Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  • Cited by 17
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2012
Print publication year:
2009
Online ISBN:
9780511757822

Book description

Are you looking for a genuine introduction to the linguistics of English that provides a broad overview of the subject that sustains students' interest and avoids excessive detail? Introducing English Linguistics accomplishes this goal in two ways. First, it takes a top-down approach to language, beginning with the largest unit of linguistic structure, the text, and working its way down through successively smaller structures (sentences, words, and finally speech sounds). The advantage of presenting language this way is that students are first given the larger picture - they study language in context - and then see how the smaller pieces of language are a consequence of the larger goals of linguistic communication. Second, the book does not contain invented examples, as is the case with most comparable texts, but instead takes its sample materials from the major computerised databases of spoken and written English, giving students a more realistic view of language.

Reviews

‘Just the textbook for those who prefer a thorough introduction to historical, social, and textual aspects of English before tackling formal linguistics.’

Bill Kretzschmar - University of Georgia

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
×

Contents

References
Aarts, B. (1992). Small Clauses in English: The Nonverbal Types. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Aarts, B. and Haegeman, L. (2006). English word classes and phrases. In Aarts, B. and McMahon, A. (eds.), The Handbook of English Linguistics (pp. 117–45). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Aitchison, J. (1991). Language Change: Progress or Decay? 2nd edn. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Altenberg, B. (1990). Predicting text segmentation into tone units. In Svartvik, J. (ed.), The London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English: Description and Research (pp. 275–86). Lund: Lund University Press.
Andersen, G. (2001). Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ashby, M. and Maidment, J. (2005). Introducing Phonetic Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon.
Bailyn, J. F. (2003). Does Russian scrambling exist? In Karimi, S. (ed.), Word Order and Scrambling (pp. 156–76). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Baldi, P. (1990). Indo-European languages. In Comrie, B. (ed.), The World's Major Languages (pp. 31–67). New York: Oxford.
Béjoint, H. (2000). Modern Lexicography: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bell, A. (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society, 13: 145–204.
Biber, D. (1988). Variation Across Speech and Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., and Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited.
Blake, N. (1992). The literary language. In Blake, N. (ed.), The English Language, VoI. II: 1066–1476 (pp. 500–41). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bolinger, D. (1977). Meaning and Form. London: Longman.
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cameron, D. (1995). Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge.
Carter, R. and Cornbleet, S. (2001). The Language of Speech and Writing. London: Routledge.
Chambers, J. K. (2003). Sociolinguistic Theory, 2nd edn. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton. (Reprinted in 2002 by Walter de Gruyter, Inc.)
Chomsky, N. (1959). A review of B. F. Skinner's verbal behavior. Language, 35: 26–58.
Clemetson, L. (2007). The racial politics of speaking well. New York Times. February 4. Section 4, pp. 1 and 4.
Comrie, B. (1989). Language Typology and Language Universals, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Comrie, B. (1990). Russian. In Comrie, B. (ed.), The World's Major Languages (pp. 329–47). New York: Oxford.
Croft, W. (2000). Explaining Language Change: An Evolutionary Approach. Harlow, England: Longman.
Croft, W. and Cruse, D. (2004). Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cruse, D. (1986). Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cruse, D. (2004). Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crystal, D. (2000). Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Crystal, D. (2003). English as a Global Language, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Daneš, F. (ed.) (1974). Papers on Functional Sentence Perspective. Prague: Academia.
D'Arcy, A. (2007). Like and language ideology: Disentangling fact from fiction. American Speech, 28(4): 386–419.
A Dictionary of Prefixes, Suffixes, and Combining Forms (2002). Taken from Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Springfield, MA: Merriam Webster's. www.spellingbee.com/pre_suf_comb.pdf (accessed March 17, 2008).
Dijk, T. A. (1988). News as Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Dijk, T. A. and Kintsch, W.. (1983). Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academic Press.
Dixon, R. M. W. (1997). The Rise and Fall of Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dresher, B. E. and Lahiri, A. (2005). Main stress left in Early Middle English. In Fortescue, M.et al. (eds.), Historical Linguistics: Selected Papers from the 16th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (pp. 75–85). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Dyson, E. D. (2005). Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?New York: Basic Civitas Books.
Edmonds, P. and Hirst, G. (2002). Near-synonymy and lexical choice. Computational Linguistics, 28(2): 105–44.
Fellbaum, C. (1998). Introduction. In Fellbaum, C. (ed.), Wordnet: An Electronic Lexical Database. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fillmore, C. (1996). The pragmatics of constructions. In Slobin, D.et al. (eds.), Social Interaction, Social Context, and Language: Essays in Honor of Susan Ervin-Tripp (pp. 53–70). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Firbas, J. (1992). Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fish, Stanley (2005). Interview. On the Media. 22 July 2005. Transcript available at: onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_072205_open.html (accessed June 22, 2008).
Fournier, J.-M. (2007). From a Latin syllable-driven stress system to a Romance versus Germanic morphology-driven system: in honour of Lionel Guierre. Language Sciences, 29: 218–36.
Francis, N. (1992). Language corpora B. C. In Svartvik, J. (ed.), Directions in Corpus Linguistics (pp. 17–32). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Frawley, W. (1992). Linguistic Semantics. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Gilliver, P. (2000). Appendix II: OED personalia. In Mugglestone, L. (ed.), Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest (pp. 232–52). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gimbutas, M. (1956). The Prehistory of Europe. Part I: Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Copper Age Cultures in Russia and the Baltic Area. American School of Prehistoric Research, Harvard University Bulletin No. 20. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum.
Gordon, R. G. (ed.) (2005). Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 15th edn. Dallas, TX: SIL International. (Electronic version: www.ethnologue.com, accessed June 22, 2008)
Greenberg, J. H. (2000). Indo-European and its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Vol. I: Grammar; Vol. II: Lexicon. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hake, R. and Williams, J. (1981). Style and its consequences: Do as I do, not as I say. College English, 43.5: 33–451.
Hall, J. H. (2004). The dictionary of American regional English. In Finegan, E. and Rickford, J. R. (eds.), Language in the USA (pp. 92–112). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd edn. London: Edward Arnold.
Halliday, M. A. K. and Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
Halliday, M. A. K. and Hasan, R. (1985). Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective. Victoria, Australia: Deakin University Press.
Halliday, M. A. K. and Matthiessen, C. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 3rd edn. London: Hodder Education.
Hammond, M. (1999). The Phonology of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Handbook of the International Phonetic Association (1999). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hewlett, N. and Beck, J. M. (2006). An Introduction to the Science of Phonetics. Oxford and New York: Routledge.
Hogg, R. (2003). An Introduction to Old English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Huddleston, R. and Pullum, G. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hull, D. L. (1988). Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hymes, D. (1971). On Communicative Competence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Jones, S. (2002). Antonymy: A Corpus-Based Perspective. London: Routledge.
Kay, C. J. (2000). Historical semantics and historical lexicography: will the twain ever meet? In Coleman, J. and Kay, C. (eds.), Lexicology, Semantics and Lexicography in English Historical Linguistics: Selected Papers from the Fourth G.L. Brook Symposium (pp. 53–68). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension: A Paradigm for Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kirkman, A. J. (1992). Good Style: Writing for Science and Technology. Oxford: Taylor and Francis.
Kornfilt, J. (1990). Turkish and the Turkic languages. In Comrie, B. (ed.), The World's Major Languages (pp. 619–44). New York: Oxford.
Labov, W. (1972). The stratification of (r) in New York City department stores. In Labov, W. (ed.), Sociolinguistic Patterns (pp. 43–70). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Labov, W. (1973). The boundaries of words and their meanings. In Bailey, C. J. and Shuy, R. (eds.), New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English (pp. 340–73). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Labov, W. (1994). Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal Factors. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Ladefoged, P. (2001). A Course in Phonetics, 4th edn. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt.
Ladefoged, P. (2005). Vowels and Consonants, 2nd edn. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Landau, S. (2001). Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lee, D. (2001). Genres, registers, text types, domains, and styles: Clarifying the concepts and navigating a path through the BNC jungle. Language Learning & Technology, 5.3: 37–72.
Leech, G. (1981). Semantics, 2nd edn. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin.
Leech, G. (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics, Vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Malmkjær, K. (2005). Linguistics and the Language of Translation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Matthews, P. H. (1981). Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Matthews, P. H. (1991). Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McArthur, T. (ed.) (1992). The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Meyer, C. F. (2003). The Lexis/Nexis database as historical corpus. Paper presented at the 24th annual conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern English, Guernsey, British Isles.
Milligan, S. (2007). Democratic contenders unite against Bush. Boston Globe. 27 April: A1.
Milroy, J. and Gordon, M. (2003). Sociolinguistics: Method and Interpretation. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Milroy, J. and Milroy, L. (1997). Varieties and variation. In Coulmas, F. (ed.), The Handbook of Sociolinguistics (pp. 47–64). Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Moon, R. (2007). Sinclair, lexicography, and the Cobuild project: The application of theory. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 12: 159–81.
Murphy, M. (2003). Semantic Relations and the Lexicon: Antonymy, Synonymy and Other Paradigms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Murray, J. A. H. (ed.) (1971). The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. London: Oxford University Press.
Nelson, G. (1996). The design of the corpus. In Greenbaum, S. (ed.), Comparing English Worldwide: the International Corpus of English (pp. 27–35). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nelson, G. (2002). International Corpus of English: Markup manual for spoken texts. www.ucl.ac.uk/englishusage/ice/spoken.pdf (accessed March 26, 2007)
Nunberg, G. (2004). Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Confrontational Times. New York: Public Affairs Books.
Olson, S. (2003). Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Paradis, C. and Willners, C. (2006). Selecting antonyms for dictionary entries: Methodological aspects. In Heinat, F., Klingvall, E., and Manninen, S. (eds.), The Department of English: Working Papers in English Linguistics, Vol. VI. www.englund.lu.se/images/stories/pdf-files/workingspapers/vol06/Paradis_Willners_06.pdf (accessed June 22, 2008).
Pelsmaekers, K. (1999). Directness and (im)politeness: the use of imperatives in business letters. In Tops, G. A. J., Devriendt, B., and Geukens, S. (eds.), Thinking English Grammar (pp. 263–79). Leuven/Louvain, Belgium: Peeters Publishers.
Plag, I. (2003). Word-Formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., and Svartvik, J. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
Renfrew, C. (1987). Archaeology and Language. London: Jonathan Cape.
Renfrew, C. (2000). At the edge of knowability: Towards a prehistory of languages. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 10.1: 7–34.
Rickford, J. (2004). Spoken soul: The beloved, belittled language of Black America. In Fought, C. (ed.), Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical Reflections (pp. 198–208). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G.. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turntaking for conversation. Language, 50: 696–735.
Saussure, F. de.Course in General Linguistics. [1916] Repr. 1983 ed. Bally, C. and Sechehaye, A., trans. Harris, R.. La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Schegloff, E. A. (2002). Opening sequencing. In Katz, J. E. and Aakhus, M. (eds.), Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance (pp. 326–85). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schiffrin, D., Tannen, D., and Hamilton, H. E. (2003). The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Schneider, E. (2003). The dynamics of New Englishes: From identity construction to dialect birth. Language, 12: 233–81.
Searle, J. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. (1979). Expression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Simon, J. (1981). Paradigm's Lost. New York: Viking.
Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sparck Jones, K. (1986). Synonymy and Semantic Classification. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.
Stockwell, R. P. and Minkova, D. (2001). English Words: History and Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Svensson, A. M. and Hering, J. (2005). Germanic prosody and French loanwords. Moderna Språk, 99: 122–8.
Tannen, D. (2001). You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Quill.
Tao, H. (2003). Turn initiators in spoken English. In Leistyna, P. and Meyer, C. F. (eds.), Corpus Analysis: Language Structure and Language Use (pp. 187–207). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Thomas, J. (1995). Meaning in Interaction. Harlow, Essex: Longman.
Thomason, S. G. and Kaufman, T. (1988). Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Titscher, S., Meyer, M., Wodak, R., and Vetter, E. (2000). Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Tomlin, R. (1986). Basic Word Order: Functional Principles. London: Croom Helm.
Trask, R. L. (1996). Historical Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Watkins, C. (2000). Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans. In American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. (Electronic version: www.bartleby.com/61/8.html, accessed June 21, 2008).
Watts, R. J. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Whaley, L. (1997). Introduction to Typology: The Unity and Diversity of Language. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Wierzbicka, A. (1996). Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wierzbicka, A. (2006). English: Meaning and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wilson, D. and Sperber, D. (2006). Relevance theory. In Ward, G. L. and Horn, L. A. (eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics, 2nd edn. (pp. 607–32). Oxford: Blackwell.
Wright, L. (2000). Introduction. In Wright, L. (ed.), The Development of Standard English: 1300–1800 (pp. 1–8). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yavas, M. S. (2005). Applied English Phonology. Oxford and Medford, MA: Blackwell.
Zipf, G. K. (1932). Selected Studies of the Principle of Relative Frequency in Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.