 9 Best Linguistics Books to Read Now

Are you interested in linguistics and looking for the best books to read on the subject? Look no further! This article has compiled a list of the top 9 linguistics books that are definitely worth reading. Whether you are a complete beginner or an advanced linguist, there is something here for everyone.

Understanding the World of Linguistics

Before diving into the list of books, you may be wondering – what exactly is linguistics? Simply put, linguistics is the scientific study of language. It examines the structure, use, and meaning of language across different cultures and contexts. By studying linguistics, we can gain valuable insight into the complexity of human language, how it evolves, and how it affects our communication and understanding of the world around us.

But linguistics is more than just studying words and grammar. It is a multifaceted field that draws from various disciplines, including psychology, anthropology, neuroscience , and computer science. This interdisciplinary approach allows linguists to explore the many facets of language, from its cognitive and social aspects to its biological and technological underpinnings.

What is Linguistics?

At its core, linguistics focuses on the components of language – syntax (the structure of language), semantics (the meaning of language), phonology (the sound system of language), and morphology (the formation of words). Through exploring these components, linguists can gain a better understanding of how language works and how it is acquired and used by individuals and groups.

For example, by studying syntax, linguists can investigate how different languages structure sentences and convey meaning. By studying semantics, they can explore how words and phrases are used to convey different meanings and how context affects interpretation. By studying phonology, they can analyze the sound patterns of language and how they vary across different languages and dialects. And by studying morphology, they can investigate how words are formed and how they change over time.

The Importance of Studying Linguistics

Linguistics is a crucial area of study that has numerous practical applications. For example, it can aid in the development of language learning systems, speech recognition software, and machine translation. Additionally, it can be used to understand and preserve endangered languages and to improve communication and understanding between different cultures.

But linguistics also has broader implications. By studying language, we can gain insights into the human mind and how we perceive and interact with the world. Language is a fundamental aspect of human experience, and understanding it can help us understand ourselves and others better. Studying linguistics can also enhance critical thinking skills, as it requires analyzing complex systems and drawing connections between them.

Overall, linguistics is a fascinating and important field that offers insights into the complexity of human language and its role in shaping our understanding of the world around us.

Top 5 Introductory Linguistics Books

Are you interested in learning more about the fascinating world of language? Look no further than these five great introductory books on linguistics:

“The Language Instinct” by Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker’s “ The Language Instinct ” is a classic book that explores the innate human ability to acquire and use language. Pinker argues that language is an instinctual behavior and that our brains are hardwired for it. He also discusses the relationship between language and thought and how our use of language shapes our perception of the world.

Did you know that there are over 7,000 languages spoken in the world today? Or that some languages, such as Pirahã, spoken in the Amazon rainforest, have no words for numbers or colors? “The Language Instinct” will take you on a journey through the fascinating world of language and leave you with a newfound appreciation for the power of words.

“How Language Works” by David Crystal

If you’re looking for an accessible and engaging overview of the structure and use of language, look no further than David Crystal’s “ How Language Works .” Crystal covers topics such as grammar, syntax, phonetics, and language change, with plenty of examples and illustrations to make these concepts clear and concrete.

Did you know that the English language has over 170,000 words in current use? Or that the word “set” has the most definitions of any word in the English language? “How Language Works” will take you on a journey through the intricacies of language and leave you with a deeper understanding of how we communicate.

“The Power of Babel” by John H. McWhorter

In “ The Power of Babel ,” linguist John H. McWhorter explores the evolution of language and its ability to adapt to new social and cultural contexts. He argues that language is constantly changing and that this change is necessary for the survival and growth of a culture. McWhorter also discusses the relationship between language and identity and how language can be a powerful tool for social and political change.

Did you know that the English language has borrowed words from over 350 other languages? Or that the word “OK” is one of the most widely recognized and used words in the world? “The Power of Babel” will take you on a journey through the history and diversity of language and leave you with a greater appreciation for the role it plays in our lives.

“The Kingdom of Speech” by Tom Wolfe

In “ The Kingdom of Speech ,” journalist Tom Wolfe delves into the origins of human language and the controversy surrounding its development. He argues that humans are the only species with a true language system and that this gave us an evolutionary advantage over other animals. Wolfe also critiques the theories of linguist Noam Chomsky, who posits that the human brain is prewired for language.

Did you know that some linguists believe that language may have evolved from the need to gossip and share information about others in our social group? Or that the Pirahã language, mentioned earlier, has no words for past or future tense? “The Kingdom of Speech” will take you on a thought-provoking journey through the history and science of language and leave you with a greater understanding of what makes us uniquely human.

“Mother Tongue” by Bill Bryson

In his signature humorous style, writer Bill Bryson takes readers on a journey through the history and quirks of the English language in “ Mother Tongue .” He explores the origins of English, how it spread throughout the world, and the challenges and changes it has undergone over the centuries. Bryson also discusses the idiosyncrasies of English grammar and spelling that have confounded learners for generations.

Did you know that English is the third most spoken language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish? Or that the English language has been influenced by many other languages, including Latin, French, and German? “Mother Tongue” will take you on a humorous and informative journey through the quirks and complexities of the English language.

So whether you’re a language lover or just looking to expand your knowledge, these five introductory linguistics books are sure to provide you with hours of fascinating reading!

Top 4 Advanced Linguistics Books

If you are looking to deepen your understanding of linguistics, here are a few more advanced books to check out:

“Syntactic Structures” by Noam Chomsky

In this groundbreaking book, linguist Noam Chomsky introduces the concept of generative grammar – the idea that language is not just a set of memorized rules but a system of underlying structures that generate an infinite number of sentences. Chomsky’s ideas revolutionized the field of linguistics and have had a significant impact on other fields such as psychology, philosophy, and computer science.

Chomsky argues that the human brain has an innate ability to understand and generate language, which he calls the “language acquisition device.” He suggests that this device is hard-wired into our brains and that we are born with the ability to learn any language. This theory has been the subject of much debate and research in the field of linguistics.

You can find this book here.

“Reflections on Language” by Stuart Chase

In “Reflections on Language,” linguist Stuart Chase offers a comprehensive survey of the entire field of linguistics. He explores topics such as phonetics, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, with an emphasis on the practical applications of these concepts. Chase also discusses the relationship between language and thought and the ways in which language shapes and is shaped by culture.

Chase’s book is notable for its accessible writing style and its ability to make complex linguistic concepts understandable to a wider audience. It is a great resource for anyone interested in linguistics, whether they are just starting out or have a more advanced understanding of the field.

“The Handbook of Linguistics” edited by Mark Aronoff and Janie Rees-Miller

This comprehensive textbook covers all aspects of linguistics, from the structure of individual sentences to the social and cultural factors that shape language use. The book features contributions from over 30 experts in the field, making it an excellent resource for advanced students and researchers.

The Handbook of Linguistics is particularly useful for those interested in the latest research and developments in the field. It covers topics such as neurolinguistics, language acquisition, and computational linguistics, and provides a thorough overview of the current state of the field.

“The Oxford Handbook of Applied Linguistics” edited by Robert B. Kaplan

As the title suggests, this book focuses on the practical applications of linguistics, such as language teaching, translation, and language policy. The contributors to this volume examine these topics from a wide range of perspectives, including psychology, sociology, and anthropology.

The Oxford Handbook of Applied Linguistics is an excellent resource for language teachers, translators, and policymakers who want to understand the latest research and developments in the field. It provides practical insights into how linguistic research can be applied in real-world contexts and offers suggestions for improving language education and policy.

“The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences” edited by Patrick Colm Hogan

This comprehensive reference work covers all areas of the language sciences, from the study of language acquisition in children to the development of artificial intelligence. It features contributions from over 400 experts in the field and is an excellent resource for researchers, educators, and students alike.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences is notable for its breadth and depth of coverage. It includes detailed entries on topics such as phonology, syntax, and semantics, as well as broader discussions of language and culture, language and the brain, and language and society. It is a must-have resource for anyone interested in the study of language.

Linguistics is a fascinating and complex field that touches on many aspects of human life. By reading these 9 books, you can gain a deeper understanding of the structure, use, and evolution of language, as well as the practical applications and implications of linguistics. Whether you are a beginner or an advanced student of linguistics, these books are sure to enrich your understanding of language and the world around us.

• Recent Posts
• The 11 Best Books About Cats You Should Read - January 16, 2024
• The 9 Best Books on Building Confidence - January 16, 2024
• Discover the 10 Best Books on the Brain - January 16, 2024

Related Posts:

Our systems are now restored following recent technical disruption, and we’re working hard to catch up on publishing. We apologise for the inconvenience caused. Find out more: https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/about-us/news-and-blogs/cambridge-university-press-publishing-update-following-technical-disruption

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings .

Login Alert

• < Back to search results
• Browse subjects

Language and Linguistics

Explore language and linguistics journals.

• Annual Review of Applied Linguistics
• Applied Psycholinguistics
• Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
• Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique
• Computational Humanities Research
• English Language & Linguistics
• English Today
• Journal of Child Language
• Journal of French Language Studies
• Journal of Germanic Linguistics
• Journal of Linguistic Geography
• Journal of Linguistics
• Journal of the International Phonetic Association
• Language and Cognition
• Language in Society
• Language Teaching
• Language Variation and Change
• Natural Language Engineering
• Nordic Journal of Linguistics
• Studies in Second Language Acquisition

Explore Language and Linguistics books

• African and Caribbean language and linguistics
• Applied linguistics
• Arabic and Middle Eastern language and linguistics
• Asian language and linguistics
• Cognitive linguistics
• Computational linguistics
• Discourse analysis
• English language and linguistics: general interest
• European language and linguistics
• Grammar and Syntax
• Historical linguistics
• History of the English language
• Latin American language and linguistics
• Other languages and linguistics
• Phonetics and phonology
• Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics
• Semantics and pragmatics
• Sign language
• Sociolinguistics

Explore specific linguistics disciplines

• Applied Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Theoretical Linguistics

Native-Speakerism and Trans-Speakerism

• Takaaki Hiratsuka

Heritage Languages

Cognitive Control along the Language Continuum

• Klara Marton

Language Assemblages

• Alastair Pennycook

Language Learning beyond English

• Ursula Lanvers

• Karen Stollznow

Compelling Communication

Emoji in Higher Education

• Omonpee W. Petcoff , Janice C. Palaganas , Marcel Danesi

Language and Linguistics series

Cambridge applied linguistics.

Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact

Cambridge Approaches to Linguistics

Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics

The Cambridge History of the English Language

Cambridge Introductions to Applied Linguistics

Cambridge Introductions to Language and Linguistics

Cambridge Introductions to the English Language

Linguistics publishing with cambridge university press.

Featured videos

Breadcrumbs Section. Click here to navigate to respective pages.

Systematic reviews in applied linguistics

DOI link for Systematic reviews in applied linguistics

Click here to navigate to parent product.

The essential ingredient of a systematic review of existing research on a particular topic is that it should be carried out with the aim of reducing as much as possible the potential bias inherent in other types of reviews; those often referred to as ‘narrative’ reviews of the literature. Examples of these narrative reviews can be found in the opening section of the vast majority of journal articles. The total elimination of bias is almost certainly impossible but a systematic review attempts to reduce bias by ensuring that it is carried out by a team of reviewers, that it is transparent in its procedures from beginning to end of the process and that the searching for relevant studies is not only exhaustive but reliable. A systematic review of relevant research aims to produce syntheses containing clear messages about the reliability of the evidence reviewed and these messages should be of benefit to practitioners. This chapter will enumerate the various challenges of carrying out a systematic review in the field of applied linguistics – challenges which are all the more noticeable when one considers the enormous breadth of the field making what to include and what to exclude one of the major considerations of the process.

• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Cookie Policy
• Taylor & Francis Online
• Taylor & Francis Group
• Students/Researchers
• Librarians/Institutions

Connect with us

Registered in England & Wales No. 3099067 5 Howick Place | London | SW1P 1WG © 2024 Informa UK Limited

With 50 days left, we need your help

The US presidential campaign is in its final weeks and we’re dedicated to helping you understand the stakes. In this election cycle, it’s more important than ever to provide context beyond the headlines, but in-depth reporting is costly. To continue this vital work, we have an ambitious goal to add 5,000 new members .

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

Sally Rooney’s new book is an exquisite return to form

In the deeply-felt Intermezzo, the celebrity novelist plays chess with God.

by Constance Grady

If you buy something from a Vox link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

Intermezzo , the first new book by Sally Rooney in three years, comes freighted with expectations. What will our first great millennial novelist do next? Will her new offering leave readers as emotionally wrecked as her previous works?

Rooney, who is Irish, writes elegant, emotionally rich novels, mostly about young people in Dublin struggling to navigate their endlessly fraught love lives under late capitalism. Her first two novels, Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), were both runaway successes. They were adapted into hit TV shows and launched the careers of their young stars . Professionally beautiful people kept getting photographed carrying the books around , with covers in strategically prominent places, like they were the hot new handbag of the season. With her last offering, 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? , her publishers took the accessorizing literally: Big-name influencers could score a Beautiful World bucket hat and a Beautiful World tote bag to wear with their Beautiful World book.

Rooney is that rarest of creatures, a unicorn of the 21st century, a celebrity author of literary fiction. Any new book by her faces a certain amount of unavoidable scrutiny: After all this time, does she still live up to the hype?

I’m happy to report that Intermezzo is exquisite. While the experimental and polarizing Beautiful World stayed largely out of the minds of its characters, with occasionally chilly results, Intermezzo is all rich inner monologue, as deeply felt as Normal People .

What’s more, it offers something for which Rooney seems to have been looking for a long time: a new way forward through the central concerns of her work. Here, love is played out through familial relationships rather than just romances, with male characters rather than dry intellectual women — and Rooney appears, for the first time, to be ready to stop apologizing for the romanticism of her work.

Rooney’s previous novels played with Austen/Brontë tropes. In Normal People , college students Connell and Marianne are clearly meant for each other, but they keep breaking up in part because of their class differences. In Conversations with Friends , young Frances has to navigate her love for older, married Nick. This is the stuff of the marriage novels of 19th-century England, updated with texting and Marxism.

Intermezzo , in contrast, is a play on the great Russian novels. It’s interested in questions about God, how we care for each other, and what gives life meaning.

At the center of Intermezzo are two brothers, Peter and Ivan, lapsed Catholics who are struggling with the recent death of their father. Peter is 32, a lawyer, fastidious about the cut of his suits and the fabric of his scarves and the way he smiles at strangers, so as “to convey to the world at large a genial disposition.” Ivan is 22 and painfully awkward, still wearing braces, and considers himself almost incapable of interacting with other people.

“Certain kind of panache in his absolute disregard for the material world,” Peter thinks of Ivan. “Peter is the kind of person who goes along the surface of life very smoothly,” Ivan thinks of Peter. As a pair, they form a kind of study in different ways self-hatred can manifest: through either indifference to the outside world or meticulous attention to it.

We meet Peter and Ivan in the immediate aftermath of their father’s funeral, but both of them have other problems to deal with. Peter is still in love with his ex-girlfriend Sylvie, but after a vaguely-described traumatic injury has left her unable to have sex, she’s broken things off with him. (The plot devices you can get away with when you’re Sally Rooney!) Now he’s entangled with a college student and camgirl named Naomi, and fears he might be falling in love with her, too.

All this Rooney narrates in textured, impressionistic sentence fragments, thoughts flitting across Peter’s mind like birds you see flapping across a window pane, there and then gone. “The old life of pleasure gone and never returning,” Peter thinks as he waits to meet lost Sylvie: “accept, or else delude yourself, all the same in the end. The will to live so much stronger than anyone imagines.” He thinks about suicide, and whether God would ever forgive him for it.

Meanwhile, Ivan, a once-precocious teen chess prodigy who has seen his ranking drop in recent years, lives his life in complete sentences, clauses piled upon clauses, his inner monologue so sweetly innocent as to become transparent. “He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind,” Ivan thinks of himself. “He has his good qualities, kind of, but none of them have much to do with living in the world that he actually lives in, the only world that can be said in a fairly real way to exist.”

The plot devices you can get away with when you’re Sally Rooney!

Ivan finds himself steadily more depressed to be living a life organized around chess, as he feels he probably hit his peak at age 15. His life starts to turn around when he meets 36-year-old Margaret, an elegant divorcée living in a small town where Ivan plays an exhibition chess game. Margaret becomes the third point-of-view character of Intermezzo , thinking in sedate, polished sentences about her confusing attraction to Ivan and how, playing chess, “his hands look precise and elegant, like the hands of a surgeon or a pianist.”

Their developing relationship is redemptive for Ivan, who has always considered himself beneath the attention of women, but ruinous for Margaret’s reputation in her conservative town. And while Peter is himself dating a college student, he doesn’t think it plausible that a “normal woman” of Margaret’s age would want anything to do with Ivan. The fight the brothers have over Margaret spirals out of control to be about their entire lives: how they cared for their father, how they should care for the family dog, what they owe to one another.

One of the big questions in this novel is the question of God. Ivan thinks that he can find God when playing really good chess: “It’s like the order is so deep, and it’s so beautiful, I feel there must be something underneath it all.”

Margaret, meanwhile, says that she doesn’t think about God in terms of beauty. “I suppose my idea of God is more to do with morality. What’s right and wrong,” she says. This binary between beauty and morality is traditionally at the center of Rooney novels . Her books are obsessed with whether or not it’s all right to live a life focused on aesthetic pleasure — playing chess like Ivan or writing stories like Connell in Normal People — when so much is wrong with the world and there’s so much political work to be done. By extension, they are obsessed with novels as an art form that exists so that their readers can experience beauty.

“It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another,” thinks Connell in Normal People when he finds himself in “a state of strange emotional agitation” over Jane Austen’s Emma . Meanwhile, celebrity novelist Alice declares in Beautiful World that the problem with Western contemporary literature is that it relies on “suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth,” disowning her own work as insufficiently engaged with real human suffering.

Her books are obsessed with whether or not it’s all right to live a life focused on aesthetic pleasure when so much is wrong with the world

Is it all right, Rooney novels tend to wonder, fretfully, to devote your life to the beauty of novels when, after all, probably the only morally correct thing to do in our current society is to start a Marxist revolution and blow up pipelines?

Strikingly, though, in Intermezzo , Rooney introduces this binary and then collapses it almost immediately. “To me, it seems like it might be all related,” Ivan says. “Like, I don’t know, to find beauty in life, maybe it’s related to right and wrong.” As the novel goes on, Rooney continues to develop this idea: that perhaps the things in our lives that are beautiful and bring us joy should be embraced, even if other people might think that they’re wrong, and that perhaps this will lead us to goodness as God understands it.

In chess, an intermezzo is an “in-between” move that turns a game in an unexpected direction. One way of reading Rooney’s Intermezzo might be as a bridge piece between the books she wrote in her 20s and what’s coming in her 30s: the novels that wondered if they had the right to exist, and the books that are done apologizing for what they are: richly realized novels about love and friendship and the way that both can make us whole as human beings. In the meantime, Intermezzo works beautifully as a book all its own. It’s as tender and lovely as you could ask for, and beneath the elegant rise and fall of Rooney’s oceanic sentences, the waters go deep.

Most Popular

• I give to charity — but never to people on the street. Is that wrong?
• Take a mental break with the newest Vox crossword
• The scary truth about how far behind American kids have fallen
• An extremely practical guide to this year’s cold, flu, and Covid season
• Agatha All Along is a Marvel show you don’t have to do homework for

Today, Explained

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

This is the title for the native ad

More in Culture

His staggering new record cements his dominance in the sport.

The original Kodak camera changed photography forever.

The winding, weird story that even involves, yes, the battle for the White House.

The rapper’s indictment on sex trafficking and other charges is the latest in a months-long saga of sexual assault and violence allegations.

Linkin Park fans welcomed new vocalist Emily Armstrong. Then the Scientology allegations surfaced.

A minor upset for Best Comedy Series couldn’t keep the rest of the night from feeling predictable.

Advertisement

Supported by

Sally Rooney, Heart on Her Sleeve, Writes a Weeper

Her new novel, “Intermezzo,” considers love in its various permutations.

• Share full article

By Dwight Garner

• Apple Books
• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million
• Bookshop.org

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

INTERMEZZO , by Sally Rooney

A Sally Rooney backlash, in certain quarters, has been building. Her books are too white , it is said, and her politics too soft . She can be, in pursuit of a love story, a bit corny — or so it is said.

Her success rankles. Midnight release parties are scheduled in many bookstores for her new novel, “Intermezzo,” as if it were “Harry Potter,” Book 8. These parties may be cheerful communal events for some. For others, they are deeply uncool.

Asked once about his ambition, the novelist Peter De Vries replied that he yearned for a mass audience large enough for his elite audience to despise. Rooney, who is Irish, has reached this tricky plateau. She’s been called the Salinger of the Snapchat generation. She does less publicity than most other writers, yet she seems curiously overexposed.

I’ve had a small, personal taste of the Rooney backlash. The advance word about “Intermezzo” has not been good, at least among publishing’s smart young crowd. I’ve heard it called overlong and undercooked.

When I’ve replied that I admire “Intermezzo” almost without reservation — I fell into it like a goose-down comforter after a 15-mile hike in the sleet — the reaction has largely been disbelief. Some were as apoplectic as parrots. If I had to boil down the responses to my declarations of love to three letters, they’d be “LOL.”

Clearly this book is going to divide people.

“Intermezzo” is about two brothers, Peter, a successful barrister in Dublin, and Ivan, who is shyer, geekier, 10 years younger, wears ceramic braces and plays competitive chess. They are mourning the death of their father, and there is lingering bitterness between them. Our perceptions of Peter and Ivan will shift quite radically over the course of the novel, the way they do about the foster brothers in Martin Amis’s early novel “Success.”

“Intermezzo” reminds us of ...

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner This exhilarating new novel — about a high school debate star in 1990s Kansas — rocks an American amplitude as it takes on psychiatry, language, toxic masculinity and much more.

Read our review.

The Idiot by Elif Batuman An innocent, language-intoxicated teenager, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives at Harvard in the ’90s to pursue love and (especially) literature in this hefty, gorgeous, digressive slab of a novel.

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck This tale of a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young woman and a much older married man — translated from the German by Michael Hofmann — is both profound and moving.

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue In her exuberant, bitingly satirical novel, O’Donoghue probes the bonds between two booksellers — an Irish student and a young gay man who is secretly involved with a closeted professor.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

More From Forbes

In florida, a school district puts books back on the shelves.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

FILE - A copy of the book titled "And Tango Makes Three" is photographed on a bookstore shelf in ... [+] Chicago, Nov. 16, 2006. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)

Facing a federal lawsuit over their removal of 36 books from schools, the Nassau County School District reached a settlement agreement to return the books to library shelves.

The books on the list included works by Ellen Hopkins and Sarah Maas as well as works by prize-winning author Toni Morrison. Oft-challenged works such as The Kite Runner, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and The Hate You Give were on the list, as well as the children’s book And Tango Makes Three, the true story of two male penguins who adopt a penguin nestling.

The board’s action was picked up by local news in late January , and that local news story caught the attention of Tango authors Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, who are no strangers to having their book challenged .

The challenge to the books was brought by the Nassau County Chapter of Citizens Defending Freedom . That chapter’s executive director Jack Knocke said in February “School districts that are breaking the law should be held accountable. In this case, we are very pleased with the cooperation and professionalism of the Nassau County School Board, who respectfully worked with us every step of the way to help protect our county’s children.”

Citizens Defending Freedom was founded as County Citizens Defending Freedom in 2021. Jack Jenkins at Religion News Service reported that the inspiration came from hearing Rand Paul speak to a group of faith and business leaders meeting at Mar-a-Lago. The group also has names ties to other conservative groups, particularly the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian conservative group that has exercised considerable influence in opposing LGTBQ rights and abortion.

CCDF started out in Polk County, where the group challenged 16 books as illegal in 2022. It soon expanded to other counties and states, changing its name to reflect its greater reach. In its IRS filing, CDF lists a threefold mission:

New Galaxy S25 Ultra Exclusive Teases Samsung’s Ambitious Plans

‘from’ season 3, episode 1 review: a terrifying return to the creepiest show on tv, ufc 308 loses one of its best main card fights.

To equip and empower American citizens to stand for and preserve freedom for themselves and future generations. To resolve breaches of liberty through local awareness, local light, and local action. To educate the American citizen on the value of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and its influence on America’s founding.

Founder Steve Maxwell is the CEO of a company that makes produce packaging, and most of the visible members of CDF are also Christian businessmen. One critic called them “Moms for Liberty in suits.”

CDF Nassau has previous experience with the Nassau school board. CDF Nassau board member Rich Lamken was a “regular speaker” at board meetings and had pushed for a Citizens Budget Advisory Committee. The board resisted but eventually created the committee, giving it oversight of just 5% of the budget. They did not appoint Lamken to the committee. The headline in the conservative Citizens Journal Florida read “ School Board Selects Leftist Extremist Over a Qualified, Experienced Candidate for Review Board. ”

CDF Nassau’s request to remove the books could not have come as a surprise to the board. But Lauren Zimmerman, attorney for the Tango authors, says it came as a surprise to those outside the board. “There was no public hearing. There was no real announcement about what was going on.” But when the news broke, the authors and several parents and students in the district filed suit in federal court.

The district had claimed that Tango was removed due to “ lack of circulation ,” but Zimmerman says that examination of district records showed that the book had been taken out by students, and that other books that showed no circulation were not removed. In a press release protesting the board’s decision to pursue settlement, CDF doubled down on its challenge to the book:

Suggesting that children find their values from the abnormal animal kingdom behavior is manipulative and confusing to young minds. Values taught is school should come from the Judeo-Christian values ordained by God on which the United States of America was founded.

In the press release, CDF also objects to Ghost Boys, which promotes “racial division, hatred, anti-police themes, and directs students to even more radical writings.”

The other books, argued CDF, were in violation of Florida statute 847.012 , which broadly forbids exposing minors to any depiction of “sexual conduct.”

The list appears to have been drawn from the website BookLooks.org , a site that highlights objectionable content in books; the site has been linked to many book challenges in the U.S.

The lawsuit charged that the school board used “unlawful censorship” to remove “the children’s book behind closed doors and without community involvement or comment” in violation of Florida’s sunshine laws. Zimmerman says the district has a book challenge procedure in place, but it was not followed in this case.

Shortly after the suit was filed, the school board centered negotiations to settle the suit, and soon after the parties reached a settlement . That settlement requires the board to restore the books, to refrain from making any future removals behind closed doors, and to acknowledge that Tango contains no obscene material.

Zimmerman argues that suit was important because “it’s a playbook that we’re seeing” in which some organization steps in and decides “its views on what our children should and shouldn’t read should rule the say.” Why would successful authors whose work is often challenged but rarely removed bother with this? Zimmerman explains, “Freedom of information, the importance of education, diversity, and viewpoints that students can be exposed to those. It's just all very important. It's kind of the cornerstone of American education.”

CDF Nassau executive director Jack Knocke called the settlement “a dark day for Nassau County Schools.” CDF called on Governor Ron DeSantis to remove the Nassau County School Board and Superintendent. They have also notified the Nassau County Sheriff, sharing district findings as evidence “that they are distributing materials in violation of Florida’s child obscenity laws.” Says Sarah Calamunci , CDF Florida State Director, “We intend to hold them accountable.”

At this time, the school board has not replied to a request for comment.

• Editorial Standards
• Forbes Accolades

Join The Conversation

One Community. Many Voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts. 

Forbes Community Guidelines

Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.

In order to do so, please follow the posting rules in our site's  Terms of Service.   We've summarized some of those key rules below. Simply put, keep it civil.

Your post will be rejected if we notice that it seems to contain:

• False or intentionally out-of-context or misleading information
• Insults, profanity, incoherent, obscene or inflammatory language or threats of any kind
• Attacks on the identity of other commenters or the article's author
• Content that otherwise violates our site's  terms.

User accounts will be blocked if we notice or believe that users are engaged in:

• Continuous attempts to re-post comments that have been previously moderated/rejected
• Racist, sexist, homophobic or other discriminatory comments
• Attempts or tactics that put the site security at risk
• Actions that otherwise violate our site's  terms.

So, how can you be a power user?

• Stay on topic and share your insights
• Feel free to be clear and thoughtful to get your point across
• ‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’ to show your point of view.
• Protect your community.
• Use the report tool to alert us when someone breaks the rules.

Thanks for reading our community guidelines. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site's  Terms of Service.