Linguistics: Books

Search the library's discovery service to find books about your linguistics topic.

Search WorldCat, a union catalog of millions books held by thousands of libraries in the U.S. and beyond. Request titles of interest via our ILL service.

Have you ever come to the library looking for a particular book only to discover even more useful titles located on a nearby shelf? "Serendipity" refers to a concept in library science in which researchers unexpectedly discover other books of interest while browsing the stacks. Unfortunately, serendipity occurs less often in the online realm. In order to make serendipity work for you, visit the physical library and browse the General Stacks in and around these call number ranges:

LB1025 to LB1050.75 (Teaching principles and practice)

P101 to P410 (Language; Linguistic theory; Comparative grammar)

Take just a few minutes to understand Library of Congress Subject Headings ( LCSH). LCSH are preferred terms applied by cataloging librarians (i.e., catalogers) to book records. These terms describe for researchers the subjects of books held by the library. Catalogers never make up a subject heading "on the fly" but instead choose from a list of terms already agreed upon by other librarians. LCSH are consistently applied so that a researcher can be confident of retrieving all (or mostly all) books held by the library on a particular topic.

Example: A researcher needs to find books about second language acquisition or the process by which non-native speakers learn a new language (L2), for example an English speaker who wishes to learn Spanish. Relevant LCSH include:

1. Applied linguistics
2. Code switching (Linguistics)
3. English language — Acquisition
4. English language — Study and teaching
5. Generative Grammar
6. Interlanguage (Language learning)
7. Markedness (Linguistics)
8. Second language acquisition
9. Spanish language — Acquisition
10. Spanish language — Study and teaching

Although highly useful once known, LCSH might not occur to researchers, even graduate students and faculty. Fortunately, researchers can easily discover relevant subject headings by performing a keyword search. It is even possible to look for a keyword in the subject field but this will be a guess and might return no results. If you find a relevant book record, remember to click on the assigned LCSH to locate additional titles on that subject. In all cases, narrowly focused keyword searches return the most relevant results.

• [KEYWORD=] "English as a second language"
• [KEYWORD IN SUBJECT=] "second language acquisition" AND [KEYWORD IN SUBJECT=] English
• [KEYWORD IN SUBJECT=] "second language acquisition" AND [KEYWORD IN SUBJECT=] Spanish
• [KEYWORD IN SUBJECT=] "Spanish language" AND [KEYWORD IN SUBJECT=] teaching

Books about the history and development of the English language...

Books about the social aspects of specific languages...

Books about other linguistics topics...