Humanities & Social Sciences Library

Are you raring to go to Korea for your exchange programme this semester?  Need some key language titles to brush up your Korean conversational skills so that you can  speak with the native speakers while you are on the ski slopes of Yong Pyong or shopping in Dongdaemun?  Here are this month’s recommendations!

Korean in 60 minutes [sound recording].
New York : Berlitz, p2008.
Call number: PL913.K84M

If you need to brush up your Korean listening and speaking skills in a hurry, you’d need to get your hands on this CD.  The title includes basic expressions, as well as key words and phrases to get you started on practicing your Korean.  Booklet included.

Korean : a complete course for beginners. [sound recording]
New York, N.Y. : Living Language, c2007. 
Call number: PL913.K84CC  (book)
Call number:  PL913.K84CC DISCS 1-6  (Audio CD) 

This simple and effective introduction to Korean will teach you everything you need to speak, understand, read, and write in Korean. A handy guide for beginners that has natural dialogues, clear grammar notes, vocabulary words and key expressions.  Immerse yourself in Korean culture, cuisine, history, geography, and more.

Listening Korean for beginners.
Elizabeth, NJ : Hollym, 2007.
Call number: PL913.L478K + 2 CDs

This is one of the titles in the Hollym series of Korean titles on reading, writing and speaking. The key focus of this book and CD set is to improve your listening and speaking skills in Korean. Published by the National Institute of the Korean Language and the International Korean Language Foundation.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Now available online!
Journal of Linguistics – Volume 45 – Issue 01 – March 2009
Cambridge University Press

Here are some of the articles featured:

Indeterminacy by underspecification
MARY DALRYMPLE
TRACY HOLLOWAY KING
LOUISA SADLER
Journal of Linguistics, Volume 45, Issue 01, March 2009, pp 31 – 68

Copy Control in Telugu
YOUSSEF A. HADDAD
Journal of Linguistics, Volume 45, Issue 01, March 2009, pp 69 – 109

The role of psychoacoustic similarity in Japanese puns: A corpus study
SHIGETO KAWAHARA
KAZUKO SHINOHARA
Journal of Linguistics, Volume 45, Issue 01, March 2009, pp 111 – 138

Phrase structure vs. dependency: The analysis of Welsh syntactic soft mutation
MAGGIE TALLERMAN
Journal of Linguistics, Volume 45, Issue 01, March 2009, pp 167 – 201
Full text access is available via the the Library’s A–Z ejournal title list.  You can also subscribe for alerts from the ejournal main page.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Deutschland.
Bonn : Societats-Verlag in cooperation with the Press and Information Office of the Federal Government, Bonn, 1993-
Call number: DD258.D486
Location: Lee Wee Nam Library

Deutschland, a bi-monthly magazine published by Germany’s federal government, is catered towards students of the German language who would like to learn more about Germany’s culture and politics. The library has copies of the English edition of this magazine in Lee Wee Nam Library. 

German writers and German literature are also occasionally featured.  Cornelia Funke, one of Germany’s well-known authors, had her book — Inkheart (the first book in the Inkworld Trilogy)– translated from German into English.

Soon to be released into a Hollywood film on 23 Jan 2009, Inkheart is a story about a girl, Meggie, whose father, Mo, had the secret ability to bring storybook characters to life when he reads aloud from books. Mo had read aloud from a book called Inkheart and had brought an evil character called Dustfinder into the real world.  He had also accidentally transported Meggie’s mother into the story. Meggie is subsequently kidnapped by one of the storybook villains and so begin’s Mo’s quest to rescue his daughter, together with the help of a group of friends, both human and magical.

When asked what inspired her to create the Inkworld trilogy, Funke said that it all started when she longed to be surrounded by characters from books.  “Readers know that feeling, when the figures in books often seem more alive than people actually around us in real life, because we can see deep into their hearts.”

Funke said that with imagination as a tool, we can disguise reality and liberate ourselves from its rules. As a writer, she gets her inspiration from “everywhere and anywhere” and that’s the reason why she always carries a notebook with her. This is a good idea-generator tip for aspiring writers!

For the full story “Supremely Imaginative”, read Deutschland online .

Check out more links to German and other foreign language resources from the library’s online subject guides page.

Sources and information

Deutschland magazine online (English)

Inkheart movie website  (check out the trailer!)

Amazon.com book review

German links: German language learning resources online

About.com: German language

All images copyright of Deutschland and Warner Brothers respectively.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Need a quick search on the biodata of Michael Halliday? What’s a phoneme?
How do you define a dialect?

The Oxford Reference Online – one of the Library’s subscribed e-book aggregators– provides you with a convenient way to search through English Language reference titles and entries on linguistics terminology with just a few clicks. Do a quick search, browse through The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics or mouse your way through the bilingual dictionaries.

Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2008 is a free web resource for wordsmiths.  You can retrieve language maps like the above or search for entries on languages, dialects and more.  See an entry on the Chinese language, which is contributed by David Lattimore, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature and of Comparative Literature, Department of East Asian Studies, Brown University.

All images copyright of the publishers.

Popularity: unranked [?]

If you are doing a topic on animal communication as part of your linguistics class, you might want to check out the articles below:

Dolphin call tells calf who’s mum
BBC News, 23 July 2008

“Female bottlenose dolphins whistle 10 times more often than usual after giving birth in order to help newborns recognise who is “mum”.” Dolphins have unique signature whistles that can identify who’s who. Whistling is part of a process called imprinting which allows baby to recognize its mum. Hear samples of real dolphin whistles in the above link!

Wild dolphins tail-walk on water
BBC News, 19 Aug 2008

An Aussie wild dolphin gave tail-walk tuition to other other wild cousins in her pod. It seems that Billie — the tail-walking dolphin instructor –had learned this behaviour in a dolphinarium when she was rescued and rehabilitated. She eventually brought the skill back into the wild with her when she was released.

Hence, according to the author, dolphins seem to display human-like cultural behaviour.
“[Cultural behaviour] are things that groups develop and are passed between individuals and that come to define those groups, such as language or dancing; and it would seem that among the Port River dolphins we may have an incipient tail-walking culture.”

Other handy references:

Nature. The dolphin defender [videorecording]
produced and written by Hardy Jones ; a production of Hardy Jones Productions and Thirteen/WNET New York.
Chicago, IL : Questar, c2005.
Call no.: D576364

Animal world’s communication kings
By Rebecca Morelle
Science reporter, BBC News
1 May 2007

All images copyright of the BBC.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Mention grammar rules and most people would feel glum and bored. But learning grammar rules is a little less painful when you have gargoyles, trolls, vampires and a rabbit on flying horseback to accompany you on your grammatical odyssey.

Learn all about nouns, subject-verb agreement, clauses, predicates and the like in this amusing little volume. Gothic illustrations and sentences with baby vampires and wolfs as subjects make this book a cut above the rest.

Examples include:

Predicate: The vampire began to powder his nose.
Restrictive clause: The painting that leered was hauled into the judge’s chambers and scolded.
Prepositions: He reached across her to grab the lamb chop asleep in the center of the table.

As Gordan says, “language lives, breathes [and] moves with you — like the beings who inhabit this book.”

Interested? Check it out@your library.

The deluxe transitive vampire : the ultimate handbook of grammar for the innocent, the eager, and the doomed
Karen Elizabeth Gordon.
New York : Pantheon Books, c1993.
Call no.: PE1112.G663


All images copyright of the author & publisher.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Calling all word lovers, you can now access Collins Wordbanks Online from any of the common PCs located in the Library!

Collins Wordbanks Online contains 57 million words of written and spoken English from both American and British sources. Language data is derived from the Bank of English — the Collins corpora of modern written and spoken text.

With Wordbanks, you can:
–view language samples as they are used in real life
–carry out linguistic research for your thesis
–analyze the semantics behind the usage of a particular word

More information can be found on our databases page or on the information page for Collins Wordbanks Online.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Shakespeare country [videorecording]
Kent, UK : Delta Music., 2002.
Call no.: E570470

Charming Stratford upon Avon, with its picturesque black and white Tudor houses, is where Shakespeare had once lived. Tour Shakespeare country for yourself in this 55 minute audiovisual journey, where you can live and breathe Shakespeare just by looking at the thatched cottages in the Warwickshire countryside. A falconry centre with flight displays by resident falcons are also part of the countryside museum experience for Shakespeare pilgrims. In modern times, dramatic twists and turns of his plays are acted out in the Globe Theatre, the architecture of which you can view in this DVD.

Old England [videorecording]
New Wave Pictures Production ; produced by Robin Bextor.
UK: Green umbrella, 2004.
Call no.: K570500

Old Sarum, Stonehenge and the elegant Salisbury Cathedral are the key highlights in this DVD. See re-enactments of battle scenes by men in chain mail shirts, take a glimpse into the lives of royalty and enjoy the many aerial views of Stonehenge, Winchester and Salisbury. This is an excellent introduction to Old England especially for those who have yet to visit the place.

Popularity: unranked [?]

On language : Chomsky’s classic works Language and responsibility and Reflections on language
Noam Chomsky.
New York : New Press, 2007.
P106.C548NA

The Blackwell guide to research methods in bilingualism and multilingualism
Li Wei and Melissa G. Moyer.
Malden, MA : Blackwell Pub., 2008.
P115.B632

Reversing language shift : theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages
Joshua A. Fishman.
Clevedon ; Philadelphia : Multilingual Matters, 1991.
P115.3.F537

Sociolinguistic perspectives on bilingual education
Christina Bratt Paulston.
Clevedon ; Philadelphia : Multilingual Matters, 1992.
LC3719.S678

Linguistic minorities, society, and territory
Colin H. Williams.
Clevedon, Avon, England ; Philadelphia : Multilingual Matters, c1991.
P119.315.L755M

Special language : from humans thinking to thinking machines
Christer Laurén and Marianne Nordman.
Clevedon [England] ; Philadelphia : Multilingual Matters Ltd., c1989.
P120.S9S741 1987

Folk linguistics
Nancy A. Niedzielski, Dennis R. Preston.
Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 2003.
P123.N666

Popularity: 9% [?]

How is “wicked” used in the youth context? Interested in finding out and comparing the meanings and semantics between “true feelings” and “mixed feelings”? Explore collocations, concordances and more with the Library’s newest resource — the British National Corpus!

The British National Corpus (BNC) XML edition contains samples of written and spoken language that is meant to represent a wide cross-section of current British English,both spoken and written. BNC contains 100 million words and contains written and spoken corpora.

For more details, check our databases page.

Popularity: unranked [?]