Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication

The fourth edition of Linguistics has been thoroughly updated and revised to reflect the increasing confluence of linguistics and cognitive science. This is especially evident in the chapter on language acquisition, which now includes sections on the acquisition of morphology, syntax, and pragmatic competence. More special topics have also been added to give teachers greater freedom to shape courses to their own interests. The basic structure of the book, however, remains unchanged, with its focus on a small set of linguistic concepts that are fundamental to the field and that will allow students to get a feel for how work in different areas of linguistics is actually done. A new and expanded third edition of the companion Linguistics Workbook adds complementary material on universals and cross-language data. Linguistics is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the structural and interpretive aspects of language: morphology, phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, language variation, and language change. The second part is cognitively oriented and includes chapters on pragmatics, the psychology of language, language acquisition, and language and the brain. This new edition adds special topics to the chapters on morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, acquisition, and language and the brain.