An Introduction to Language

1. WHAT IS LANGUAGE? Linguistic Knowledge. What Is Grammar? Universal Grammar. What Is Not (Human) Language. Language and Thought. 2. MORPHOLOGY: THE WORDS OF LANGUAGE. Content Words and Function Words. Morphemes: The Minimal Units of Meaning. Rules of Word Formation. Sign Language Morphology. Morphological Analysis: Identifying Morphemes. 3. SYNTAX: THE SENTENCE PATTERNS OF LANGUAGE. What the Syntax Rules Do. Sentence Structure. UG Principles and Parameters. Sign Language Syntax. 4. THE MEANING OF LANGUAGE. What Speakers Know about Sentence Meaning. Compositional Semantics. When Compositionality Goes Awry. Lexical Semantics (Word Meanings). Pragmatics. 5. PHONETICS: THE SOUNDS OF LANGUAGE. Sound Segments. Articulatory Phonetics. Major Phonetic Classes. Prosodic Features. Phonetic Symbols and Spelling Correspondences. The Phonetics" of Signed Languages. 6. PHONOLOGY: THE SOUND OF LANGUAGE. The Pronunciation of Morphemes. Phonemes: The Phonological Units of Language. Distinctive Features of Phonemes. The Rules of Phonology. Prosodic Phonology. Sequential Constraints of Phonemes. Why Do Phonological Rules Exist? Phonological Analysis. 7. LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY. Dialects. Languages in Contact. Language and Education. Language in Use. 8. LANGUAGE CHANGE: THE SYLLABLES OF TIME. The Regularity of Sound Change. Phonological Change. Morphological Change. Syntactic Change. Lexical Change. Reconstructing "Dead" Languages. Extinct and Endangered Languages. The Genetic Classification of Languages. Types of Languages. Why Do Languages Change? 9.LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. The Linguistic Capacity of Children. Stages in Language Acquisition. The Role of the Linguistic Environment: Adult Input. Knowing More Than One Language. 10. LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND THE HUMAN BRAIN. The Human Mind at Work. The Human Brain. Language and Brain Development. The Modular Mind: Dissociations of Language and Cognition. 11. COMPUTER PROCESSING OF HUMAN LANGUAGE. Computers That Talk and Listen. Applications of

Nina Hyams received her bachelor's degree in journalism from Boston University in 1973 and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in linguistics from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1981 and 1983, respectively. She joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1983, where she is a professor of linguistics. Her main areas of research are childhood language development and syntax. She is author of the book LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND THE THEORY OF PARAMETERS (D. Reidel Publishers, 1986), a milestone in language acquisition research. She has also published numerous articles on the development of syntax, morphology, and semantics in children. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Utrecht and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and has given lectures throughout Europe and Japan. Victoria Fromkin was Professor of Linguistics and a member of the faculty of the University of California, Department of Linguistics from 1966 until her death in 2000. She served as its chair from 1972-1976. Dr Fromkin published more than one hundred books, monographs and papers on topics concerned with phonetics, phonology, tone languages, African languages, speech errors, processing models, aphasia and the brain/mind/language interface. Robert Rodman was a Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at North Carolina State University. His research interests included computational forensic linguistics, speech processing, and in particular, lip synchronisation and voice recognition.