Humanities & Social Sciences Library

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.

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Update on Lee Wee Nam Library

The expansion and renovation of the Lee Wee Nam Library has been put on hold for the time being until the new Campus Master Plan is completed. Work on the Library (which was to expand to 15,000 square metres) was initially suspended in Dec 2007 due to the overheated construction industry in Singapore. It was then scheduled to open in 2012 instead of 2010. The Library is currently providing input to the Campus Planning Committee to ensure the continual development of exciting library spaces for the use of students.

To accommodate the rapid growth of the library collection, we will continue with our plans to move the Engineering collection in Library 2 to LWN Library. The 5^th Floor vacated by CED will be renovated to provide more reading and shelf space. Library 2 will be developed as an interim Business Library and some of the business librarians will also be relocated there. Work will be carried out in the December vacation and all this will be completed in early 2009.

For updates on library facilities development, please refer to the blog <NTU Libraries Building Updates>. This new Blog aims to keep users informed of plans and progress in upgrades, renovations and other building work carried out by the library. It also provides some basic statistics of the 8 libraries managed by our Library.

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.

Attention LMS students! You can now download the slides for Info jungle explorer here. If you need further help on explorations to more destinations, feel free to contact your subject librarian at omwong@ntu.edu.sg.

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.

Dear Library Users,

All NTU Libraries will be closed on 9 Aug 2008 (National Day) and 11 Aug 2008 (University Holiday).

Thank you.

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.

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

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.