Although its purpose is to teach statistics, he uses examples from almost all kinds of linguistic areas, and therefore may provide a nice introduction to all sorts of other relevant linguistic areas of inquiry, given that your concern is precisely that, if an NLPer is for example in syntax, s/he has no knowledge of sociolinguistics, phonetics or psycholinguistics, to name just a few of the other areas covered by that book.
Another one which is certainly outdated but has its merits for exactly introducing the reader to a broad range of issues is Computers and human language, by George W. Smith, 1991. I used it when I taught NLP to computer science students back in 1994 :-)
Hope to have helped, Diana -- Diana Santos Univ. of Oslo
2013/2/12 Mcenery, Tony <a.mcenery at lancaster.ac.uk>:
> For a very broad introduction to the study of the English language, there is:
>
> J. Culpeper, F. Katamba, P. Kerswill, R. Wodak, T. McEnery (Eds.) (2009) English Language: Description, Variation and Context Basingstoke: Palgrave.
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [corpora-bounces at uib.no] on behalf of Dominic P Rout [d.rout at sheffield.ac.uk]
> Sent: 12 February 2013 13:55
> To: corpora at uib.no
> Subject: [Corpora-List] Broader linguistic resources
>
> Hello all
>
> I was recently discussing the work of Steven Pinker with a colleague,
> and we talked about how one thing lacked by many PhD students in NLP
> is a broader understanding of language, outside of their chosen field.
>
> It was suggested that I ask this list the following question:
>
> What are some useful, broad and accessible overview books about
> language (specifically in English) that might be useful to a student
> of NLP wishing to broaden their horizons?
>
> Does anyone have any answers, or starting points?
>
> Thanks
> Dominic Rout
> PhD Student
> Natural Language Processing Group
> The University of Sheffield
> http://domrout.co.uk
>
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