impossible to find books and happy finds
A couple months ago I picked up The Clumber Spaniel by Peggy Grayson and Rae Furness for like $45 bucks from some sketchy antiques site that I found by scouring Google for about an hour. The cheapest that book was on Amazon.com was $299.00 and 218 pounds on Amazon.co.uk.
I picked up Rand Valentine's Nishnaabemwin Reference Grammar a few weeks ago, and it references two books enough that, given my Chicago heritage, I should pick up and read, as they are solid components of the Algonquian canon: Bloomfield's Eastern Ojibwa (University of Michigan Press, 1957) and Professor Dahlstrom's Plains Cree Morphosyntax (Garland's Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics series, 1991). It turns out that these books are impossible to find, at least on the internet. Or at the very least, these books demonstrate my limited abilities at sourcing books. I spent a good hour or two searching for these books on Google and looked at every results page with no luck. These books are simply not for sale on the internet right now, which is absurd.
I've added them to my Amazon.com wish list; so, if Mom and Dad are looking for a challenge, I would be very pleased if they would be able to find one or both of them. As they are in Michigan, the Bloomfield title might be easier for them to find there than elsewhere in the country. Good luck and thanks in advance.
Tom, Jess and I ended up in St. George's Gardens yesterday afternoon with a copy of the Times (I naturally cannot speak to Tom's taste (or should I say, I can speak to the fact that Tom has terrible taste), and we've had this conversation before: it is simply a badly written newspaper with new-Conservative leanings; I would take the Telegraph or the Guardian over the Times any day (not that I take any paper; I read the news that Google tells me to read, and it tends to tell me to read the Guardian and the Telegraph, and when it tells me to read the Times (which isn't often, fortunately), I shudder and look for the equivalent Guardian or Telegraph article), their alleged political bents notwithstanding), and Tom had a clear division of labor in mind: He would read the paper, Jess would read the magazine, then they'd switch, and all the while I'd get the number puzzles. We've been through this with the Saturday Times enough in the past that we know the number puzzles are hard to find, but on the last page it says where they were this week: in the Saturday Review on p. 13. After spending about ten minutes looking for the Saturday Review and not finding it and scouring the rest of the paper for some number puzzles for me to work, I instead started reading a novel Tom had bought earlier in the morning about some Ukrainian guy who had a penguin for a pet. It is surely the case that gifted eight-year-olds could write more clearly and more compelling narrative to boot, and finally I simply had to conclude that the book was a translation and stop reading.
Anyway, Tom's act of purchasing the book reminded me that there's a good used bookstore right behind Waitrose that has about six shelves of linguistics books and that I hadn't checked it out in a couple months, and so when we parted yesterday afternoon I headed to the back corner of this basement bookshop (which has the same feel as the Seminary Co-op) and found a number of potentially worthwhile titles, the most exciting of which is a book by Cedric Boeckx called Understanding Minimalist Syntax: Lessons from Locality in Long Distance Dependencies.
I'd never read anything by Boeckx, but he is a good writer and uses examples well, and he seems to be at the cutting edge of mainstream generative syntax, so he's got lots of good references. The subject matter itself (the idea that movement occurs locally and that elements stop at intermediate landing sites rather than moving all the way to the front of the sentence in one fell swoop, where movement here is the way the theory deals with when words appear in a position in a sentence which does not reflect their canonical position in perhaps more basic sentences (consider, for example, What-i did Mary think that John said Cedric's book was about , where represents a blank spot where we would expect the what at the beginning of the question to originate)) seems right to me, probably because Professor Merchant always fed it to us like that, with the Irish data and everything (it's amazing to me how state-of-the-art our Syntax-1 class was and how much bullshit Merchant cut through in order to give us what was the basically totally up-to-date view of syntax at the time). The evidence that such movement stops in intermediate positions in the sentence comes from other languages (Irish has some good examples, where you see other words in the middle of the sentence that only show up when things move) as well as English (English has examples which don't show overt movement but which require a logical form which includes the words at the intermediate sites to account for different interpretations). In some of the Ojibwe stuff I've been reading, there is evidence of successive-cyclic movement as well, and so I consider the find this weekend to have been a fairly lucky one.
Oh, and this is how I am breaking back into linguistics.
Also, it's just come to me, but if you are looking to buy me a present and have perhaps $1400 dollars or 700 pounds that you would like to spend, you can get me Otto Jespersen's Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles in seven volumes, which Routledge republished in 2006. Alternatively, if you are able to find an older complete set for less money, that's perfectly fine, as long as it's a complete set. The Grammar is definitely a reference work, but I know from past experience that it is a hassle to try to check out at the library, because you'll check out one volume, get it home, then realize you need a different volume, and it will be checked out to a faculty member (who is too cheap to buy his own set of Jespersen!). Stay ever vigilant (and thanks in advance for presents)-- /B/
I picked up Rand Valentine's Nishnaabemwin Reference Grammar a few weeks ago, and it references two books enough that, given my Chicago heritage, I should pick up and read, as they are solid components of the Algonquian canon: Bloomfield's Eastern Ojibwa (University of Michigan Press, 1957) and Professor Dahlstrom's Plains Cree Morphosyntax (Garland's Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics series, 1991). It turns out that these books are impossible to find, at least on the internet. Or at the very least, these books demonstrate my limited abilities at sourcing books. I spent a good hour or two searching for these books on Google and looked at every results page with no luck. These books are simply not for sale on the internet right now, which is absurd.
I've added them to my Amazon.com wish list; so, if Mom and Dad are looking for a challenge, I would be very pleased if they would be able to find one or both of them. As they are in Michigan, the Bloomfield title might be easier for them to find there than elsewhere in the country. Good luck and thanks in advance.
Tom, Jess and I ended up in St. George's Gardens yesterday afternoon with a copy of the Times (I naturally cannot speak to Tom's taste (or should I say, I can speak to the fact that Tom has terrible taste), and we've had this conversation before: it is simply a badly written newspaper with new-Conservative leanings; I would take the Telegraph or the Guardian over the Times any day (not that I take any paper; I read the news that Google tells me to read, and it tends to tell me to read the Guardian and the Telegraph, and when it tells me to read the Times (which isn't often, fortunately), I shudder and look for the equivalent Guardian or Telegraph article), their alleged political bents notwithstanding), and Tom had a clear division of labor in mind: He would read the paper, Jess would read the magazine, then they'd switch, and all the while I'd get the number puzzles. We've been through this with the Saturday Times enough in the past that we know the number puzzles are hard to find, but on the last page it says where they were this week: in the Saturday Review on p. 13. After spending about ten minutes looking for the Saturday Review and not finding it and scouring the rest of the paper for some number puzzles for me to work, I instead started reading a novel Tom had bought earlier in the morning about some Ukrainian guy who had a penguin for a pet. It is surely the case that gifted eight-year-olds could write more clearly and more compelling narrative to boot, and finally I simply had to conclude that the book was a translation and stop reading.
Anyway, Tom's act of purchasing the book reminded me that there's a good used bookstore right behind Waitrose that has about six shelves of linguistics books and that I hadn't checked it out in a couple months, and so when we parted yesterday afternoon I headed to the back corner of this basement bookshop (which has the same feel as the Seminary Co-op) and found a number of potentially worthwhile titles, the most exciting of which is a book by Cedric Boeckx called Understanding Minimalist Syntax: Lessons from Locality in Long Distance Dependencies.
I'd never read anything by Boeckx, but he is a good writer and uses examples well, and he seems to be at the cutting edge of mainstream generative syntax, so he's got lots of good references. The subject matter itself (the idea that movement occurs locally and that elements stop at intermediate landing sites rather than moving all the way to the front of the sentence in one fell swoop, where movement here is the way the theory deals with when words appear in a position in a sentence which does not reflect their canonical position in perhaps more basic sentences (consider, for example, What-i did Mary think that John said Cedric's book was about , where represents a blank spot where we would expect the what at the beginning of the question to originate)) seems right to me, probably because Professor Merchant always fed it to us like that, with the Irish data and everything (it's amazing to me how state-of-the-art our Syntax-1 class was and how much bullshit Merchant cut through in order to give us what was the basically totally up-to-date view of syntax at the time). The evidence that such movement stops in intermediate positions in the sentence comes from other languages (Irish has some good examples, where you see other words in the middle of the sentence that only show up when things move) as well as English (English has examples which don't show overt movement but which require a logical form which includes the words at the intermediate sites to account for different interpretations). In some of the Ojibwe stuff I've been reading, there is evidence of successive-cyclic movement as well, and so I consider the find this weekend to have been a fairly lucky one.
Oh, and this is how I am breaking back into linguistics.
Also, it's just come to me, but if you are looking to buy me a present and have perhaps $1400 dollars or 700 pounds that you would like to spend, you can get me Otto Jespersen's Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles in seven volumes, which Routledge republished in 2006. Alternatively, if you are able to find an older complete set for less money, that's perfectly fine, as long as it's a complete set. The Grammar is definitely a reference work, but I know from past experience that it is a hassle to try to check out at the library, because you'll check out one volume, get it home, then realize you need a different volume, and it will be checked out to a faculty member (who is too cheap to buy his own set of Jespersen!). Stay ever vigilant (and thanks in advance for presents)-- /B/