Reviewed by Alexander Onysko, Universität Innsbruck
The third edition of The study of language largely lives up to the byline on the title page: ‘thoroughly revised and updated’. A comparison to the previous edition shows a variety of improvements. The layout of the book is more user-friendly due to larger fonts for chapter headings and section titles that facilitate selective reading. Moreover, the extended list of keywords following each chapter heading in the table of contents complements this improved layout by providing a clearer overview of the concepts dealt with in the individual chapters.
The book comprises twenty chapters that cover essential topics in linguistics, from traditional fields such as phonetics and phonology, morphology, word formation, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics to important areas such as discourse analysis, language and the brain, language acquisition, gestures and sign languages, language history and change, regional variation, social variation, and language and culture. In comparison to the second edition, the cohesion within the opening chapters has been successfully increased. Thus, Ch. 1, ‘The origins of language’, is now immediately followed by ‘Animals and human language’, which includes a discussion of the properties of language (e.g. displacement, arbitrariness, productivity, cultural transmission, duality) within the context of the limited ability of chimpanzees to acquire (human) language.
Additional changes that improve the accessibility of the book include the removal of the chapter on language and machines, whose content in the second edition was a bit outdated, and the addition of separate chapters devoted to regional variation, social variation, and language and culture. This separation allows for an expansion of topics such as dialectology, social markers, speech style and style shifting, prestige, speech accommodation, social barriers, vernacular language, slang, address terms, and language and gender.
As helpful tools for teaching and self study, every chapter concludes with study questions, research tasks, discussion topics or projects, and suggestions for further reading. An appendix contains answers to the study questions, and the newly available glossary allows students to navigate safely through the unknown waters of linguistic terminology, which are successfully kept to a mere trickle throughout the book.
While this volume offers an incredible amount of information in a concise and clear manner, there are a few areas of language analysis that should be included in such a comprehensive introductory book. For example, the chapter on syntax is solely based on generative grammar and neglects other approaches such as functional grammar and construction grammar. Similarly, the chapter on semantics focuses on the rather static notions of semantic features and lexical relations. Prototype semantics and polysemy are comparably underrepresented, and while the process of metonymy is lucidly explained, its close kin, metaphor, remains unmentioned. A brief depiction of cognitive and logical approaches would better indicate the complexity of semantics. Finally, the rapidly developing fields of corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics deserve separate chapters in the book.
Despite these minor shortcomings that could inspire future editions of The study of language, this edition has taken a step to remain the most lucidly written, comprehensive, and concise introduction to language available. This volume is impressive for its accessibility, compact structure, and didactic aids.