CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1
1.1 What is linguistics? 1
1.1.1 Definition 1
1.1.2 The scope of linguistics 2
1.1.3 Some important distinctions in linguistics 3
1.2 What is language? 7
1.2.1 Definitions of language 7
1.2.2 Design features 9
Revision exercises 11
CHAPTER 2 Phonology 13
2.1 The phonic medium of language 13
2.2 Phonetics 14
2.2.1 What is phonetics? 14
2.2.2 Organs of speech 14
2.2.3 Orthographic representation of speech sounds——broad and narrow transcriptions 16
2.2.4 Classification of English speech sounds 18
2.3 Phonology 22
2.3.1 Phonology and phonetics 22
2.3.2 Phone, phoneme, and allophone 23
2.3.3 Phonemic contrast, complementary distribution, and minimal pair 25
2.3.4 Some rules in phonology 26
2.3.5 Suprasegmental features——tress, tone, intonation 28
Revision exercises 31
CHAPTER 3 Morphology 33
3.1 Morphology 33
3.1.1 Open class and closed class 33
3.1.2 Internal structure of words and rules for word formation 34
3.2 Morphemes-the minimal units of meaning 35
3.3 Derivational and inflectional morphemes 35
3.4 Morphological rules of word formation 37
3.5 Compounds 38
Revision exercises 40
CHAPTER 4 Syntax 42
4.1 What is syntax? 42
4.2 Categories 42
4.2.1 Word-level categories 42
4.2.2 Phrase categories and their structures 45
4.3 Phrase structure rule 46
4.3.1 XP rule 46
4.3.2 X藟Theory 47
4.3.3 Coordination rule 48
4.4 Phrase elements 49
4.4.1 Specifiers 49
4.4.2 Complements 49
4.4.3 Modifiers 51
4.5 Sentences (The S rule) 51
4.6 Transformations 53
4.6.1 Auxiliary movement 53
4.6.2 Do insertion 56
4.6.3 Deep structure and surface structure 57
4.6.4 Wh movement 59
4.6.5 Move a and constraints on transformations 63
Revision exercises 64
CHAPTER 5 Semantics 67
5.1 What is semantics? 67
5.2 Some views concerning the study of meaning 68
5.2.1 The naming theory 68
5.2.2 The conceptualist view 68
5.2.3 Contextualism 69
5.2.4 Behaviorism 70
5.3 Lexical meaning 71
5.3.1 Sense and reference 71
5.3.2 Major sense relations 72
5.4 Sense relations between sentences 77
5.5 Analysis of meaning 79
5.5.1 Componential analysis—— way to analyze lexical meaning 79
5.5.2 Predication analysis—— way to analyze sentence meaning 80
Revision exercises 82
CHAPTER 6 Pragmatics 84
6.1 Some basic notions 84
6.1.1 Definition 84
6.1.2 Pragmatics vs. Semantics 85
6.1.3 Context 85
6.1.4 Sentence meaning vs. utterance meaning 86
6.2 Speech act theory 87
6.2.1 Austin's model of speech acts 87
6.2.2 Searle's classification of speech acts 89
6.3 Principle of conversation 92
Revision exercises 94
CHAPTER 7 Language Change 95
7.1 introduction 95
7.2 Sound Change 95
7.3 Morphological and syntactic change 96
7.3.1 Change in "agreement" rule 96
7.3.2 Change in negation rule 97
7.3.3 Process of simplification 97
7.3.4 Loss of inflections 97
7.4 Vocabulary change 97
7.4.1 Addition of new words 98
7.4.2 Loss of words 101
7.4.3 Changes in meaning of words 102
7.5 Some recent trends 104
7.5.1 Moving towards greater informality 104
7.5.2 The influence of American English 104
7.5.3 The influence of science and technology 105
7.6 Causes of language change 106
Revision exercises 109
CHAPTER 8 Language and Society 111
8.1 The scope of sociolinguistics 111
8.1.1 The relatedness between language and society 111
8.1.2 Speech community and speech variety 112
8.1.3 Two approaches to sociolinguistics studies 113
8.2 Varieties of language 113
8.2.1 dialectal varieties 114
8.2.2 Register 119
8.2.3 Degree of formality 121
8.3 Standard dialect 122
8.4 Pidgin and Creole 123
8.5 Bilingualism and diglossia 124
Revision exercises 126
CHAPTER 9 Language and Culture 127
9.1 Introduction 127
9.2 What is culture? 127
9.3 The relationship between language and culture 128
9.4 Sapir- Whorf Hypothesis 130
9.5 Linguistic evidence of cultural differences 132
9.5.1 Greetings and terms of address 132
9.5.2 Thanks and compliments 133
9.5.3 Colour words 134
9.5.4 Privacy and taboos 135
9.5.5 Rounding off numbers 136
9.5.6 Words and cultural-specific connotations 137
9.5.7 Cultural-related idioms, proverbs and metaphors 137
9.6 The significance of cultural teaching and learning 138
9.7 Cultural overlap and diffusion 139
9.8 Intercultural communication 141
Revision exercises 141
CHAPTER 10 Language Acquisition 143
10.1 Introduction 143
10.2 Theories of child language acquisition 143
10.2.1 A behaviourist view of language acquisition 144
10.2.2 An innatist view of language acquisition 145
10.2.3 An interactionist view of language acquisition 147
10.3 Cognitive factors in child language development 148
10.4 Language environment and the Critical Period hypothesis 150
10.5 Stages in child language development 152
10.5.1 Phonological development 152
10.5.2 Vocabulary development 152
10.5.3 Grammatical development 154
10.5.4 Pragmatic development 156
10.6 Atypical development 157
Revision exercises 157
CHAPTER 11 Second Language Acquisition 159
11.1 Introduction 159
11.2 Connections between first language acquisition and second language acquisition 159
11.3 Contrastive analysis 161
11.4 Error analysis 162
11.5 Interlanguage 164
11.6 The role of native language in second language learning 166
11.7 Second language learning models and input hypothesis 167
11.8 Individual differences 168
11.9 Second language acquisition and its pedagogical implications 172
Revision exercises 173
CHAPTER 12 Language and Brain 175
12.1 Introduction 175
12.2 Neurolinguistics 175
12.2.1 What is neurolinguistics? 175
12.2.2 The structure and function of the human brain 176
12.2.3 Methods in the study of the brain and evidences for lateralization 177
12.2.4 Aphasia 180
12.3 Psycholinguistics 183
12.3.1 What is psycholinguistics? 183
12.3.2 Psycholinguistic research methods 183
12.3.3 Linguistics and language processing 188
12.3.4 Psycholinuistic modeling 193
Revision exercises 194
Bibliography 195
Glossary 198