Skip to Main Content
This course aims to develop students’ understanding of the basics in linguistic inquiry. A wide range of topics are included to introduce students to some of the major subfields of linguistics, with a focus on data/examples from the English language. Among the topics covered are the development of English as a language, the pragmatic considerations governing its use, and its grammatical characteristics from the sentence down to the individual speech sound. Special attention is given to the development of logical, analytical and critical thinking skills.
This book serves for students major in both linguistics and teaching English as a second language, foreign language studies, general education, the cognitive and neurosciences, psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. There are 12 chapters in this book, covering the general study of language; the study of grammar with morphology, the notions of constituency, syntactic categories, phrase structure trees, structural ambiguity, the infinite scope of language, and the X-bar grammatical patterns; semantics and pragmatics; phonetics; phonology; sociolinguistic study of language; language change; language acquisition; psychology of language and the neurology of language; fundamentals of computational linguistics, and writing.
This book introduces the fundamentals of linguistics. It covers all the important areas of the field, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, classification of languages, historical linguistics, first language acquisition, second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, brain and language, language in social contexts, writing and language, indigenous languages of North America, sign languages, animal communication, and computational linguistics. Each chapter begins with bulleted objectives and concludes with a summary, key terms, recommended reading, and exercises to reinforce material presented in the chapter. In this seventh edition, all chapters have been revised to reflect recent research.
This book introduces the science of language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, the book argues that language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution like web spinning in spiders or sonar in bats. This new edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since the book was first published. In the end, the book offers not only notes and references, but also suggested readings the author picks.
