Linguistics

David Crystal’s Pelican Original, first published 1971 and reprinted through 1980 — this copy from the long middle of that run. Crystal was born in Lisburn in 1941, read English at University College London, and was Professor of Linguistic Science at Reading by the time this appeared; the note on the author lists his research in intonation, stylistics and language acquisition, and his editorship of the Journal of Child Language. The book runs from “Why Study Language?” through traditional approaches and linguistic science to the major themes — comparative philology, Saussure, phonetics, phonology, morphology, surface and deep syntax, semantics. The cover sets the sentence “the linguist saw the pelican” in IPA above its own phrase-structure derivation, a design carried across the whole Pelican linguistics series.