Reviewed by Nikolai Penner, McMaster University
This textbook from a world-renown team of scholars at the University of Essex offers an innovative way of teaching the discipline of linguistics. The authors examine language from various perspectives and theoretical standpoints.
The book is divided into three large parts: ‘Sounds’, ‘Words’, and ‘Sentences’. In each section, fundamental concepts are introduced and then applied to the several linguistic disciplines (i.e. child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and sociolinguistics). Although the overall structure remains unaltered from the first edition, the second version of the book underwent a number of important changes, including a modification of individual sections, the addition of new exercises after each chapter, and a significant expansion of the bibliography and recommended reading lists at the end of each section.
Part 1, ‘Sounds’, includes seven chapters. It begins with a brief description and classification of the sounds of the English language (Ch. 2 ‘Sounds and suprasegmentals’, 29–51) and introduces some of the more abstract concepts in phonology, such as the notion of phonemes, syllables, and their structure (Ch. 5 ‘Phonemes, syllables and phonological processes, 84–105). Chs. 3 and 4 examine the role of sounds in phonological variation and sound change, whereas child phonology and issues of speech perception and production are the topics of the final two chapters in this section.
Part 2, ‘Words’, consists of nine chapters that discuss language in terms of morphology and semantics. Chs. 8–11 focus on word formation and introduces word categories, morphemes, and morphological processes. These concepts are then applied to different languages across the globe. Ch.12 ‘Word meaning’ (193–210) deals with semantic properties of words and the implication of word meaning for the overall organization of the lexicon. The next two chapters examine the acquisition of words by children, the issues of memory, word perception, and production. Chs. 15 and 16 deal with the lexical disorders that affect the use of words and inflectional marking (e.g. aphasia and specific language impairment) and with lexical variation and change.
The final section, Part 3 ‘Sentences’, contains ten chapters that discuss the core theoretical ideas on sentence formation and introduces new terminology, such as empty categories, movement, and syntactic variation. Chs. 24–26 examine the child’s acquisition of grammar, adult processing of sentences, and syntactic disorders (e.g. agrammatism). The book concludes with the discussion of sentence use and an introduction to the core ideas of pragmatics.
By structuring this book in an unconventional way, the authors aim to provide a number of benefits to both teachers and students. For example, the division into three parts makes this textbook appropriate for smaller classes. It provides a possibility to efficiently distribute the workload between a phonetician, a morphologist, and a syntactician. In addition, each section of the book is largely self-contained and can be used as an introduction for more specialized courses. Students, on the other hand, should be able to acquire the information and engage with the subject more easily compared to the other existing introductory textbooks.