Interesting References in the Literature
from Linguistics and Allied Fields
This list is under unceasing development. These are items that I have found stimulating, thought provoking and sometimes even useful. The references themselves are sketchy, but most of the items can be readily identified by a librarian or an online library catalogue from what is here.
They are grouped by loose similarity. A section at the end has to do with what a new student of discourse linguistics might wish to study.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 1889-1951, New York, MacMillan, 1953.
Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument , Cambridge U P, 1958.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors we live By, University of Chicago Press, 1980.
George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: what categories reveal about the mind, University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Ch. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: a treatise on argumentation University of Notre Dame Press, London, 1969 (translated from a French original of 1958.)
A. R. Luria, Language and Cognition , J. Wiley, 1981??
Hayley Davis and Talbot J. Taylor, eds., Redefining Linguistics, Routledge, 1990.
Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson, Relevance: communication and cognition, 2nd edition, Blackwell, 1995.
Diane Blakemore's textbook on relevance: Understanding Utterances , Blackwell, 1992
John R. Taylor, Linguistic Categorization: prototypes in linguistic theory , Oxford U P, 1989.
Taylor: a fine overview of cognitive linguistics, in John R. Taylor, Possessives in English , Oxford U P, 1996.
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., Intentions in the Experience of Meaning , Cambridge U P, 1999.
The work of Erving Goffman is particularly provocative when viewed from a linguistic perspective. Linguistics in various ways acknowledges that processes and theories about understanding language must be responsive to the context . This means many different things, and often the dependency is mentioned and then ignored. Goffman suggests in very rich and insightful ways what such contexts might be doing, and even what their nature might be. Here are some stimulating examples for linguistics out of his much larger set of writings and the still growing literature about him.Goffman, Erving (1981). Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lemert, Charles C. and Ann. Branaman, eds. (1997). The Goffman Reader. Malden, Mass: Blackwell.
Goffman, Erving (1967). Interaction Ritual. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co.
Drew, Paul and Anthony Wooton, eds. (1988). Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Levinsohn, Stephen C. (1988). Putting Linguistics on a Proper Footing: Explorations in Goffman's Concepts of Participation In P. Drew and A. Wooton (eds,). Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order Boston: Northeastern University Press, 161-227. This one is particularly significant because 1) it links key linguistic topics, especially diexsis, directly to Goffman's work, and 2) it extends that work of Goffman.
Deborah Schiffrin, Approaches to Discourse, (a textbook) Blackwell, 1994.
The issue sometimes arises of what someone with a new interest in Discourse Linguistics should study. There are good books, good journals and good conferences. Schiffrin's textbook, above, is a very approachable starting point. Searle's 1975 book Speech Acts is now widely recognized in part for its limitations, but it helped to shape the field and is still important furniture for the linguists's workroom. The book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things by Lakoff is a very readable book on the important topic of categories as foundation stones for theories. Journals Text, Discourse Processes, Pragmatics (IPrA), Journal of Pragmatics (JOP) have all carried major weight, along with others. The journals bearing the name Cognitive ... are carrying more and more. For explorations using a different methodology, the journal Computational Linguistics is worthwhile.
Some of the leading-edge work is still, to my taste, far too focused on the sentential, the propositional and the pseudo-logical, at the expense of dealing with the functions of discourse among people. That is presently a stable feature of the work and the literature, but those whose interests are broader or just different will find good things as well.