Bøger i Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics serien

Language is a skill that young children master with incredible ease and speed, and the remarkable way in which they achieve this has long fascinated linguists and developmental psychologists alike. This accessible new textbook introduces the field of child language acquisition, exploring language development from birth.

Assuming little or no prior knowledge of the topic, this textbook provides a clearly organized introduction to tone and tonal phonology. Comprehensive in scope, it examines the main types of tonal systems found in Africa, the Americas, and Asia, using examples from the widest possible range of tone languages.

Understanding Minimalism, first published in 2005, is an introduction to the Minimalist Program - the model of syntactic theory within generative linguistics. Accessibly written, it presents the basic principles and techniques of the minimalist program in a step-by-step fashion. Over 100 exercises are provided, encouraging students to put these new skills into practice.

This 1986 textbook presents an account of the main concerns, problems and theoretical and practical issues raised by second language acquisition research. It provides students of linguistics and applied linguistics and anyone concerned with foreign language teaching with a real understanding of the fundamental issues in the field.

Case, a system which marks the relationships between words in a sentence, is fundamental to every language. This accessible 2006 textbook introduces the various approaches to case that have been proposed in modern linguistics, looking at how different theories of syntax have accounted for the distribution of case across languages.

When first published in 1986, this book was the first to survey intonation in all its aspects, both in English and universally. This updated edition remains the basic reference book on the subject for linguists, phoneticians, speech therapists and all those concerned with speech in any way.

Designed for students, this detailed analysis of the principal areas of French grammar combines the insights of modern linguistic theory with those of more traditional grammarians. Each chapter is followed by a set of exercises, and a useful guide to further reading.

Andrew Radford's textbook, Minimalist Syntax, provides a concise, clear, and accessible introduction to syntactic theory. Assuming very little prior grammatical knowledge, it takes students through a range of phenomena in English syntax. Includes an extensive glossary, 'helpful hints', and exercises with model answers.

Definiteness is the concept expressed by definite articles such as 'the', and also by demonstratives ('this', that') and personal pronouns. This 1999 textbook surveys such expressions in many languages, and examines theoretical literature on this aspect of grammar, to establish what definiteness is and how languages can express it.

This textbook on syntactic theory draws on Chomsky's minimalist programme. It covers the main topics, presents theoretical issues and discusses structural variation within English. There are extensive integral workbook sections with helpful hints and model answers and a substantial glossary.

This book demonstrates the contribution that statistics can and should make to linguistic studies. The range of work to which statistical analysis is applicable is vast: including, for example, language acquisition, language variation and many aspects of applied linguistics.

This richly illustrated textbook introduces the major writing systems of the world - from cuneiform to English spelling - explaining their structural makeup and how they work. It also includes a review of the history of writing and a discussion of the literate mind and the literate society.

This textbook deals with the grammatical category of person. Drawing on data from over 700 languages, it compares the use of person across different languages, examines the factors underlying this variation, and looks at different types of person forms in the grammatical and social contexts in which they are used.

This book is an introduction to syntactic theory and analysis which can be used for both basic syntactic analysis courses and advanced courses in theoretical syntax. It presents syntactic phenomena from a wide range of languages and introduces students to the major typological issues that syntactic theories must address.

This is an introduction to Optimality Theory, whose central idea is that surface forms of language reflect resolutions of conflicts between competing constraints. Exercises accompany chapters 1-7, and there are sections on further reading. Optimality Theory will be welcomed by any linguist with a knowledge of derivational Generative Phonology.

An introduction to the general linguistic study of aspect. Topics covered include the relation of tense and aspect, the morphology and the semantics of aspect, and structuralist and philosophical approaches. The first study of aspect as a general linguistic phenomenon, it is intended for students of individual languages and linguistics.

Cognitive Linguistics argues that language is governed by general cognitive principles, rather than by a special-purpose language module. This introductory textbook surveys the field of cognitive linguistics, presenting its theoretical foundations and the arguments supporting it. Clearly organised and accessibly written, it provides a useful introduction to this fast-growing area.

This textbook is a clear and concise introduction to the study of how new languages come into being. Starting with an overview of the field's basic concepts, it surveys the new languages that developed as a result of the European expansion to the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific.

This book, first published in 2000, provides an introduction to the grammatical category of number, surveying many languages to reveal that the world's linguistic resources are richer than even many linguists realise. Aimed at linguistic students, it is the first book-length treatment of this topic and can serve as an entry to linguistic typology.

This book provides a clear and accessible introduction to formal, and especially Montague, semantics within a linguistic framework.

This book provides students of phonology with an accessible introduction to the way in which sounds combine to form words. It offers more detail than previously available in introductory textbooks and is an indispensable first step towards understanding the major theoretical issues in modern phonology at the word level.

This authoritative 2003 textbook provides a linguistic perspective on second language acquisition. It argues for a role for Universal Grammar in second language acquisition. Theories as to the role of Universal Grammar and the extent of language transfer are presented and discussed, together with relevant empirical research.

William Croft presents a comprehensive introduction to the method and theory used in studying typology and universals. The second edition of this essential textbook has been thoroughly rewritten and updated to reflect advances in typology and universals in the past decade.

Andrew Radford has acquired an unrivalled reputation over the past thirty years for writing syntax textbooks in which difficult concepts are clearly explained without the excessive use of technical jargon. Analysing English Sentences continues in this tradition, offering a well-structured introduction to English syntax and contemporary syntactic theory which is supported throughout with learning aids such as summaries, lists of key hypotheses and principles, extensive references, handy hints and exercises. Instructors will also benefit from the book's free online resources, which include PowerPoint slides of chapter key points and analyses of exercise material, as well as an answer key for all the in-book exercises. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated throughout, including additional exercises and an entirely new chapter on exclamative and relative clauses. Assuming no prior knowledge of grammar, this is an approachable introduction to the subject for undergraduate and graduate students.

This is a general introduction to grammaticalization, the change whereby lexical terms and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions. The authors synthesize work from several areas of linguistics, including historical linguistics, discourse analysis, and pragmatics. Data are drawn from many languages including Ewe, Finnish, French, Hindi, Hittite, Japanese, Malay, and especially English. This 2003 second edition has been thoroughly revised with substantial updates on theoretical and methodological issues that have arisen in the decade since the first edition, and includes a significantly expanded bibliography. Particular attention is paid to recent debates over directionality in change and the role of grammaticalization in creolization. Grammaticalization will be a valuable and stimulating textbook for all linguists interested in the development of grammatical forms and will also be of interest to readers in anthropology and psychology.

A handy beginner's guide, this textbook introduces the various stages of linguistic fieldwork, from the preparation of the work to the presentation of the results. Drawing on over forty years of fieldwork experience between them, in over two dozen languages, the authors pack the book with examples and anecdotes from their experiences and include practical exercises for students to test what they have learned. Independent of any particular perspective, the methods can be applied to a wide range of fieldwork settings, for projects with very different theoretical backgrounds and without the need to travel too far. The book covers 'traditional fieldwork' such as language description and documentation, as well as less typical methods, including language contact and quantitative studies with experiments or questionnaires.

Discourse analysis is a term that has come to have different interpretations for scholars working in different disciplines. For a sociolinguist, it is concerned mainly with the structure of social interaction manifested in conversation; for a psycholinguist, it is primarily concerned with the nature of comprehension of short written texts; for the computational linguist, it is concerned with producing operational models of text-understanding within highly limited contexts. In this textbook, first published in 1983, the authors provide an extensive overview of the many and diverse approaches to the study of discourse, but base their own approach centrally on the discipline which, to varying degrees, is common to them all - linguistics. Using a methodology which has much in common with descriptive linguistics, they offer a lucid and wide-ranging account of how forms of language are used in communication. Their principal concern is to examine how any language produced by man, whether spoken or written, is used to communicate for a purpose in a context.

Those aspects of language use that are crucial to an understanding of language as a system, and especially to an understanding of meaning, are the acknowledged concern of linguistic pragmatics. This textbook provides a lucid and integrative analysis of the central topics in pragmatics - deixis, implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and conversational structure. A central concern of the book is the relation between pragmatics and semantics, and Dr Levinson shows clearly how a pragmatic approach can resolve some of the problems semantics have been confronting and simplifying semantic analyses. The exposition is always clear and supported by helpful exemplification. The detailed analyses of selected topics give the student a clear view of the empirical rigour demanded by the study of linguistic pragmatics, but Dr Levinson never loses sight of the rich diversity of the subject. An introduction and conclusion relate pragmatics to other fields in linguistics and other disciplines concerned with language usage - psychology, philosophy, anthropology and literature.

Analyzing Sound Patterns is a clear and concise introduction to phonological phenomena, covering a wide range of issues from segmental to suprasegmental problems and prosodic morphology. Assuming no prior knowledge of problem solving, this textbook shows students how to analyze phonological problems with a focus on practical tools, methodology and step-by-step instructions. It is aimed at undergraduate and beginning graduate students and places an instructional focus on developing students' analytical abilities. It includes extensive exercises of various types which engage students in reading and evaluating competing analyses, and involves students in a variety of analytical tasks. This textbook: * is designed around related phonological problems and demonstrates how they are analyzed step by step * presents and compares competing accounts of identical problems, and discusses and evaluates the arguments that distinguish one analysis from another * details how a broad array of sound patterns are identified and analyzed.