This page will be updated through the semester. Recently added items are marked NEW.
Online supplement to the textbook
- Contemporary Linguistics has an online
book
companion site, with advanced and supplementary materials
- There's a mistake in the textbook's web page. The extra links for the sociolinguistics chapter (Ch 14) are actually found here.
Reserve reading in the Undergraduate Library
Thinking like a linguist: Mental grammar and dialect differences
- Words for fizzy
beverages across the US, by Alan McConchie
- Edinburgh linguist Geoff Pullum's view of the difference between acknowledging that different dialects have different grammars, and claiming that a given utterance is ungrammatical with respect to a particular dialect (from Language Log)
Phonetics and phonology
- The vocal tract
- Practice with consonant properties: an interactive vocal tract model, by Daniel Hall
- X-ray films of the vocal tract during the production of the vowels [i e a o u] from the companion web site to the book Vowels and Consonants (P. Ladefoged; 2001)
- X-ray films of the vocal tract during the production of
English and French sentences,
from the X-Ray Film Database Project
(Scroll to the bottom of their page for the film clips -- here is "Why did Ken...")
- American English vowels
- More about "General American English" vowels, including sound files
- CL web site section on American dialects -- go to Chapter 2 > Advanced material > American dialects
- Phonetic transcription practice
(short words |
medium words |
long words),
by Kevin Russell, U. of Manitoba
- Downloading and using phonetics fonts
Morphology and syntax
- The familiar bound morphemes, function words, and syntactic structure help us "understand" the nonsense words in Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky"
Semantics and pragmatics
- YouTube videos showing the violation of conversational maxims
- "Friends" clip
- Grice's Maxims, by ricpot
- Conversational Maxims, by mandygal66
Child language acquisition
- The CHILDES database -- repository of child language data
- Some methods for experiments with infants and children (U. of Iowa)
- Child Language Video Archive (Macquarie U.)
Language variation
- Variation in the lexicon
- DARE -- The Dictionary of American Regional English
- DARE web page with 100 regional lexical items, some with maps
- DARE -- The Dictionary of American Regional English
- Phonological and phonetic variation
- Dialect maps from the TELSUR project at the University of Pennsylvania
(Labov, Ash, & Boberg):
Where do people pronounce these pairs of words identically vs. differently?
[Note: The phonetic symbols used on these maps are not IPA symbols]
- Stanford linguist John Baugh's
audio clips
illustrating one speaker (Baugh) using pronunciation rules
from three different varieties of American English
- NPR's Robert Siegel interviews U Penn linguist Bill Labov about recent and ongoing changes in pronunciation in varieties of American English
- Dialect maps from the TELSUR project at the University of Pennsylvania
(Labov, Ash, & Boberg):
Where do people pronounce these pairs of words identically vs. differently?
[Note: The phonetic symbols used on these maps are not IPA symbols]
- Language variation and implications for education
- John Baugh's links related to the Ebonics controversy (Stanford U)
NEW | Historical language change
- Language relationships in the Indo-European language family
- From San Diego State U
- From Wikipedia
- "Say something in Proto-Indo-European", by Geoffrey Sampson
- Writing systems and ancient languages: AncientScripts.com, by Lawrence K. Lo
