Linguistics: An Introduction

Front Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Maps
List of Tables
Preface
Organization and presentation
Manner of presentation
Pedagogic philosophy
Range and type of information
Theoretical framework
Structure of the book
About the second edition
Guide for the student
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and Conventions Used in Examples
1. Introduction
1.1 What is linguistics?
Linguistics as a science
The subject matter of linguistics
1.2 Fundamental concepts
The sign
Relations between form and meaning in the sign
Iconic signs
Symbolic signs
Language as a sign system
Nature of signs in human language
Symbolic signs in language
Iconic signs in language
Relations between linguistic signs
Syntagmatic
Paradigmatic
Mediums of language
1.3 Design features of human language
Arbitrariness
Displacement
Cultural transmission
Duality
Productivity
Reflexivity
1.4 Outline of modern linguistics from ahistorical perspective
Formal linguistics
Functional linguistics
Scope of modern linguistics
Summing up
Guide to further reading
Issues for further thought and exercises
Notes
Part I. Language: System and Structure
2. Sounds of Language: Phonetics and Phonology
2.1 Fundamental properties of speech sounds
The speech chain
Phones
2.2 The vocal tract
The lungs
The larynx
The oral cavity
The nasal cavity
2.3 Types of phones
Consonants
Places of articulation
Labial
Dental
Alveolar
Palatal
Velar
Uvular
Pharyngeal
Glottal
Manners of articulation
Stops
Nasals
Fricatives
Affricates
Laterals
Rhotics
Glides
Vowels
2.4 Some additional features
Airstream mechanisms
Glottalic
Velaric
Coarticulation
Diphthongs
Syllables
2.5 Prosodies
Pitch
Tone
Intonation
Stress
2.6 Phonology
Phonemes and allophones
Non-contrastiveness of allophones
Free variation
Complementary distribution
Rules of realization
2.7 How to establish the phonemes of a language
Example
Why focus on suspicious pairs?
2.8 Transcription
Summing up
Guide to further reading
Issues for further thought and exercises
Notes
3. Structure of Words: Morphology
3.1 Words
Notion of the word
The structure of words
3.2 Morphemes, allomorphs and morphs
3.3 Main types of morphemes
Types according to occurrence
Free morphemes
Bound morphemes
Types of morpheme according to function or use
Lexical morphemes
Bound roots
Derivational affixes
Grammatical morphemes
Free grammatical morphemes
Bound grammatical morphemes
Inflectional affixes
Clitics
Differences between derivational affixes, inflectional affixes and clitics
Summary of morpheme types
3.4 Allomorphs and allomorph conditioning
Types of allomorph
Types of conditioning factors
Morphological rules
3.5 Morphological description
Case morphology in Warumungu
Morphology of locative case marking in Turkish
Locative case in Meryam Mir
3.6 Morphological analysis
Sample morphological analysis: Hungarian verbs
Grammatical morphemes
Lexical morphemes
Structure of the verb
Morphological analysis by speakers
Summing up
Guide to further reading
Issues for further thought and exercises
Notes
4. Lexicon
4.1 The lexicon
Nature of the lexicon
Openness
Parts-of-speech
Main categories
Criteria
Parts-of-speech across languages
4.2 Ways of making new words
Limitations on formation of new words
Clipping
Acronyming
Blending
Borrowing
Major features of word borrowing
Some borrowings into English
Some borrowings from English
Coinage
4.3 Ways of using old forms to get new meanings
Derivation
Compounding
Reduplication
Backformation
Meaning extension
Meaning narrowing
4.4 Fixed expressions
Idioms
Collocations
4.5 What’s in a word?
Word taboos
Euphemisms
Dysphemisms
Summing up
Guide to further reading
Issues for further thought and exercises
Notes
5. Structure of Sentences: Syntax
5.1 What is syntax?
Openness
The notion of sentence
Grammaticality
5.2 Hierarchical structure in sentences
Grouping
Evidence for groupings of words
Movability
Contractibility
Meaning differences
5.3 Syntactic units
Clauses
Phrases
Nature of phrases
Types of phrase
Noun phrases
Verb phrases
Other phrase types
Complications
5.4 The structure of clauses
Fundamentals
Description of the clause in terms of phrases
Problems
Grammatical relations
Experiential roles
Subject and object
Theme
Morphology and syntax
Summing up
Guide to further reading
Issues for further thought and exercises
Notes
6. Meaning
6.1 What is meaning?
Reference and sense
Sense and connotations
Literal and figurative meaning
Sentence and utterance meaning
Overview of types of meaning in language
6.2 Semantics
Homophony, polysemy and vagueness
Lexical semantic relations
Synonymy
Antonymy
Hyponymy
Meronymy
Specifying lexical meanings
Sentence semantics
6.3 Pragmatics: The meaning of utterances
Speech acts
Performatives
Direct and indirect speech acts
Felicity conditions
Reference
The cooperative principle
Presuppositions
Summing up
Guide to further reading
Issues for further thought and exercises
Part II. Language: A Human Phenomenon
7. Sociolinguistics: Language in its Social Context
7.1 Language as a social phenomenon
Social domains of language use
The speech community
7.2 Social varieties and variation
Regional variation
Standard dialects
Isoglosses
Variation according to social group
Variation according to gender
Other dimensions of variation
Accommodation
7.3 Varieties and variation according to use
Secret varieties
Respect varieties
7.4 Language use in bilingual communities
Language choice
Code-switching
7.5 Language shift and endangerment
Rate of language shift, endangerment and death
Causes of language shift
Structural changes accompanying language shift and endangerment
Language maintenance and revival
Summing up
Guide to further reading
Issues for further thought and exercises
Notes
8. Text and Discourse
8.1 Preliminaries
Structure beyond the sentence
Text and discourse
8.2 Text organization
Text types and structures
Narratives
Expository texts
Other genres
Coherence and cohesion
Coherence
Cohesion
Reference
Conjunction
Substitution
Ellipsis
Lexical cohesion
8.3 Discourse: Language in interactive use
Hierarchical organization of interactions
Moves
Exchanges
Transactions
Summary of discourse components
Managing interactions
Turn-taking
Pre-sequences
Summing up
Guide to further reading
Issues for further thought and exercises
Note
9. Psycholinguistics: Language, the Mind and the Brain
9.1 Language and cognition
Language and thought: The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
Revisions to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
9.2 Language processing
Comprehension
Perception of speech sounds
Four difficulties in perception of speech sounds
Categorical nature of speech perception
Role of vision and other senses
Identification and recognition of words
Comprehension of sentences
Production
Relations between production and comprehension
9.3 Language and the brain
Basic structure of the human brain
Localization and lateralization
Evidence for localization and lateralization
Aphasia
Broca’s aphasia
Wernicke’s aphasia
Other types of aphasia
Summary of aphasia types
Problems of interpretation
Split-brains
Dichotic listening
Wada test
Brain scanning
Positron Emission Tomography
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Concluding comments
Summing up
Guide to further reading
Issues for further thought and exercises
Notes
10. Language Acquisition
10.1 Major features of child language acquisition
General characteristics of language acquisition
Preliminary remarks
Basic schedule of acquisition
Pre-language stages
One-word stage
The two-word stage
Telegraphic speech
Basic mastery
Continued acquisition
Caretaker speech
Acquisition of phonetics and phonology
Acquisition of lexicon
Acquisition of semantics
Acquisition of morphology
Acquisition of syntax
Negative constructions
Interrogatives
Complex sentence constructions
10.2 Strategies for child language learning
Broad strategies for language leaning
Conditioned-response learning
Imitation
Hypothesis testing
Innateness
Strategies for learning meaning of words
10.3 Second-language learning
Developmental stages in second-language learning
L2 learning of phonetics and phonology
L2 learning of morphology
L2 learning of syntax
Effects of age on L2 learning
Transfer
Factors relevant to L2 learning
Summing up
Guide to further reading
Issues for further thought and exercises
Notes
11. Language in its Biological Context
11.1 Natural communication systems of other animals
Commonalities of signs in communication systems of humans and animals
Natural communication systems of some animal species
Bees
Birds
Vervet monkeys
Apes
11.2 Teaching human language to animals
Dogs’ understanding of human language
Apes
Teaching ASL to chimpanzees
Teaching chimpanzees to use tokens or keys
Evaluation of apes’ language abilities
11.3 Origins and evolution of human language
Nineteenth-century theories of language origins
More recent theories of language origins
Gestural origins
The grooming hypothesis
Language as a genetic predisposition
Language and social cognition
Concluding remarks on language evolution
Summing up
Guide to further reading
Issues for further thought and exercises
Notes
Part III. Language: Uniformity and Diversity
12. Gesture and Sign Languages
12.1 The visual-gestural medium
Preliminary remarks
Gestures
12.2 Primary sign languages
Phonetics and phonology of sign languages
Morphology of sign languages
Sign language lexicon
Sign language syntax
Sign languages in linguistics
12.3 Alternate sign languages
Sign languages in Central Australia
Plains Indian Sign Language
Ts’ixa Sign Language
Monastic sign languages
Summing up
Guide to further reading
Issues for further thought and exercises
Notes
13. Writing
13.1 The visual-inscribed medium
Differences from other mediums
Emergence of early writing systems
13.2 Types of writing system
Logographic systems
Syllabaries
Abjads
Alphabets
13.3 The English writing system
13.4 Writing systems in society
13.5 Linguistic features of some written varieties
Text messaging
Writing on the internet
Twitter
Blogs
Wikis
Summing up
Guide to further reading
Issues for further thought and exercises
Notes
14. Unity and Diversity in Language Structure
14.1 Preliminaries to the study of the unity and diversity of languages
Two complementary perspectives on variation in language
Requirements
14.2 Universals of language
Absolute non-implicational universals
Non-absolute non-implicational universals
Absolute implicational universals
Non-absolute implicational universals
14.3 Typology
Two morphological typologies of languages
Morpheme integrity
Affixing typology
Morphological typology
Grammatical number
Nominal possession
Case systems
Syntactic typology
Universality of grammatical relations
Word order typology
Argument structure
Order of essential elements
Phonological typology: Tone systems
Lexical–semantic typology: Verbs of motion
14.4 Explaining unity and diversity of languagestructure
Common origins
Human biology
Functional unity of language
Summing up
Guide to further reading
Issues for further thought and exercises
Notes
15. Language Change
15.1 Major characteristics of language change
15.2 Sound change
Grimm’s Law
Some common types of sound changes
Loss or deletion
Insertion
Assimilation
Dissimilation
Metathesis
Generality of sound changes
15.3 Morphological change
Acquisition and loss of bound morphemes
Analogical change
Reanalysis
15.4 Syntactic change
Changes in word order
Changes in grammatical constructions
Borrowing of grammatical constructions
Reanalysis of grammatical constructions
Extension of grammatical constructions
15.5 Grammaticalization
15.6 Semantic change
Pejoration
Amelioration
Hyperbole
Understatement
Direction of semantic change
15.7 Causes of language change
Physiological tendencies
Functional considerations
Identity
Foreign influence
Taboo
Social upheaval
Regularization
Structural pressure
Summing up
Guide to further reading
Issues for further thought and exercises
Note
16. Languages of the World
16.1 Number and variety of the world’s languages
How many languages are spoken in the world today?
Distribution of languages
Why so many languages?
Numbers of speakers of the world’s languages
16.2 Relations among the languages
How are the world’s languages related?
Methods for establishing language families
Comparative method
Mass-comparison
Lexicostatistics
16.3 Six major language families and one disputed family
Indo-European
Austronesian
Afroasiatic
Niger-Congo
Sino-Tibetan
Trans-New Guinea
Khoisan
16.4 Contact languages
Pidgins
Creoles
Mixed languages
Summing up
Guide to further reading
Issues for further thought and exercises
Notes
Glossary
References
Index of Languages
Index of Names
Index