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 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). These are subject terms assigned by cataloging librarians to book "records" (or the information about a book in the catalog). Subject terms help the researcher understand what a book is about. Librarians never make up a subject "on the fly" but rather choose from a list of terms already agreed to by other librarians. LCSH are very consistently applied to book records. This means that a researcher can be confident of retrieving most books held by the library on a research topic by clicking on the hyperlinked subject term within the record.
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 not return any 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.