The fourth edition of Linguistics has been thoroughly updated and
revised to reflect the increasing confluence of linguistics and
cognitive science. This is especially evident in the chapter on language
acquisition, which now includes sections on the acquisition of
morphology, syntax, and pragmatic competence. More special topics have
also been added to give teachers greater freedom to shape courses to
their own interests. The basic structure of the book, however, remains
unchanged, with its focus on a small set of linguistic concepts that are
fundamental to the field and that will allow students to get a feel for
how work in different areas of linguistics is actually done. A new and
expanded third edition of the companion Linguistics Workbook adds
complementary material on universals and cross-language data.
Linguistics is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the
structural and interpretive aspects of language: morphology, phonetics,
phonology, syntax, semantics, language variation, and language change.
The second part is cognitively oriented and includes chapters on
pragmatics, the psychology of language, language acquisition, and
language and the brain. This new edition adds special topics to the
chapters on morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, acquisition, and
language and the brain.
Richard Demers is Professor of Linguistics and Robert Harnish is
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, where the late
Adrian Akmajian also taught. Ann K. Farmer is Research Associate in the
Linguistics Department at the University of California, Berkeley.