Linguistics: A Guide to the Reference Literature (review)

This book contains many annotated references to sources useful to both professional linguists and linguistics students of all backgrounds and persuasions. It is but one of eight in the Reference sources in the humanities series edited by James Rettig. I have found it particularly well-suited for a course I regularly teach to beginning graduate students entitled ‘Research methods and bibliography’. There are 1,039 items well-organized into three basic parts, totaling 31 separate sections. This edition has 500 new entries, 50 of which are websites. The indexes by author, title, and subject greatly enhance this volume’s utilitarian value (355–96). It seems awkward but perhaps inevitable, however, for the same author to be listed under different names, e.g. Harold B. Allen is also Harold Byron Allen, or Muhammad H. Bakalla is also M. H. Bakalla (355).

Part 1, ‘General linguistics’ (3–123), includes bibliographies of all kinds, core periodicals, indexes, electronic databases, encyclopedias, etc. Although one finds many well-known publications discussed under ‘core periodicals’, with information about when they began and what kinds of essays they publish, three series seem out of place: Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1975-); Papers from the regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (1968-), and Yearbook of morphology (1988-).

Part 2, ‘Allied areas’ (127–202), covers many so-called hyphenated linguistics fields: anthropological, applied, mathematical, computational, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. One additional related field—semiotics—is included because the author deemed it germane. That decision was a splendid one, in my opinion; however, one may question the inclusion of Sociological abstracts (191) as well as the website of the American Sociological Association (199) since these would be far more relevant to sociologists than sociolinguists.

Part 3 deals with languages (205–354). Generally, the sections are organized according to traditional genetic classification: Indo-European, Dravidian, Afro-Asiatic, etc. However, all African languages are lumped together under ‘African’ (327–37). This was perhaps justified, given its brevity, and as an Afroasiaticist Iwas delighted to see an entire chapter devoted to ‘Afro-Asiatic’ (339–41). However, there were only seven listings in total, three of which were devoted to Arabic. Paul Newman’s Hausa and the Chadic language family: A bibliography (Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 1996) should have been listed under ‘Afroasiatic’ rather than ‘African’ (335).

Let me now turn to the overall scope of the work. DeMiller explains in the introduction to the second edition (xi–xv) that the beginning date for the references is 1957—the publication date of a revolution in linguistics signaled by the appearance of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic structures (The Hague: Mouton and Co.). This was a reasonable decision. She also informs us that certain bibliographies were excluded, e.g. some by the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the Indiana University Linguistics Club. This too was wise; yet one can only speculate why Sir George A. Grierson’s Linguistic survey of India (1903–28) is included (items 621–28, 229), even though it meets the post-1957 specification mentioned above, since it was reprinted by Motilal Banarsidas in New Delhi in 1967–68. This survey is outdated since it was based on data gathered mainly from 1897 to 1900 and utilizes the 1891 census figures. A much more reliable source for languages and their numbers of speakers (in India and elsewhere) is Ethnologue: Languages of the world, 13th edn., ed. by Barbara F. Grimes. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1996, available on the internet (items 572–74, including the language name and family indexes, 210–11).

In conclusion, this book has been carefully prepared, with well-written annotations of varying length—from a few lines to over a page. Finally, let me say that I found no errors to interfere with intelligibility; however, a few minor mistakes occur, e.g. ‘ebonics’ for ‘Ebonics’ (141), or ‘pidgin and Creole languages’ when ‘creole’ is correct (211).