New series: 50 Great Ideas in Linguistics

As I’ve been teaching this summer (And failing to blog on a semi-regular basis like a loser. Mea culpa.) I’ll occasionally find that my students aren’t familiar with something I’d assumed they’d covered at some point already. I’ve also found that there are relatively few resources for looking up linguistic ideas that don’t require a good deal of specialized knowledge going in. SIL’s glossary of linguistic terms is good but pretty jargon-y, and the various handbooks tend not to have on-line versions. And even with a concerted effort by linguists to make Wikipedia a good resource, I’m still not 100% comfortable with recommending that my students use it.

Therefore! I’ve decided to make my own list of Things That Linguistic-Type People Should Know and then slowly work on expounding on them. I have something to point my students to and it’s a nice bite-sized way to talk about things; perfect for a blog.

Here, in no particular order, are 50ish Great Ideas of Linguistics sorted by sub-discipline. (You may notice a slightly sub-disciplinary bias.) I might change my mind on some of these–and feel free to jump in with suggestions–but it’s a start. Look out for more posts on them.

• Sociolinguistics
  • Sociolinguistic variables
  • Social class and language
  • Social networks
  • Accommodation
  • Style
  • Language change
  • Linguistic security
  • Linguistic awareness
  • Covert and overt prestige
• Phonetics
  • Places of articulation
  • Manners of articulation
  • Voicing
  • Vowels and consonants
  • Categorical perception
  • “Ease”
  • Modality
• Phonology
  • Rules
  • Assimilation and dissimilation
  • Splits and mergers
  • Phonological change
• Morphology
  • Paradigm levelling
  • Case
  • Tense and aspect
  • Affixes
• Syntax
  • Hierarchical structure
  • Competence vs. Performance
  • Movement
  • Grammaticality judgements
• Semantics
  • Pragmatics
  • Truth values
  • Scope
  • Lexical semantics
  • Compositional semantics
• Computational linguistics
  • Classifiers
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Speech recognition
  • Speech synthesis
  • Automata
• Documentation/Revitalization
  • Language death
  • Self-determination
• Psycholinguistics
  • Language acquisition
  • Reading