I have been working on a text-book titled "Introduction to Linguistics for foreign language learners".
I conceptualized the title in the very early days of my teaching linguistics at JNU, New Delhi, where I taught the undergraduates doing foreign languages like French, Spanish, Russian, German, Japanese and others. I asked one of my teachers who had assigned me the teaching job after the centre had approved my name for teaching the optional/tool classes of undergraduates,'.... if there was any book that I can use as the text-book for my class. The teacher said that unfortunately there is no such title. From that day onwards, I have been wondering why we have never thought about this. People outside the discipline have so much of expectation from us and we have not even bother to give them this much of help. What else could be more useful than telling the foreign language learners that there are methods in linguistics and by using them, you can accelerate your process of learning the language or these methods will help you to understand the difficult concepts of language and their functions and thus, you will be surprised and be open to learn the new structures of a foreign language.
The book that I am working on at the moment (the deadline is July 2007) has the following components:
Introduction to Linguistics for foreign language learners
0. What is language?
0.1. What are the components of language?
0.2. How linguistics can help in understanding the structure and function of a
language?
1. Phonetics and Phonology
1.1. Description of Sounds
1.2. Articulation of various sounds
1.3. How is umlaut in German and other languages produced?
1.4. What is a syllable?
1.5. What is the structure of a syllable?
1.6. Suprasegmental
features in languages
1.7. Some useful Phonological rules and their explanations
2. Morphology
2.1. Branches of Morphology
2.2. Parts of Speech
2.3. Nominal Morphology
2.4. Number
2.5. Person
2.6. Gender
2.7. Case
2.8. Verbal Morphology
2.9. Various type of verbs
2.10. Finite, non-finite & infinitive
2.11. Main, Auxiliary & Modal
2.12. Stative and non-stative verbs
2.13. What is verb conjugation
2.14. Derivational Morphology
2.15. Morphology of Suffixes and Prefixes which help to derive new words
2.16. Compounding
3.0 Syntax
3.1. What is the difference between a phrase and a compound word?
3.2. Various kind of Phrase-Structures
3.3. How constituents are formed
3.4. What is Argument of Verb and why is it important for syntax
3.5. The notion of Case agreement
(most romance languages have a complex
case agreement system)
3.6. Types of Sentences ( Affirmative, Interrogative, Negative)
3.7. Simple Sentences
3.8. Compound Sentences
3.9. Complex Sentences
3.10. Relative Clause
3.11. Complementation
4.0. Semantics
4.1. Conceptual versus associative meaning
4.2. Lexical relations
4.3. Synonymy
4.4. Antonym
4.5. Hyponymy
4.6. Homophony
4.7. Homonymy
4.8. Polysemy
4.9. Metonymy
4.10. Collection
5.0. Translation: theory and practice
5.1. Types of translation
5.2. Translation and equivalence
5.3. Problems in translations
6.0. Language in context
6.1. Sociolinguistics
6.2. Psycholinguistics
6.3. Stylistics
7.0. References