Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- The origins of language
- Animals and human language
- The development of writing
- The sounds of language
- The sound patterns of language
- Words and word-formation processes
- Morphology
- Phrases and sentences : grammar
- Syntax
- Semantics
- Pragmatics
- Discourse analysis
- Language and the brain
- First language acquisition
- Second language acquisition/learning
- Gestures and sign languages
- Language history and change
- Language and regional variation
- Language and social variation
- Language and culture
- Appendix: Suggested answers to study questions
- Glossary
- References
- Index
Preface
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- The origins of language
- Animals and human language
- The development of writing
- The sounds of language
- The sound patterns of language
- Words and word-formation processes
- Morphology
- Phrases and sentences : grammar
- Syntax
- Semantics
- Pragmatics
- Discourse analysis
- Language and the brain
- First language acquisition
- Second language acquisition/learning
- Gestures and sign languages
- Language history and change
- Language and regional variation
- Language and social variation
- Language and culture
- Appendix: Suggested answers to study questions
- Glossary
- References
- Index
Summary
In preparing the third edition of this book, I have tried to present an updated survey of what is known about language and also of the methods used by linguists in arriving at that knowledge. There have been many interesting developments in the study of language over the past two decades, but it is still a fact that any individual speaker of a language has a more comprehensive ‘unconscious’ knowledge of how language works than any linguist has yet been able to describe. Consequently, as you read the following chapters, take a critical view of the effectiveness of the descriptions, the analyses and the generalizations by measuring them against your own intuitions about how your language works. By the end of the book, you should feel that you do know quite a lot about both the internal structure of language (its form) and the varied uses of language in human life (its function), and also that you are ready to ask more of the kinds of questions that professional linguists ask when they conduct their research.
To help you find out more about the issues covered in this book, each chapter ends with a set of Further Readings which will lead you to more detailed treatments than are possible in this introduction. Each chapter also has Study Questions, Research Tasks and Discussion Topics/Projects.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Study of Language , pp. ix - xPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005