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Melanie and Mike present, in partnership with Amazon.com,

The Etymology Book Store

Linguistics

Steven Pinker offers a sometimes controversial, sometimes welcomed theory regarding the origin of language.  Noam Chomsky calls this "an extremely valuable book".  The unanimous review of this book: it is engaging!  It is an excellent introduction to linguistics for lay readers, and a thought-provoking work for linguists.  It was first published in 1994 but it hasn't lost its effectiveness.

Heinz Giegerich investigates the way in which alternations in the sound patterns of words interact with the processes of word-formation in the language. Drawing examples from English and German, he uncovers and spells out in detail the principles of 'lexical morphology and phonology', a theory that has in recent years become increasingly influential in linguistics. He queries many of the assumptions previously made in it to produce a formally coherent theory which moreover offers new accounts of some central phenomena in the phonology of English.