This book is an attempt to explain language structure and its relation to language cognition and acquisition. By starting at the beginning and reformulating the questions asked by current linguistic theories, we analyze the essential features of language and language users. From this base we construct a theory that avoids the complexity of many contemporary language theories and requires few presuppositions about innate language abilities. At the same time the theory is able to explain a great variety of language structures and much of the data of human language performance.

Because we start with fundamental questions about the nature of language, the book makes language science accessible to the nonspecialist. In order to provide a background for understanding our theory and its implications, we consider major contemporary theories of language in detail and evaluate related claims about language. These decisions provide a framework for evaluating our own claims. We hope that publication of this book will get other people interested in our approach and solicit help in finding theoretical and empirical consequences of the theory.

Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, when asked of a jointly-authored work “who did what?”, are reported to have replied that one of them wrote the nouns and the other the verbs. When we are asked the same question, we answer that one of us wrote the vowels and the other the consonants.