We regularly get questions or requests for advice about linguistics literature. What books are good? What should I read? So off and on over the past year, we have been working on a linguistics reading list. We hope that this can fill some of the gap and get more students of biblical languages reading and thinking about linguistics.
This reading list is built off our own education and experiences in the classroom as well as our reading of the literature. This necessarily means that it is skewed toward more functionalist and cognitive linguistic perspectives. We certainly read generative linguistics, but we find functional and cognitive linguistics more compelling and more useful for our work. That reality is reflected here. We have not provided annotations for every bibliographic item, but do provide comment on each topic surveyed below. So halfway between a full annotated bibliography and a simple list of books.
A couple topics currently are still left empty, such as historical linguistics. We’re also debating how specific we might want additional topics to be, particularly in spaces where linguists have done work on Ancient Greek that traditional biblical studies seems unaware of. Given the length of this document, that might work better a separate document.
Right now, we cover the following topics:
- General survey
- Grammatical analysis
- Phonetics, Phonology & prosody
- Morphology
- Syntax & syntactic theory
- Information structure
- Semantics & pragmatics
- Cognitive linguistics
- Linguistic typology & language change
- Reference Works
The list is also a work in progress, so you can feel free to simple make a copy of this document if you would want, but only this original version will see additions and annotations added over time, so you also might just want to bookmark the link.
Without further ado…
Koine-Greek 