The student will come away from it with a solid understanding of basic linguistic terminology and an appreciation for the breadth of topics that linguistics has to offer. Overall, this textbook is an excellent overview of the central topics in linguistics and how linguists study language, and this edition is a notable improvement over previous ones. do language universals exist?), the book remains practical enough for an introductory class. Finally, by avoiding broader theoretical questions (e.g. 2 fails to discuss recursion as a property of language.
Lamentably, this edition lacks any discussion of linguistic typology or language endangerment, and the chapter on syntax limits itself to phrase structure rules and basic generative syntax. The expanded tasks are an excellent launching point for further investigation and term papers, challenging the student to consult outside sources and conduct independent research. There are twenty new sections and fifty new end-of-chapter tasks, including expanded discussions of language origins, text messaging, and kinship terminology. This edition is better organized than its predecessors into sections and subsections, and it gives greater emphasis to data analysis.
The website also includes all figures and illustrations, which most instructors should find useful. This edition includes a number of improvements, most notably replacing the appendix with a freely downloadable ninety-seven-page online study guide that gives interesting in-depth answers to all of the study questions and tasks in the book, with fully-cited sources. Each chapter includes study questions, tasks, discussion topics, and topically arranged lists of sources for further reading. 19), and the final chapter discusses language, culture, and linguistic relativity (Ch. Coverage of sociolinguistics includes separate chapters on regional variation (Ch. 12), first and second language acquisition (Chs. The second half of the book covers other major subfields in linguistics, including discourse analysis (Ch. 7) and word-formation and neologisms (Ch. He includes chapters on prescriptivism and traditional grammar (Ch. Y then moves into the core of linguistics: phonetics (Ch. 2), including a discussion of the defining properties of language. The book begins with chapters on language origins (Ch.
Y briefly explains each concept without too much detail, and his writing is lucid, concise, and easy to read. Chapters are typically organized around important terminology, so that each term receives its own section, and the table of contents resembles a vocabulary list. In contrast to the data-driven, hands-on approach of such texts as Language files (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2007), this book focuses on the conceptual. The newest edition of George Yule’s widely-used textbook remains an excellent introduction to linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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