Chapter 1 Language and linguistics 1
1 What is human language 2
2 What is linguistics 8
Chapter 2 Language universals 15
1 Semantic universals 15
2 Phonological universals 17
3 Syntactic universals 18
4 Absolute universals 18
Chapter 3 The history of English Ⅰ：Old English 21
1 Languages in Britain before English 23
2 Old English 25
Chapter 4 The history of English Ⅱ：Middle English 30
1 The change from Old English to Middle English 30
2 Modern English 33
Chapter 5 Language acquisition and disorders 36
1 Child language acquisition 36
2 Language development and maturation 39
3 Second language acquisition 41
4 Language disorders 43
5 Errors 46
Chapter 6 Communication 50
1 Saussure's model of the speech circuit 51
2 Shannon's and Moles'communication models 52
3 Bühler's organon model 54
4 Jakobson's model of communicative functions 56
Chapter 7 Phonetics 59
1 Articulatory phonetics 60
2 Articulatory phonetics—vowels 64
Chapter 8 Phonology 67
1 Phonemes and allophones 67
2 Distinctive features 69
3 Redundant features 69
4 Rules of phonology 70
Chapter 9 Morphology 74
1 Types of morphemes 76
2 Morphology and word-formation 78
3 Word classes and sentence functions 103
Chapter 10 Syntax 106
1 Introduction 106
2 Traditional grammar 109
3 Structuralist approaches 110
4 PS grammar(Phrase structure grammar) 113
5 Transformational-generative grammar 116
6 Systemic-functional grammar 147
Chapter 11 Semantics 153
1 Some fundamental concepts of semantics 154
2 Several theories of meaning 156
3 Sense relations 164
Chapter 12 Pragmatics 185
1 Context and meaning 186
2 Speech act theory 188
3 Conversational analysis 192
4 The theory of conversational implicature 199
Chapter 13 Sociolinguistics 212
1 Micro-analysis of language variation 213
2 Macro-analysis of language variation in multilingual communities 239
Chapter 14 Language,thought and culture 256
1 Understanding of culture 256
2 Language and thought 259
Chapter 15 Text linguistics 268
1 Cohesion 269
2 Cohesive devices 269
3 Coherence 285
Chapter 16 Computational linguistics 292
1 Computer-assisted language learning 293
2 Machine translation 296
3 Corpus linguistics 299
4 Information retrieval 302
5 Mail and news 303
Chapter 17 Semiotics:Study of signs 305
References 356