There is one setbook for the course. This can be bought in the University bookstore, from Amazon and other online websites as you like. The book is:

Ingo Plag, Maria Braun, Sabine Lappe and Mareille Schramm
Introduction to English Linguistics (2nd edition)
Mouton de Gruyter

We will be working through the chapters chronologically pretty much, so it will be easy for you to see where we are going and where we have been.

The following also presents some easy reading on and around subjects relevant to the introduction...

GeoWissen GEO WISSEN Nr. 40 - 10/07 - Das Geheimnis der Sprache, Hamburg: G+J.

There are alsotwo recommended books. You will not be tested on the contents of these explicitly in the exam for this part of the course, but it will be a good idea if you plan to have them read sometime during your first year:

Aitchison, Jean. (1996). The Seeds of Speech. Language Origin and Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Crystal, David. (2002). The English Language. A Guided Tour of the Language. London: Penguin.