This is the completely revised, updated and enlarged 2nd edition of a classic textbook used in many English and linguistics departments in Germany for more than 20 years. It serves both as an introduction for beginners and as a companion for more advanced undergraduate and graduate students, familiarizing its readers with the major and distinctive properties of English (Standard English as well major national, regional and social varieties), including an in-depth structural comparison with German. Written in an accessible style and with many reader-friendly features (including checklists with key terms and concepts, basic and advanced exercises with solutions), the book offers a state-of-the-art-survey of the core terminology and issues of the central branches of linguistics, including an account of the major current research traditions and methodologies.
Author(s): Bernd Kortmann
Edition: 2nd revised
Publisher: J.B. Metzler
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 314
Contents
Preface
1 Linguistics: Major concepts and research traditions
1.1 | Setting the scene
1.2 | Central dichotomies
1.3 | Three major research traditions in 20th century linguistics
1.3.1 | Structuralism
1.3.2 | Formalism / Generative linguistics
1.3.3 | Functionalism
Exercises
Sources and further reading
2 Phonetics and phonology: On sounds and sound systems
2.1 | Phonetics
2.1.1 | Transcription
2.1.2 | Speech organs
2.1.3 | Types of sounds
2.1.3.1 | Consonants
2.1.3.2 | Vowels
2.2 | Phonology
2.2.1 | On determining the phoneme inventory: Segmental phonology
2.2.2 | Prosody: Supra-segmental phonology
2.2.3 | Phonological processes in connected speech
Exercises
Sources and further reading
3 Morphology: On the structure and formation of words
3.1 | Types of morphemes
3.2 | Morphophonemics: Interface of morphology and phonology
3.3 | Word formation processes
3.3.1 | Derivation
3.3.2 | Compounding
3.3.3 | Conversion
3.3.4 | Shortenings
Exercises
Sources and further reading
4 Grammar: The ground plan of English
4.1 | Inflectional morphology
4.2 | Syntax: Building blocks and sentence patterns
4.2.1 | Parts of speech
4.2.2 | Phrases and clauses
4.2.3 | Grammatical relations
4.3 | The English verb phrase
4.3.1 | Verb types
4.3.2 | Tense
4.3.3 | Aspect
Exercises
Sources and further reading
5 Contrastive Linguistics: English and German
5.1 | Contrastive Linguistics
5.2 | The most striking grammatical differences between English and German
5.2.1 | Morphology
5.2.2 | Word order
5.2.3 | Form-function mappings
5.2.4 | Further differences in the verb phrase
5.3 | Phonological differences
Exercises
Sources and further reading
6 Semantics: Word and sentence meaning
6.1 | Branches and boundaries of semantics
6.2 | Types and facets of meaning
6.3 | Structural semantics: Meaning structures in the vocabulary
6.3.1 | Lexical fields
6.3.2 | Sense relations
6.3.3 | Lexical ambiguity: Polysemy and homonymy
6.4 | Cognitive semantics: Prototypes and metaphors
6.4.1 | Prototypes
6.4.2 | Metaphors
Exercises
Sources and further reading
7 Pragmatics: The study of meaning in context
7.1 | Competing definitions: Perspective or component?
7.2 | Deixis
7.3 | Speech acts
7.3.1 | Classification of illocutionary acts
7.3.2 | Felicity conditions
7.3.3 | Indirect speech acts
7.4 | Conversational implicatures
7.4.1 | The original theory by Grice
7.4.2 | Post-Gricean models
Exercises
Sources and further reading
8 Sociolinguistics: Regional and social varieties of English
8.1 | Different types of varieties
8.2 | British and American English: A comparison
8.3 | Regional varieties
8.3.1 | Traditional and modern dialectology
8.3.2 | Syntactic variation in the British Isles
8.4 | Social varieties
8.5 | Feminist linguistics
8.6 | Sociolinguistics and language change
Exercises
Sources and further reading
9 Turns and trends in 21st century linguistics
9.1 | The quantitative turn
9.1.1 | Corpus linguistics
9.2 | The usage-based turn
9.2.1 | Usage-based linguistics
9.2.2 | The construction(al)ist turn: Construction Grammar
9.3 | The typological turn in World Englishes research
9.3.1 | Typological profiles across the anglophone world
9.3.2 | Angloversals, varioversals, areoversals
9.3.3 | Generalizations from a typological perspective
9.4 | The historical turn
Exercises
Sources and further reading
10 General reference works
11 Online resources and appetizers
12 Index
