An Introduction to Language

An Introduction to Language introduces you to the fascinating study of human language from an Australian perspective. Chapters explore the nature of human language, the grammatical aspects and psychology of language, as well as language and its relation to society. Popular features include learning objectives and margin definitions in each chapter, along with summary tables inside the covers, which assist you to learn core concepts and terminology.

Table of Contents:
IFC: Phoneme List for Australian English Part 1. The nature of human language 1. What is language? Part 2. Grammatical aspects of language 2. Phonetics: The sounMorphologyds of language 3. Phonology: The sound patterns of language 4. Morphology: The words of language 5. Syntax: The sentence patterns of language 6. Semantics and Pragmatics: The meanings of language Part 3. The psychology of language 7. Language acquisition 8. Language processing and the human brain Part 4. Language and society 9. Language in society 10. Language change: The syllables of time 11. Writing: The ABCs of language IBC: Lexical Categories tables

About the Author :
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. Nina Hyams is Professor of Linguistics and co-director of the UCLA Psycholinguistics Laboratory and the UCLA Infant Language Laboratory. 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 and morphology in children. Mengistu Amberber is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of New South Wales. His main research interests include the syntax–semantics interface (with particular reference to generative grammar) and linguistic typology. He is the co-editor of Complex Predicates: Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Event Structure (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Felicity Cox is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. She is the Linguistics Department director of undergraduate studies and convenor of the Bachelor of Speech, Hearing and Language Sciences program. She teaches phonetics and phonology at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and has published widely on the phonetics and phonology of Australian English. Felicity is the author of Australian English: Pronunciation and Transcription, 2nd edition (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Rosalind Thornton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University and a researcher in the Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders. Rosalind teaches introductory linguistics, child language acquisition and syntax. Her research focuses on the acquisition of syntax in typically-developing children, and children with Specific Language Impairment.