Dominique Maingueneau

In Aborder la linguistique, Maingueneau has penned a flyby overview of the field of linguistics -- origins, main subdivisions, and associated areas of research. At 60 pages, though, this booklet is too short, not to do all of this justice (that would be an impossible task), but merely to convey some insight into the field. Essentially, my main gripe with this booklet is not its length, but its approach. Maingueneau has chosen to list subfields, some terminology, and a few schools of thought with only the barest of explanations of what they are: a contextless enumeration is all that is presented here. Example are rare, and an actual discussion of the kinds of phenomena that the various subfields are concerned with is virtually non-existent

It's hard to see who this was written for. From a linguist's perspective, the terms and schools of thought mentioned here may indeed be said to provide a decent snapshot of the field, but it will be hard for anyone unfamiliar with linguistics to end up with anything but the shallowest grasp. While the bare-bones text might work as a general textbook for an introductory course in linguistics for non-linguists, it cannot stand on its own, and absolutely requires supporting material (seminars, illustrative papers and the like) for it to transcend enumeration and achieve understanding. This renders the booklet mostly useless without a course in linguistics to flesh it out, or at least an accompanying series of seminars in which matters may be illustrated with papers and some actual examples.… (mer)