LING 500: Linguistics for Non-Majors

BASIC RESOURCES IN LINGUISTICS

Reference Books:

Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 2nd Ed. Online and 1st ed. in print P29 .E48 1994 Main Reference.

International Encyclopedia of Linguistics P29 .I58 2003 Information Commons Reference Multi-volume set. Index at the end.

Indexes (Data Bases)

LLBA: Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts
Broad coverage of language and linguistic issues including language education. Indexes journals, books, dissertations, technical reports. Began in 1973. LLBA has a thesaurus which contains some definitions.

MLA: Modern Language Association International Bibliography
Covers language and linguistics as well as literature. MLA International Bibliography offers a detailed bibliography of journal articles, books including book chapters and dissertations. Produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the electronic version of the bibliography dates back to the 1920s Contains links to some full text.

PsycInfo
PsycINFO, from the American Psychological Association (APA), contains nearly 2.3 million citations and summaries of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations, all in psychology and related disciplines, dating as far back as the 1800s.

AnthroSource
Developed by the American Anthropological Association (AAA), AnthroSource brings 100 years of anthropological material online to scholars and the public, including the current issues for 15 of the AAA's most critical peer-reviewed publications through the end of 2006, including American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly. It also offers an archive of all AAA journals and seamless access to archival content housed at JSTOR for key AAA publications including American Anthropologist.

ERIC
ERIC, the Educational Resource Information Center, provides access to education literature and resources. The database provides access to information from journals included in the Current Index of Journals in Education and Resources in Education Index. ERIC provides full text of more than 2,200 digests along with references for additional information and citations and abstracts from over 1,000 educational and education-related journals.

Online Catalog

Search Strategy Builder This source will help you put together your search terms.

Key word searching: Searches for the words you enter placing ands between the words and looking for them anywhere in the catalog record.
Subject searching: Searches for subject you enter only in the subject area of the catalog record. Subjects must be Library of Congress format.

Tips on searching for books about a particular language: The subject heading is always NAME OF LANGUAGE plus the word LANGUAGE; e.g. Navajo language, Bulgarian language.

Dictionaries are found using the subject: Spanish language dictionaries; Basque language dictionaries. For dictionaries which translate from one language to another use: Spanish language dictionaries English.

Using Data Bases

Familiarize yourself with the vocabulary of your subject area, in this case linguistics. Use the online catalog and look at subject headings, titles, tables and contents. Use the encyclopedias listed above. Check your notes from class and your readings.
Look for a thesaurus and subject list in your data base.
Try combinations of terms. If your words are too narrow try to figure out the broader terms. If you search is too large, look for one or two really good articles and see what words are used to describe them and what words appear in the abstracts.

LLBA:

LLBA has a good thesaurus.
It includes abstracts of the articles
It allows you to look at your search history and then combine search results.

MLA:

MLA is older than LLBA
It does not include abstracts for articles
It has a thesaurus.
It includes a lot of information about literature as well as linguistics.
It allows you to look at your search history and modify searches or combine them.
It contains a separate, useful list of journals indexed in MLA with information about each journal.

Contact Sara Heitshu for more information