About Linguistics at Oxford

Introductions to Linguistics at Oxford University Press

• Introduction from John Davey, Linguistics Editor, OUP UK
  
  
• Introduction from Peter Ohlin, Linguistics Editor, OUP USA
  
  
• Introduction to Applied Linguistics by Professor Henry Widdowson

We aim to publish the best and most exciting work in linguistics for scholars and students at all levels. We ask our authors to do their best to make their work as accessible as possible to researchers in related fields. Working closely with OUP in New York we cover every aspect of the discipline. The main commissioning activity in Oxford falls into the following categories:

Sociolinguistics is more commonly published from New York but there is no hard-and-fast division of subfields between the two branches. Most books published in linguistics connect in some way to work in fields such as psychology, human biology, philosophy, cognitive science, lexicography, and so on, and we promote and market them accordingly. Our linguistics publishing is independent of any single school or approach and includes the fruits of cooperation and synthesis among once or currently warring factions.

Textbooks

Our textbooks aim meet the needs of students at introductory, intermediate, advanced, and postgraduate levels.

Three parallel series of surveys report critically on the main research developments in syntax and morphology, semantics and pragmatics, and phonology and phonetics. These are single author books, written at graduate level.

Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics focuses on introductory and intermediate courses. Its most recent title is R. M. W. Dixon's A Semantic Approach to English Grammar and Geert Booij's introduction to morphology, The Grammar of Words.

Core Linguistics is a new series of the textbooks which explain the core concepts and show how these develop into the currently accepted theoretical ideas and analytical tools. The tone of the books is informal; they are well-paced; and have be numerous exercises plus answers. David Adger's Core Syntax, the first of the series, is a widely adopted introduction to Minimalist Syntax.

Submitting a proposal

If you have written or plan to write a book you think OUP ought to publish, please send me a short descriptive letter by post or email. Should you decide to send a proposal this should describe the aim, scope, argument, and readership of the book and its relation to existing literature. Could you also send me a provisional outline of chapters with a paragraph about each of them, together with your estimate of its extent in words and when you plan to complete it? Could you also include a short CV?

John Davey
Consultant editor: Academic and College Linguistics
Oxford University Press
Oxford OX2 6DP
john.davey@oup.com
jcadavey@btinternet.com
44 [0]1865 556767 ext 4157; 44 [0] 1865 316774

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OUP USA's linguistics publishing is co-ordinated closely with that of OUP in the UK, and the outside world will not necessarily know the difference. Nonetheless the program of OUP books that I publish out of the New York office has its own distinctive character. In general I am most interested in publishing for academic and general readers with an interest in the studies of language in its social context. More broadly, I am interested in publishing works of impeccable and up-to-date linguistic scholarship that are sensitive to the need for scholars to speak beyond the confines of their own specialties.

Monograph series

My most well-known series is Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax edited by Richard Kayne of New York University. This distinguished and prolific series has become the venue of choice for the work of top syntacticians around the world including Guglielmo Cinque and Richard Kayne. If you would like to submit a project to this series or any other please see my contact information below.

Other series I handle are Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics edited by Edward Finegan of the University of Southern California, and Studies in Language and Gender edited by Mary Bucholtz of Texas A&M University.

Submitting a proposal

I welcome submission of proposals whether or not they fit into the above named series. A proposal should consist of an introductory description or overview (which includes the rationale for the project and its intended audience), a table of contents, several sample chapters, and a copy of your vita. You may send it to me over e-mail at pho@oup-usa.org or by mail to:
Peter Ohlin
Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
USA

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It is of the nature of linguistics as a disciplinary enquiry that it separates out different aspects of language as experienced by its users and reformulates them as abstractions. Whether the linguist is modelling phonological or syntactic systems, or identifying the essential cognitive or communicative constructs that inform language knowledge, or describing the patterns of actual language behaviour, the result is always at a remove from how people actually experience language in the real world. If this were not the case, if linguists simply recorded experienced reality and were not in T.S.Eliot's words 'expert beyond experience' there would be no point in doing linguistics at all.

But the theoretical and descriptive findings of linguistics can be referred back to the everyday reality from which they were derived and used to reformulate it in its turn in new and informative ways. This is what applied linguistics seeks to do: to refer linguistics back to problems that people have with language in the real world, and look for insights that might be relevant to their clarification and solution.

One obvious set of problems are those which people encounter in the learning of languages other than their own, and the most active area of applied linguistics has been that which seeks to put the teaching of such languages on a principled footing in reference to developments in linguistic theory and description. The titles that figure here are representative of such work. They range from books that make such developments accessible to the non-specialist reader to those which explore in depth their relevance for the way language is to be conceived as a subject, and how courses and classroom activities are to be designed. As such, these books not only extend the field of linguistics itself and lend an additional significance to its enquiries, but also provide an indispensable professional foundation for language pedagogy.

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