An Introduction to Language

Title page
Imprint page
Brief contents
Contents
Guide to the text
Guide to the online resources
Preface
About the authors
Acknowledgements
Part 1: The nature of human language
Chapter 1: What is language?
Linguistic knowledge
Knowledge of the sound system
Knowledge of words
The creativity of linguistic knowledge
Knowledge of sentences and non-sentences
Linguistic knowledge and performance
What is grammar?
Descriptive grammars
Prescriptive grammars
Teaching grammars
Universal Grammar
The development of grammar
Sign languages: evidence for language universals
What is not (human) language
The birds and the bees
Can animals learn human language?
Can computers learn human language?
Chapter review
Part 2: Grammatical aspects of language
Chapter 2: Phonetics: the sounds of language
Speech sounds
Identity of speech sounds
The phonetic alphabet
Sound and spelling correspondences
Categorising speech sounds
Consonants
Vowels
Prosodic features
Stress
Tone and intonation
The phonetics of signed languages
Chapter review
Chapter 3: Phonology: the sound patterns of language
Phonemes: the phonological units of language
Identifying phonemes
Complementary distribution
An illustration of vowel allophones: nasalisation in English
An illustration of consonant allophones: variation in English /t/
Phonological features
Contrastive and non-contrastive features
Natural classes of speech sounds
Feature specifications for Australian English consonant and vowel phonemes
Phonological rules
Feature change
Segment insertion and deletion
Reordering
From one to many and from many to one
The function of phonological rules
Phonemic analysis: discovering phonemes
Phonotactics
Lexical gaps
The production of morphemes
An illustration of allomorphs: English plurals
An illustration of allomorphs: English past tense
An illustration of allomorphs: Akan negation
Prosodic phonology
Syllable structure
Word stress
Sentence and phrase stress
Intonation
Approaches to phonology
Optimality Theory
An exemplar-based approach to phonology
Chapter review
Chapter 4: Morphology: the words of language
Content words and function words
Morphemes: the minimal units of meaning
The discreteness of morphemes
Bound and free morphemes
Bound roots
Rules of word formation
Derivational morphology
Inflectional morphology
The hierarchical structure of words
Rule productivity
Compounds
Word formation errors
Sign language morphology
Morphological analysis: identifying morphemes
Chapter review
Chapter 5: Syntax: the sentence patterns of language
What syntax rules do
Sentence structure
Constituents and constituency tests
Syntactic categories
Selection
Phrase structure
Phrase structure trees
Phrase structure rules
Structural ambiguities
The infinity of language
Movement
Tense movement
Aux movement
Universal Grammar principles and parameters
Principles
Parameters
Universal Grammar in action: sign-language syntax
Chapter review
Chapter 6: Semantics and pragmatics: the meanings of language
What speakers know about sentence meaning
Truth
Entailment and related notions
Ambiguity
Compositional semantics
Semantic rules
When compositionality goes awry
Lexical semantics (word meanings)
Theories of word meaning
Lexical relations
Semantic features
Argument structure and thematic roles
Pragmatics
Pronouns and other deictic words
Language and thought
Chapter review
Part 3: The psychology of language
Chapter 7: Language acquisition
Children’s capacity for language
Usage-based language development
Corrective feedback
The theory of Universal Grammar
Acquiring linguistic knowledge
Infant perception and production of speech sounds
The acquisition of phonology
The acquisition of the lexicon
The acquisition of morphology
The acquisition of syntax
The acquisition of pragmatics
The acquisition of signed languages
Knowing more than one language
Childhood bilingualism
Second-language acquisition
Chapter review
Chapter 8: Language processing and the human brain
Comprehension of speech
The speech signal
Speech perception
Bottom-up and top-down models
Lexical access and word recognition
Syntactic processing
Syntactic category ambiguity
Garden path sentences
Further factors
Speech production
Lexical selection
Application and misapplication of rules
Planning units
The human brain: localisation of language
Aphasia
Acquired dyslexia
Brain imaging in aphasic patients
Neural evidence of grammatical phenomena
Neurolinguistic studies of speech sounds
Neurolinguistic studies of sentence and word structure
Language and brain development: left hemisphere lateralisation
Brain plasticity
Delayed exposure to language
The critical period
Language creation in deaf children
The Modular mind: dissociations of language and cognition
Linguistic savants
Specific language impairment
Genetic basis of language
Chapter review
Part 4: Language and society
Chapter 9: Language in society
Dialects
Regional dialects
Dialects of English
Social dialects
Languages in contact
Lingua francas
Contact languages: pidgins and creoles
Bilingualism
Language and education
Second-language teaching
Teaching reading
Bilingual education
Language in use
Styles
Slang
Jargon and argot
Taboo or not taboo?
Language and sexism
Secret languages and language games
Chapter review
Chapter 10: Language change: the syllables of time
The regularity of sound change
Sound correspondences
Ancestral protolanguages
Phonological change
Phonological rules
The Great Vowel Shift
Morphological change
Syntactic change
Lexical change
Addition of new words
Semantic change
Broadening
Narrowing
Meaning shifts
Reconstructing dead languages
The nineteenth-century comparativists
Comparative reconstruction
Historical evidence
Extinct and endangered languages
The genetic classification of languages
Languages of the world
Types of languages
Why do languages change?
Chapter review
Chapter 11: Writing: the ABCs of language
The history of writing
Pictograms and ideograms
Cuneiform writing
The rebus principle
From hieroglyphics to the alphabet
Modern writing systems
Word writing
Syllabic writing
Consonantal alphabet writing
Alphabetic writing
Writing and speech
Spelling
Spelling pronunciations
Chapter review
Glossary
Index