/lit/ - Literature

>>11527394
I don't know any books, but I really enjoy the YouTube channel Langfocus. Good luck, anon.

Start with Saussure, then Lacan, then decide if you can take any more

>linguistics
hmmmmmmmm. Welp, I wouldn't know about that man, thoughts and prayers.(ironically)
Start with semiotics.
Read
Winfred noths, handbook of semiotics
The essential Peirce volume 2(though you should really read volume one first)
Umberto Eco's "a theory of semiotics" and "semiotics and the philsophy of language"
Then if you want you can read journals, or you can look at biosemiotics or linguistics.
I will be honest and say I don't really study linguistics so can't recommend anything beyond semiotics and philsophy of language. I will say that I have a big issue with studying language in a vacuum. I can't see how you are supposed to make a science out of language without grounding it in semiotics, or even worse, by grounding it in semiology. I take offense to grounding linguistics in Saussurian semiology and analytic autism.

>>11527394
He should have just pirated it, or returned it after scanning as many pages as he could

The Chicago Manual of Style (warm up)

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities
The Philosophy of Language by A.P. Martinich (will lead you onwards to the linguistic shitstorm of the 20th century)
The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language (same)
some stuff:
Lectures on the English Language by George Perkins Marsh
The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of "Proper" English, from Shakespeare to South Park
Composition of Scientific Words: A manual of methods and a lexicon of materials for the practice of logotechnics (not what you think)
Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar
Corpus, Concordance, Collocation
Lexicology and Corpus Linguistics
Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English: A Minimalist Approach
Semantics (Saeed)

linguistics is the physics of philosophy

>>11527643
>>11527662
>>11527801
Thank you my friends, I look forward to getting started.

>>11527960
And big thanks to you too.

>>11527662
Saussure begs Benveniste because he corrects his flawed notion of the arbitrariness of the sign, the flawed notion which is the basis of Lacan and other charlatans like Kristeva.

>>11527394
Seems like the stuff adduced so far is mostly the theoretical and philosophical background of linguistics, and I am certainly not arguing against starting to read it, but consider "Linguistics: An Introduction" by William B. McGregor if you want to get into the practical fields of general Linguistics.

If you like to get into Historical Linguistics, get Lyle Campbell's "Historical Linguistics" and work your way through it, it's really good.

>>11527394
The kingdom of Speech is fantastic, I’d highly recommend it.

>>11528064
care to extrapolate?

>>11528112
Well I'm not gonna write out an academic essay, but I can give you the headlines. A collection of Benveniste is available on libgen in English, it's a pretty short piece and the other ones in the collection I can recommend as well, so it's a good pick-up in any case. Basically it goes like this:
Firstly, you have to remember Saussure originally studied Indo-Germanic, a faculty that deals with sounds and only at the very periphery with what you usually associate with linguistics, like semiotics, semantics, pragmatics, etc. Secondly, the Saussure we know is the Saussure collected and interpreted by his students, just a general word of caution because Saussure didn't just talk about signifiers and signifieds, there was also a chosé that people forget and some other stuff as well.
It is arbitrary that a given word is applied to a given thing in the outside world and no other, but this does not pertain to the sign itself. Between a concept (signifie) and the sound-image (signifiant) there's a total correlation, plain and simple, if I say 'tree' you immediately think of a tree, the dissemination of meaning occurs outside of the linguistic sign in the real application of a word, which is completely arbitrary. Benjamin called this 'die Magie des Urteils' (Über die Sprache überhaupt etc.).
Then there's some technical stuff like Saussure not keeping his terminology straight and mixing the relative with the arbitrary (what is relative is in no way arbitrary), but just read it my man.

>>11528112
Oh yeah the piece is called something like 'the nature of the linguistic sign'. Now compare with Kristeva the erudite whore: 'The arbitrariness of the Saussurian sign has placed us in front of a bar, or even an emptiness, that constitutes the referent/signified/signifier relationship, of which Lacan has merely taken up the "visible" aspects in the gaping hole of the mirror stage'. Being the shrewd kike (=academic) she is, if she's ever confronted with Benveniste, she'll probably claim that it doesn't matter if it's true or not, it'll just have been a self-fulfilling prophecy, but that's besides the point. I also think it very likely that it's not just ignorance, it's a studied ignorance, but I still think she's an erudite whore.
Oh yes and she bases her theory on two things: Saussure and Bakthin. Bakthin I have no particular quarrel with, in fact I rather like him, but his philology was in no way sound. It wasn't even philology. Christ I hate Kristeva so goddamn much. The whole notion of intertextuality is retarded and removes agency from the author in favour of some supranatural body of text. It has no merit and there's no reason at all just to not just say 'allusion' (because that's what it is).
But I digress.

>>11527394
george yule-the study of language
exactly what you want anon

>>11528528
savage

>>11527394
Syzygy Part 2 Logos

https://youtu.be/u6y6_pk6qE4

The Logos is an important concept within philosophy, psychology and religion. On one hand it is typically
referred to as "The Word", an emanation of the divine, the voice of "God", and speech itself. On the other
hand it represents reason and logic, secondary qualities which could not exist without a syntax, i .e. a
language.

Human language is a very peculiar and mystical faculty of endless fascination.
The language systems we have developed over millennia are
distinctly more complex than any other species. At the same time we are coincidentally the the most "self-aware" species on the planet. The relationship between symbolic representation (i .e. human language and
art) and subjective consciousness is inescapable. Another parallel that can be drawn here is that both require
recursion.

How human language came be to be is a topic of much speculation. What reason did our ancestors have to
develop complex language? Fundamentally, the answer lies in the emergence of our sense of self. The sense
of self is nothing less than the "big bang" of human consciousness at the beginning of "time", that "I am I ".
Before that defining moment human beings would have existed in a timeless state, much like a new born
child. Similarly, an infant has no sense of self and hence no ego. The construction of the self is a gradual
process both historically and psychologically.

>>11528654
the ego is a spook though

>>11527394
To get an understanding of Chomsky do not dive right into Chomsky. You will not understand it, although you will think you do. Instead, check out the book Chomsky's Universal Grammar by Virginia Cook. It provides a good overview. If you want to go further down that path, some good generative syntax textbooks are the one by Adger and the one by Carnie.

inb4 Chomsky/UG is retarded. The man has had an influence on the field (for good or bad) that is almost impossible to overstate. You need to really understand his theories, even if you end up disagreeing with him.

Other stuff that's good:
>Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory
>Heim and Kratzer's Semantics in Generative Grammar
If you do read Saussure and you become interested in structuralism:
>Trubetzkoy's writings on phonology