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 study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect, and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language states.
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.
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 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 is a guide to current ideas about linguistics. Chapter One introduces the way in which language works and how we can describe it. Chapter Two deals with the context of linguistics- what we do with language, how we use it, and its various functions. Chapters Three to Five discuss the central aspects of all linguistic study- sound, syntax, and meaning. Chapters Six and Seven deal with how to take the study of linguistics further, exploring its diverse strands and aspects, and also offer advice on how to write an essay on an aspect of linguistics.
This book introduces general strategies and methods for quantitative analysis of linguistic data. Two introductory chapters on probability distribution and quantitative methods are followed by five individual chapters dedicated to phonetics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and syntax respectively. The book uses R, the statistical software package most commonly used by linguists, to discover patterns in quantitative data and to test linguistic hypotheses, provides a balanced treatment of the practical aspects of handling quantitative linguistic data, and includes sample datasets contributed by researchers working in a variety of sub-disciplines of linguistics.
The core of the book is a comparative analysis of markers within conversational discourse collected by Dr Schiffrin. Her analysis demonstrates that neither the markers, nor the discourse within which they function, can be understood from one point of view alone, but only as an integration of structural, semantic, pragmatic, and social factors. The study concludes that markers provide contextual coordinates which aid in the production and interpretation of coherent conversation at both local and global levels of organization. It raises a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues important to discourse analysis - including the relationship between meaning and use and the role of qualitative and quantitative analyses.
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