Linguistics An Introduction

Second edition of this highly successful textbook offering a unified approach to language from a range of perspectives.

Written by a team based at one of the world's leading centres for linguistic teaching and research, the second edition of this highly successful textbook offers a unified approach to language, viewed from a range of perspectives essential for students' understanding of the subject. Using clear explanations throughout, the book is divided into three main sections: sounds, words, and sentences. In each, the foundational concepts are introduced, along with their application to the fields of child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, language disorders, and sociolinguistics, giving the book a unique yet simple structure that helps students to engage with the subject more easily than other textbooks on the market. This edition includes a completely new section on sentence use, including an introduction and discussion of core areas of pragmatics and conversational analysis; coverage of sociolinguistic topics, introducing communities of practice; a wealth of new exercise material and updated further reading.

Introduction; Part I. Sounds: 1. Introduction; 2. Sounds and suprasegmentals; 3. Sound variation; 4. Sound change; 5. Phonemes, syllables and phonological processes; 6. Child phonology; 7. Processing sounds; Part II. Words: 8. Introduction; 9. Word classes; 10. Building words; 11. Morphology across languages; 12. Word meaning; 13. Children and words; 14. Lexical processing and the mental lexicon; 15. Lexical disorders; 16. Lexical variation and change; Part III. Sentences: 17. Introduction; 18. Basic terminology; 19. Sentence structure; 20. Empty categories; 21. Movement; 22. Syntactic variation; 23. Sentence meanings and logical form; 24. Children's sentences; 25. Sentence processing; 26. Syntactic disorders; 27. Using sentences.

Written by a team based at one of the world's leading centres for linguistic teaching and research, the 2009 second edition of this highly successful textbook offers a unified approach to language, viewed from a range of perspectives essential for students' understanding of the subject.

Andrew Radford is Professor and Head of Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex.
Martin Atkinson is Professor in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex.
David Britain is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex.
Harald Clahsen is Professor in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex.
Andrew Spencer is Professor in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex.