ABSTRACT
With the new linguistics courses at Reading, the demand for introductory material was becoming increasingly urgent. All of us needed further reading to support our lectures, but there were few books that were both accessible and (even more important) enthusing. I wasn’t going to fall into the trap of getting my new-to-the-subject students reading Ogden and Richards, et al. Why were there no motivating introductions to linguistics, to phonetics, to stylistics, to grammar, to semantics, to language acquisition – to anything? It wasn’t good when students (or prospective students) came up and asked for something easy to read on my subject, and I couldn’t help them. There were nice introductions to psychology, sociology, and other subjects around. Why not linguistics? We moaned for a year, then realized that the solution was literally on our doorstep.
