What are some classic papers in linguistics that a beginner should read?

Someone has asked this question on Quora and a lad named Marc Ettlinger, PhD, Linguistics, UC Berkeley provided us with this great answer:

Linguistics sits somewhere between sciences like neuroscience, computer science and psychology and humanities, including modern languages and philology.

 I'll highlight a few classic books and articles with the idea that there are many that I'm leaving out. Note that there is a bias here towards older papers that have shown their reliability over time, whereas the most relevant papers to someone doing research now will be generally newer, but less reliable.

Broca (1865) On the site of the faculty of articulated speech. - Pioneering study of neurolinguistics, identifying Broca's area

Paul Broca

·    Saussure (1916). A Course in General Linguistics - Introduced a number of ideas fundamental to the study of modern linguistics including the arbitrariness of the sign and the importance of studying linguistics synchronically

·         Sapir (1921) Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech

Edward Sapir

 ·  Jakobson (1941). Child Language: Aphasia and Linguistic Universals - Jakboson was a giant of structuralism, but this volume is the one that's really lasted the test of time.

·   Wittgenstein (1953). Philosophical Investigations. The seminal work on the philosophy of language, introducing Language-games and key work onCategory theory

·         Whorf (1956) Language, Thought, and Reality - The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

·       Berko (1958) The Child's Learning of English Morphology. - Introduced thewug-test and popularized the idea of studying child language as a way of unlocking the secrets of language

·         Chomsky. (1959) A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior - The critique of behaviorism that launched the cognitive revolution.

·       Labov, W. (1964) The Social Stratification of English in New York City - Launched modern sociolinguistics

·               Chomsky (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax - Culmination of 5-10 years of revolutionizing the study of linguistics as a cognitive science

·    Greenberg. (1966) Language Universals - Revealed striking patterns of regularity across languages

·             Lenneberg (1967). Biological Foundations of Language. Introduced the idea of a critical period

·         Chomsky & Halle (1968) The Sound Pattern of English - Treatise on generative phonology

Chomsky & Halle

·         Geschwind (1970). The Organization of Language and the Brain - Key state-of-the-art on language and the brain

·         Eimas et al., (1971). Speech perception in infants. Pioneering research on child language.

·         Brown (1973). A first language: The early stages. One of the first careful documentations of a child learning language.

·         Ladefoged (1975) A course in phonetics - The textbook on phonetics, to this day

·         Grice (1975) ‘Logic and Conversation’ - Foundational work on pragmatics and diyadic conversation.

·         Lakoff & Johnson (1980) Metaphors We Live By - One of the touchstones in the emerging Cognitive Linguistics

·         Fodor (1983) The Modularity of Mind - The clearest argument for encapsulation and modularity of the language faculty

·         Werker & Tees (1984) Cross Language Speech Perception - Helped establish the processes involved in the earliest stages of language understanding.

·         Prince & Smolensky (1993) Optimality Theory - Transformed phonology and persists as the dominant paradigm

·         Nunberg, Sag & Wasow (1994) Idioms - A really nice example of a clear, interesting paper that I keep returning to over and over - more of a sentimental favorite on my part, plus Nunberg. Yes, that Geoff Nunberg, before he was famous.

·         Chomsky (1995) The Minimalist Program - The current paradigm for studying syntax

·         Saffran, Aslin & Newport (1996) Statistical Learning by 8-month-old Infants - Re-introduced the idea that language acquisition may depend on domain-general mechanisms

·         Luce & Pisoni (1999). Recognizing Spoken Words: The Neighborhood Activation Model. One of the most cited papers in psycholinguistics and speech recognition.

·         Kuhl (2000) A new view of language acquisition

·         Jurafsky & Martin (2000). Touchstone for computational linguistics.

·         Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch (2002) The Faculty of Language: What is it, Who Has It and How Did It Evolve - Pushed all the generative linguistics chips onto the notion of recursions. And the response: Pinker & Jackendoff (2004) The faculty of language: what's special about it?

Well, this is not all, but I think that whoever is going to read this post, will be busy for a while. Therefore, enjoy it.