CHAPTER 5: WORDS FURTHER READING

Chapter 5:  Words FURTHER READING Of the many texts available on the topic of words, the following will be helpful. Your tutor will guide you on those which are particularly relevant for your programme of study. Aronoff and Anshen’s (1998) handbook article on ‘Morphology and the lexicon’ is short, clear and interesting, with good discussion of how words relate to the rest of a language system. An accessible introduction to corpus linguistics is McEnery and Wilson’s (2001) book Corpus Linguistics. Another good introduction, particularly dealing with corpus methods for analysing text structure and understanding how particular words can be key to particular texts and kinds of text is Scott and Tribble’s (2006) Textual Patterns. Xiao (2008) has provided an invaluable survey of important corpora – of their goals, content and accessibility. It should be consulted by anyone wanting to do corpus linguistics. In Clark’s book First Language Acquisition (2003), her chapter on young children’s word-building is an accessible general introduction. Particularly for readers who like to have a book at hand, even when working on the internet, Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English (Leech et al. 2001) is a compact and fascinating reference book. It is worth reading the introduction to this one, even if you do not usually look at the stuff at the beginning of dictionaries. Carstairs-McCarthy’s An Introduction to English Morphology (2002) is a small book and easy to understand, but very informative about words. There is a useful and very short overview of the Google Labs N-gram Viewer on the Culturomics website.