{"id":1014,"date":"2010-08-10T22:00:15","date_gmt":"2010-08-10T20:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1014"},"modified":"2010-08-09T10:20:53","modified_gmt":"2010-08-09T08:20:53","slug":"an-introduction-to-language-and-linguistics-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1014","title":{"rendered":"An introduction to language and linguistics"},"content":{"rendered":"
An introduction to language and linguistics<\/strong>. Ed. by Ralph W. Fasold<\/strong> and Jeff Connor-Linton<\/strong>. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. 556. ISBN 0521612357<\/a>. $50.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Ioana-Rucsandra Dasc\u0103lu<\/strong>, University of Craiova<\/em><\/p>\n

This handbook is a very useful guide for all beginners who intend to study linguistics. In the introductory chapter, the editors present the properties language displays as an essential element of human activity as well as the universal properties generally occurring in the description of languages: modularity, constituency and recursion, discreteness, productivity, arbitrariness, reliance on context, and variability. Different aspects of language study are taken up: phonetics, morphology, semantics, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, language change, and computational linguistics.<\/p>\n

In the chapter about phonetics and phonology, Elizabeth Zsiga<\/strong> describes the organs that produce articulation, classifying the results of the process into several types of sounds. Morphology is the next level discussed, and it is motivated as the study of the internal structure of vowels and their meaningful parts; a definition of \u2018word\u2019 is offered as \u2018the smallest independent unit of language or one that can be separated from other such units in an utterance\u2019 (56).<\/p>\n

Paul Portner<\/strong> presents the creation of meaning within the domain of semantics and pragmatics: semantics studies the literal meanings of words, phrases, and sentences, while pragmatics deals with the use of language in particular situations (137). The relation between words is depicted by semantic concepts such as synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, ambiguity, and entailment. There are conversational principles that organize human speech: they were mainly theorized by H. Paul Grice, who enunciated the cooperative principle and four conversational maxims: quality, quantity, relevance, and manner. Within the discipline of pragmatics, a notable contribution was proposed by J. Austin, recognizing locutionary acts, illocutionary acts, and perlocutionary acts (162).<\/p>\n

Kendall A. King<\/strong> writes about child language acquisition, mixing medical and linguistic data, in order to reveal the phases that children follow when they begin talking: the holophrastic stage, the two-word stage, and the multi-word stage. In \u2018Language and the brain\u2019, Michael T. Ullman writes about the biocognitive and neurocognitive processes of the human brain in the production of language. The brain anatomy is clearly presented by drawings and maps describing neurons, hormones, neurotransmitters, and genes. Major problems such as mental lexicon, conceptual semantics, phonology, syntax, and morphology are discussed in biological, that is, cellular, molecular, and genetic terms.<\/p>\n

Shaligram Shukla<\/strong> and Jeff Connor-Linton<\/strong> deal with themes of language change, diachrony, and historical linguistics. The types of language changes discussed by the authors are: phonological, morphological, semantic, and syntactic. At the lexical level, the focus is on borrowings and the status of loan words, the difference between a superstratum language and a substratum language, and the difference between adapted elements and loan translations (294). Analogy is discussed as a process that causes modifications or new creations according to existing patterns, and the reconstruction of a protolanguage by the comparative method is presented, with attention to the relations among prehistorical peoples thus revealed (305).<\/p>\n

At the geographic level, taking into account regional factors, Natalie Schilling-Estes<\/strong> deals with dialect variation (lexical, phonological, and morphosyntactic), introducing terms such as \u2018dialect\u2019, \u2018slang\u2019, and \u2018jargon\u2019, and their transformations according to social factors (region, social class, ethnicity, age) that are important subjects in multicultural studies. The deeper anthropological implications suggest sets of rules about politeness, ethnic differences, interactional sociolinguistics, indirectness, stereotyping, gender, and \u2018languaculture, a term that expresses the way \u2018the speaker perceives and orders the world\u2019 (369).<\/p>\n

Ralph Fasold<\/strong>, in \u2018The politics of language\u2019, continues the sociological approach with the connection between language and identity, studying various types such as political invectives, blasphemy and cursing, and hate speech. Connor-Linton studies writing, covering the types of scripts, including logographic systems with pictograms, syllabic systems, alphabetic and consonantal ones, and concludes that writing plays a decisive role in human cultures and society.<\/p>\n

Alison Mackey<\/strong> studies second language acquisition (SLA) by examining methods of learning and teaching that are guided by behaviorist, nativist, interactionist, and socioculturalist principles, with the participation of grammar translation, audiolingualism, community language learning, the direct method, the silent way, and the natural approach (460).<\/p>\n

The last chapter, \u2019Computational linguistics\u2019 by Inderjeet Mani<\/strong>, discusses the domain where human language is learned and understood by machines\u2014whether it is a matter of accomplishing translations, of using mechanical processes and web online data, of modeling morphological processing, syntactic processing, semantic processing, probabilistic theories, or of recognizing speech\u2014all through mathematical patterns, algorithms, and statistic approaches.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An introduction to language and linguistics. Ed. by Ralph W. Fasold and Jeff Connor-Linton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. 556. ISBN 0521612357. $50. Reviewed by Ioana-Rucsandra Dasc\u0103lu, University of Craiova This handbook is a very useful guide for all beginners who intend to study linguistics. In the introductory chapter, the editors present the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1014"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1015,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014\/revisions\/1015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}