Intro -- Contents in Brief -- Contents in Detail -- Preface -- Ch 1: Languages and Linguistics -- How Many Languages are There? -- Does the United States Have an Official Language? -- What is Human Language? -- Signs: Arbitrary and Nonarbitrary -- Languages as Patterned Structures -- Speech as Patterned Language Use: Communicative Competence -- Languages and Dialects -- Modes of Linguistic Communication -- Do Only Humans Have Language? -- The Origin of Human Languages: Babel to Babble -- What is Linguistics? -- Summary -- Part One: Language Structures -- Ch 2: Words and Their Parts: Lexicon and Morphology -- Introduction: Words Seem Tangible -- What Does It Mean to Know a Word? -- Lexical Categories (Parts of Speech) -- Morphemes: Word Parts with Meaning or Function -- How are Morphemes Organized within Words? -- How Does a Language Increase Its Vocabulary? -- What Types of Morphological Systems Do Languages Have? -- Variant Pronunciations of a Morpheme: Allomorphy -- Summary -- Ch 3: The Sounds of Languages: Phonetics -- Sounds and Spellings: Not the Same Thing -- Phonetics: The Study of Sounds -- Describing Consonant Sounds -- Kinds of Consonant Sounds -- Vowel Sounds -- Summary -- Ch 4: Sound Systems of Language: Phonology -- Introduction: Sounds in the Mind -- Phonological Rules and Their Structure -- Syllables and Syllable Structure -- Stress -- Syllables and Stress in Phonological Processes -- Morphology and Phonology Interaction: Allomorphy -- Phonological Processes -- From Lexical Entries to Surface Realizations: What the Brain Knows -- Summary -- Ch 5: The Structure and Function of Phrases and Sentences: Syntax -- Introduction -- Constituency -- Major Constituents of Sentences: Noun Phrases and Verb Phrases -- Phrase-Structure Expansions -- Grammatical Relations: Subject, Direct Object, and Others.

Surface Structures and Underlying Structures -- Types of Syntactic Operations -- Functions of Syntactic Operations -- Recursion and Novel Sentences -- Summary -- Ch 6: The Study of Meaning: Semantics -- Introduction -- Linguistic, Social, and Affective Meaning -- Word, Sentence, and Utterance Meaning -- Lexical Semantics -- Function Words and Categories of Meaning -- Semantic Roles and Sentence Meaning -- Semantic Roles and Grammatical Relations -- Summary -- Ch 7: Language Universals and Language Typology -- Similarity and Diversity across Languages -- Phonological Universals -- Syntactic and Morphological Universals -- Types of Language Universals -- Explanations for Language Universals -- Language Universals, Language Diversity, and Language Acquisition -- Summary -- Part Two: Language Use -- Ch 8: Information Structure and Pragmatics -- Introduction: Encoding Information Structure -- Categories of Information Structure -- Information Structure: Intonation, Morphology, Syntax -- The Relationship of Sentences to Discourse: Pragmatics -- Summary -- Ch 9: Speech Acts and Conversation -- Language in Use -- Sentence Structure and the Function of Utterances -- Speech Acts -- The Cooperative Principle -- Violations of the Cooperative Principle -- Politeness -- Speech Events -- Conversation is Organized -- Cross-Cultural Communication -- Summary -- Ch 10: Language Variation across Situations of Use: Registers -- Introduction -- Language Varies within a Speech Community -- Speech Situations -- Registers in Monolingual Societies -- Markers of Register -- Similarities and Differences between Spoken and Written Registers -- Two Registers Compared -- Summary -- Ch 11: Language Variation among Social Groups: Dialects -- Language or Dialect: Which Do You Speak? -- How Do Languages Diverge and Merge? -- National Varieties of English.

Regional Varieties of American English -- The Atlas of North American English -- Ethnic Varieties of American English -- Ethnic Varieties and Social Identification -- Socioeconomic Status Varieties: English, French, and Spanish -- The Language Varieties of Women and Men -- Why Do Stigmatized Varieties Persist? -- Summary -- Part Three: Language Change, Language Development, and Language Acquisition -- Ch 12: Language Change over Time: Historical Linguistics -- Do Living Languages Always Change? -- Language Families and the Indo-European Family -- How to Reconstruct the Linguistic Past -- What are the Language Families of the World? -- Language Origins and Language Evolution -- Languages in Contact -- Summary -- Ch 13: Historical Development in English -- A Thousand Years of Change -- Where Does English Come From? -- Old English: 700-1100 -- Companions of Angels: A Narrative in Old English -- Middle English: 1100-1500 -- Where Men and Women Go All Naked: A Middle English Travel Fable -- Modern English: 1500-Present -- Summary -- Ch 14: Acquiring First and Second Languages -- Introduction -- Acquiring a First Language -- Studying Language Acquisition -- Acquiring a Second Language -- Summary -- Glossary, Symbols, Typographical Conventions -- Answers to Practice Exercises -- Index -- Index of Languages -- Index of Internet Sites -- Index of Films and Videos.

Whatever you do and wherever you go, you use language to interact. This text explains what human language is and how it works, giving you a look into the multiple fascinating and surprising facets of this uniquely human trait. You'll find many opportunities to ask your own questions and explore the language in use all around you.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2022. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.