Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
 Very Fast Service and delivery. October 13, 2009
Phillip Crocker (Avenel, NJ)
This was a book needed for a class at college. It took the college bookstore 3 weeks. It took me 3 days. Very Fast Service and delivery.
 slow shipping October 4, 2009
K. Hawkins
Shipping took almost 2 weeks for this text book and it was displayed as the wrong book. I had to return it.
Required Reading July 11, 2008
A. Alvarez (Queens, New York)
Very thorough and detailed. May not be most exciting book ever written, but it serves its purpose excellently.
 A Well-Written, Easy-to-understand Intro February 16, 2007
K. Flegal (Herndon, VA USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have an earlier edition of this text that I used in a linguistics course several years ago, and I understand that the 5th edition is very similar.
This book is clearly, simply written, making some very complex and abstract concepts clear and understandable. I'm currently working on my Masters in Linguistics, and I regularly refer back to this text in my higher-level classes for clarification of things like Theta roles and x-bar theory (syntax), morphology, phonology, etc.
The text is fairly comprehensive, covering all the major sub-categories of linguistics. It doesn't pretend to cover any of the subjects in depth, but it does provide an excellent foundation for anyone who wants to understand the basics.
Good introductory text June 7, 2006
A Reader
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book provides a good introduction to many areas of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, language acquisition and computational linguistics. The approach is basically Chomskian.
I would give the book about 3-1/2 stars. It touches on a wide range of linguistic issues, at varying degrees of depth. The description of concepts is fairly sensible. However, there are some issues not treated in adequate depth. For example, early in the book various irregularities in English are discussed which do not fit into their linguistic model--here it would make a lot of sense to explain the historical reasons for these irregularities. Also, the treatment of computational linguistics is weak; some good AI texts do a better job. On the other hand, it could be argued that an introductory text at this level can only include so much material.
In short, I found this to be a profitable overview of the field and would recommend it to others.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
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