Search our discovery service to find books about your topic. Search by narrowly-focused search terms (or keywords). The keyword linguistics, for example, is probably too broad, at least on its own. Instead, if you're looking for books about the English language and society, try "English language" AND sociolinguistics.
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 looked for a particular book on the library's shelves only to discover a more useful title located on a nearby shelf? Serendipity refers to a concept in library science in which researchers unexpectedly discover books of interest while browsing the stacks. Unfortunately, serendipity is difficult to duplicate online. Make serendipity work for you by visiting the physical library. Browse the General Stacks in and around the following call number ranges:
LB1025 to LB1050.75
Teaching principles and practice
P101 to P410
Language; Linguistic theory; Comparative grammar
Take 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. Such terms communicate to researchers (you!) 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:
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.