Erika Hoff

I find it harder and harder to review textbook/reference books like this one, since they are going to be used by such a wide range of peoples each with their own unique precious flower of a background, for a dizzying array of purposes. Here are some fairly arbitrarily selected points in this book's favour:

a) my students are using it, and they are all getting good grades (the class average is currently sitting at like 77%, and I know I'm an indulgent marker but that ain't all me), and they're smart and all and I don't want to take away from that but I have also seen them cannily referring to the textbook, in their assignments and even in class!

b) I am teaching this stuff, per above, but I took the course for mercenary motives not because it's my area; I'm no kind of expert in most of it--with the exception of phonology and sort of theories of acquisition (though in my case it's more like "history of theories of acquisition"). Acq. of morphosyntax, acq. of pragmatics, acq. of semantics, bilingual and L2 acq., all mysterious and scary to me. Now slightly less so, and Hoff has provided me with a reliable sidearm that has gotten me through a zombie-filled term.

c) so as for the intellectual-history stuff that is my area, and the more science/technology studies (an opposed to the philosophy/natural-history and Marxist/anti-imperialist angles of my thesis) critique I am hoping to develop of acquisition studies and the way they conceptualize the speaking or unspeaking human, I can definitely imagine referring to this book early and often. It's super good on the big picture.

I think this amounts to an endorsement.… (meer)