Teachers as Scholars

Teachers as Scholars
English: A Tale of Two Languages
Eileen Fitzpatrick
Department of Linguistics

Bibliography

Highly Recommended:
Aronoff, Mark. 1976. Word Formation in Generative Grammar. MIT Press.

Millward, C.M. 1988. A Biography of the English Language, 2nd Edition. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. An excellent, detailed history of English with charts, illustrations, and many examples of each stage of the language.

Myerson, Rosemarie Farkas. 1976. A Study of Children's Knowledge of Certain Word Formation Rules and the Relationship of This Knowledge to Various Forms of Reading Achievement. Ed.D. Diss. Harvard.

Recommended:
Algeo, John. 1982. Problems in the Origins and Development of the English Language. Harcourt, Brace & World. A workbook with many exercises.

Barber, Charles. 2007. The English Language: A Historical Introduction. Cambridge University Press.

Bobrick, Benson. 2001. Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution it Inspired. Simon & Schuster. A historical/political account of Biblical translations into English and the translation of the King James Bible. A bit drier than McGrath (see above), which deals more with cultural history.

Davis, Norman. 1967. Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. A major source of readings in Old English.

National Reading Vocabulary Lists.

McGrath, Alistair E. 2001. In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How it Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture. Doubleday.

The Oxford English Dictionary. 1989. 2nd ed. 20 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. THE dictionary. You can access the OED here through Sprague Library if you have a MSU username and password.

Wells, John. 1982. Accents of English, 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A thorough description of each of the major Englishes: British, Irish, American, Canadian, Australian, Caribbean, New Zealand, South African.

Talmy, Leonard. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Timothy Shopen (ed.) Cambridge University Press.

Winchester, Simon. 1998. The Professor and the Madman. HarperCollins. The Oxford English Dictionary and its most prolific contributor, with good information about the history of dictionaries of English in a page-turner presentation.