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Index
Coverpage
Half title page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Detailed contents
Introduction
Defining language
Universal properties of language
Modularity
Discreteness
Constituency
Recursion and productivity
Arbitrariness
Reliance on context
Variability
The descriptive approach
The diversity of linguistics
How to approach this book
1 The sounds of language
Key terms
Chapter preview
Goals
Articulatory phonetics
The tools of phonetics
The vocal tract
Articulation
Manners of articulation
Writing sounds: transcription
Consonants
Vowels
Suprasegmentals
Length
Tone and intonation
Syllable structure
Stress
Acoustic phonetics
Sound waves
Simple and complex sounds
Hearing
Measuring speech
Phonology
Phonemes and allophones
Discovering phonemes and allophones
Phonotactics
Alternation and allomorphs
Types of phonological alternations
Discovering alternations
Phonological theory
Chapter summary
Exercises
Suggestions for further reading
2 Words and their parts
Key terms
Chapter preview
Goals
What is a word?
Morphology: the study of word structure
Morphemes
The forms of morphemes
Some morphological operations of the world’s languages
Affixation
Other types of affixation
Reduplication
Ablaut and suppletion
Tone and stress
Two purposes of morphology: derivation and inflection
Derivation
Inflection
Acquiring inflectional contrasts
Chapter summary
Exercises
Suggestions for further reading
3 The structure of sentences
Key terms
Chapter preview
Goals
Poverty of the stimulus
The amazing robot basketball player
Applying the metaphor to the structure of sentences
The grammar: an English example
The lexicon and syntactic categories
The rules: a starting point
Syntactic trees
Prepositional phrases
Adjectives and determiners
The grammar: modern theory
Projection
Merger
Adjunction
Grammars are finite; language is not
The significance of recursion
Restrictions on the grammar
You can do without that, but not always
Heavy Determiner Phrase movement
The Binding Theory
Summary
Differences in syntax across languages
Head–complement order in Hindi
Immobile wh-words in Thai
Gender in languages
Chapter summary
Exercises
Suggestions for further reading
4 Meaning
Key terms
Chapter preview
Goals
Speaker’s meaning and semantic meaning
Semantics
Fundamental semantic concepts and compositionality
Lexical semantics
Subjects, predicates, and arguments
Thematic roles
Logical words
Modifiers
Quantification
Intensionality
Semantics summary
Pragmatics 1: meaning and context
Indexicality, context-dependency, and anaphora
Presupposition
Pragmatics 2: meaning and the intention to communicate
The Gricean view of meaning
Implicature
Speech acts
Pragmatics summary
Philosophical issues
The psychological view
The referential view
Chapter summary
Exercises
Suggestions for further reading
5 Discourse
Key terms
Chapter preview
Goals
Language use above and beyond the sentence
Data: language use in everyday life
Spoken and written discourse: a first look
Spoken discourse
Sequential and distributional analyses
Repair and recipient design
Comparing transcripts
Adjacency pairs
Participation frameworks
Narratives
Summary: spoken discourse
Written discourse
Fragmentation and integration
Writing to be read
Language functions
Planes of discourse
Participation framework
Exchange structure
Act structures
Information state
Idea structure
Linking together planes of discourse
Chapter summary
Exercises
Suggestions for further reading
6 Child language acquisition
Key terms
Chapter preview
Goals
Gathering data on language acquisition
Parental diaries
Observational studies
Experimental studies
The data: milestones in child language development
The first sounds
The first words
First sentences: morphological and syntactic development
Crosslinguistic and crosscultural aspects of language acquisition
Explaining the data
Behaviorism
Nativism
Connectionism
Social interactionism
What’s at stake in the child language debate?
Chapter summary
Exercises
Suggestions for further reading
7 Language and the brain
Key terms
Chapter preview
Goals
The biology of the brain
The cerebrum
The cerebral cortex and its neurons
Cytoarchitectonics: the distribution of neurons in the cortex
The cerebellum, subcortical structures, and networks in the brain
Questions about the biology of language
Biological substrates: what are the biological bases of language?
Biotemporal dynamics: what does the movie of brain activity during language use look like?
Separability: do different language functions depend on different biological substrates?
Domain specificity: are the biological substrates of language dedicated exclusively to language?
Methods in the study of the biology of language
The lesion method
Hemodynamic neuroimaging
Event-related potentials
Magnetoencephalography
Direct brain recording and stimulation
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Evidence and explanations
The lexicon, conceptual-semantics, and phonology
Syntax
Morphology
Chapter summary
Exercises
Suggestions for further reading
8 Language change
Key terms
Chapter preview
Goals
Languages change
Causes of language change
Articulatory simplification
Regularization
Language contact
Kinds of language change
Phonological change
Morphological change
Syntactic change
Semantic change
Mechanisms of language change
Sound change
Borrowing
Analogy
Linguistic reconstruction and language families
The comparative method
Internal reconstruction
Historical linguistics and culture
Chapter summary
Exercises
Suggestions for further reading
9 Dialect variation
Key terms
Chapter preview
Goals
The nature of dialect variation
Languages, dialects, and standards
The regular patterning of dialects
Why are standards held in such esteem?
Why dialects?
Inherent variability
Levels of dialect variation
Lexical variation
Phonological variation
Morphosyntactic variation
Pragmatic variation
Shared features among dialects
Types of dialect variation
Social class and social network
Gender-based patterns of variation
Ethnicity-based variation
Dialect and style
Age-based variation and language change
The fate of dialect variation
Chapter summary
Exercises
Suggestions for further reading
10 Language and culture
Key terms
Chapter preview
Goals
Culturally influenced aspects of language
Language, culture, and framing
Crosscultural miscommunication
Politeness and interaction
High-involvement and high-considerateness styles
Overlap
Back-channel cues
Turn-taking
Asking questions
Indirectness
Mutual stereotyping
The ritual nature of conversation
Language and gender
Complementary schismogenesis
Language and cultural relativity
Chapter summary
Exercises
Suggestions for further reading
11 The politics of language
Key terms
Chapter preview
Goals
Identity politics and language
Identity in language
Key concepts
Interpreting some of the cases
Language standardization
Coded and alternative standards
Nonstandard language: Ebonics
Language issues in China and Singapore
The politics of standardization
Diglossia
“Languages” and “dialects”
The politics of languages and dialects
Official English
Language rights in the United States
Bilingualism
Bilingual maintenance: continuing immigration
Bilingual maintenance: group identity
Controlling the content of speech
Blasphemy and cursing
Hate speech
Chapter summary
Exercises
Suggestions for further reading
12 Writing
Key terms
Chapter preview
Goals
Writing and speaking
Types of writing systems
Logographic systems
Syllabic systems
Alphabetic systems
Consonantal alphabetic systems
The development of writing
Protowriting
Cuneiform
Egyptian hieroglyphs
Early alphabets
The consequences of literacy
Conservatism
Democratization
Standardization
Relative advantage
Chapter summary
Exercises
Suggestions for further reading
13 Second language acquisition
Key terms
Chapter preview
Goals
Theories of second language acquisition
Behaviorism
Comprehensible input and the natural order hypothesis
The interaction hypothesis
Socioculturalism
Universal Grammar
Frequency-based approaches
Summary
Individual differences in second language acquisition
First language (L1)
Age
Gender
Working memory
Motivation
Context of second language learning
SLA processes
Attention
Developmental sequences
Fossilization
Instruction
Teaching methods
Bridging the theory–pedagogy gap
Task-based language teaching and learning
Chapter summary
Exercises
Suggestions for further reading
14 Computational linguistics
Key terms
Chapter preview
Goals
The computational perspective
Morphological processing
Tokenization
Morphological analysis and synthesis
Syntactic processing
Context-free grammars
Parsing
Part-of-speech tagging
Beyond context-free grammars
Statistical parsing
Semantic processing
Word meaning
Sentence meaning
Natural language generation
Probabilistic theories
Related technologies
Information extraction
Automatic summarization
Speech recognition
Speech synthesis
Machine translation
Major challenges in computational linguistics
Chapter summary
Exercises
Suggestions for further reading
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