A framework detailing the nature of various forms of schemata and how the writer interacts with them as personal symbols are iterative translated to communal symbols during the act of writing.

Kuhn's seminal framing of the theory of paradigm shifts, and their impact on scientific thought.

Barthes' expansion of Saussure's initial framing of the field of semiology. A bit dry, but short.

Culler's writtings on Deconstruction in the 80's.

This book is a multipronged argument against the idea that the mind is conditioned solely by experience.

Basic English was an invention of Ogden and some related researchers. It is an artificial language (using only 850 words) which is a subset of English. It was intended as an auxillary language which could be taught in a week to anyone, and which had a smooth transition into Standard English.

The Art of Memory was a system of mnemonic techniques which began during the period of Greek Poets, rose to popularity amongst the Roman Orators, and was embellished and expanded during the Enlightenment. While it has mostly been forgotten now, it shaped large parts of academic thought from 400 bce to about 1700 ce. This book provides a solid history of the Art's evolution over this time frame through its use and evolution by such minds as Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, and Leibniz.

This book provides a thorough covering of code as literature, with guidelines for how to approach reading existing code, descriptions of many of the code styles and idioms one is likely to encounter in the wild in Open Source projects, and exercises to cement all of this knowledge. Provides a good basis for the code as language discussion.

One of the seminal works on linguistics, this text is short and approachable. de Saussure taught a course 3 times in the early years of the 1900s, and this book was compiled after his death by his students, who were very impressed with his work. This book went a long way towards establishing the current field of linguistics, and laid the groundwork for Semiotics.

A published collection of Paul Graham's (a big mover and shaker in the Scheme community) online essays. These essays largely deal with the relationship between understanding, language difficulty, and hacking. They are good reads.

An independent volume dealing specifically with linguistic problems in semantics. Major theoretical questions considered include Semantics and Grammar, Deixis, Mood and Illocutionary Force and Modality.

Also know as "Semiotics for Beginners", David Chandler provides a good initial background into the field and history of semiotics (which is the theory of Signs). This book is written in a style which gradualy introduces the reader to the technical vocabulary of Semiotics, and is much more accessable than Umberto Eco's "A Theory of Semiotics".

The aim of this book is to explore the theoretical possibility and the social function of a unified approach to every phenomenon of signification and/or communication.