Linguistics

“Babel is an endlessly interesting book, and you don’t have to have any linguistic training to enjoy it . . . it’s just so much fun to read.” —NPR English is the world language, except that 80 percent of the world doesn’t speak it. Linguist Gaston Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world’s people in their mother tongues, you’d need to know no fewer than twenty languages. In Babel, he sets out to explore these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Javanese, Bengali). Whisking readers along on a delightful journey, he traces how these languages rose to greatness while others fell away, and shows how speakers today handle the foibles of their mother tongues. Whether showcasing tongue-tying phonetics, elegant but complicated writing scripts, or mind-bending quirks of grammar, Babel vividly illustrates that mother tongues are like nations: each has its own customs and beliefs that seem as self-evident to those born into it as they are surprising to outsiders. Babel reveals why modern Turks can’t read books that are a mere 75 years old, what it means in practice for Russian and English to be relatives, and how Japanese developed separate “dialects” for men and women. Dorren also shares his experiences studying Vietnamese in Hanoi, debunks ten myths about Chinese characters, and discovers the region where Swahili became the lingua franca. Witty and utterly fascinating, Babel will change how you look at and listen to the world. “Word nerds of every strain will enjoy this wildly entertaining linguistic study.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

For the past forty years, linguistics has been dominated by the idea that language is categorical and linguistic competence discrete. It has become increasingly clear, however, that many levels of representation, from phonemes to sentence structure, show probabilistic properties, as does the language faculty. Probabilistic linguistics conceptualizes categories as distributions and views knowledge of language not as a minimal set of categorical constraints but as a set of gradient rules that may be characterized by a statistical distribution. Whereas categorical approaches focus on the endpoints of distributions of linguistic phenomena, probabilistic approaches focus on the gradient middle ground. Probabilistic linguistics integrates all the progress made by linguistics thus far with a probabilistic perspective. This book presents a comprehensive introduction to probabilistic approaches to linguistic inquiry. It covers the application of probabilistic techniques to phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics. It also includes a tutorial on elementary probability theory and probabilistic grammars.

Developed at Carleton University, Ottawa, this is a comprehensive workbook -- now in its second, revised edition -- designed primarily for use with introductory courses in linguistics. With 334 graded excercises and problems from more than 60 languages and dialects.

Why Study Linguistics is designed to help anyone with an interest in studying language understand what linguistics is, and what linguists do. Exploring how the scientific study of language differs from other ways of investigating this uniquely human behavior, Why Study Linguistics:? explores the various topics that students of linguistics study, including sound systems of language, the structure of words and sentences and their meanings, and the wider social context of language change and language variation;? explains what you might do with a degree in linguistics and the kinds of jobs and careers that studying linguistics prepares you for; is supported by a list of links to additional resources available online.? This book is the first of its kind and will be essential reading for anyone considering a course of study in this fascinating subject, as well as teachers, advisors, student mentors, and anyone who wants to know more about the scientific study of language.

This accessible textbook is the only introduction to linguistics in which each chapter is written by an expert who teaches courses on that topic, ensuring balanced and uniformly excellent coverage of the full range of modern linguistics. Assuming no prior knowledge the text offers a clear introduction to the traditional topics of structural linguistics (theories of sound, form, meaning, and language change), and in addition provides full coverage of contextual linguistics, including separate chapters on discourse, dialect variation, language and culture, and the politics of language. There are also up-to-date separate chapters on language and the brain, computational linguistics, writing, child language acquisition, and second-language learning. The breadth of the textbook makes it ideal for introductory courses on language and linguistics offered by departments of English, sociology, anthropology, and communications, as well as by linguistics departments.

Human language allows us to plan, communicate, and create new ideas, without limit. Yet we have only finite experiences, and our languages have finite stores of words. Drawing on research from neuroscience, psychology, and linguistics, David Adger takes us on a journey to the hidden structure behind all we say (or sign) and understand.

This is a comprehensive introduction to theoretical linguistics. It presupposes no previous knowledge and terms are defined as they are introduced; but it gives a rigorous and technical treatment of a wide range of topics, and brings the reader to an advanced level of understanding. Since its first publication in 1968 Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics has been one of the classic introductions to the discipline. In a field which is often seen as rapidly moving, it will continue to be used by students seeking an overview of the central areas of linguistics - phonetics and phonology, grammar and semantics - and to be of great value to anyone interested in the ways in which theory can help to explain the key problems of human language.

This textbook introduces the fundamental concepts and methods of corpus linguistics for students approaching this topic for the first time, putting specific emphasis on the enormous linguistic diversity represented by approximately 7,000 human languages and broadening the scope of current concerns in general corpus linguistics. Including a basic toolkit to help the reader investigate language in different usage contexts, this book: Shows the relevance of corpora to a range of linguistic areas from phonology to sociolinguistics and discourse Covers recent developments in the application of corpus linguistics to the study of understudied languages and linguistic typology Features exercises, short problems, and questions Includes examples from real studies in over 15 languages plus multilingual corpora Providing the necessary corpus linguistics skills to critically evaluate and replicate studies, this book is essential reading for anyone studying corpus linguistics.