Linguistics: A Guide to Library Research

Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA) abstracts and indexes the international literature in linguistics and related disciplines in the language sciences. The database covers all aspects of the study of language including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Complete coverage is given to various fields of linguistics including descriptive, historical, comparative, theoretical and geographical linguistics. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,500 serials publications, and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, and dissertations. 

The definitive index for the study of language, literature, linguistics, rhetoric and composition, folklore, film, dramatic arts, and the history of printing and publishing, covering scholarly publications from the 1920s to the present. It is produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), an organization dedicated to the study and teaching of language and literature.

International in scope, it includes over 2.7 million citations to journal articles, books, articles in books, series, translations, scholarly editions, websites, and dissertations from 6,000+ periodicals (including peer-reviewed e-journals) and 1,200 book publishers. While the majority of records are from English-language publications, at least sixty other languages are represented including French, Spanish, German, Russian, Portuguese, Norwegian, and Swedish.

Includes the MLA Directory of Periodicals and the MLA Thesaurus, a collection of thousands of subject terms and personal names used in indexing the bibliography.

The English Corpora site provides a search interface for some of the most well-known corpora for linguistic research, containing millions (or billions) of words. Some of the most famous are the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the British National Corpus (BYU-BNC). English Corpora also includes News on the Web (NOW), Global Web-based English (GLOWbE) and the Wikipedia Corpus. This link is to U-M's institutional account, with higher search limits for U-M researchers. Create a personal account to save queries and customized word lists.

EEG features comprehensive descriptions of individual languages from geographical regions and language families all across the world, including Africa, South America, Asia and Asia-Pacific. Makes full grammars available together in an interlinked and semantically-annotated format, enabling cross-linguistic queries. Allows for cross-language comparison of grammatical phenomena, as well as individual language descriptions. Enhanced through multimedia components such as audio, video and maps. Updated semiannually with new grammars. Initially 20 grammars, EEG will grow with semi-annual updates.

Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) is a historical database of print and manuscript sources documenting the English language between the fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries. LEME includes over 1,200 lexicons, 150 of which are fully searchable. Through these historical lexicons, researchers can see how speakers of early modern English described the meaning of words and their equivalents in other languages. The database includes monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries, lexical encyclopedias, hard-word glossaries, spelling lists, and lexically-valuable treatises.