Table of Contents

Part 1: THE NATURE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE.
1. What Is Language?
Linguistic Knowledge. What Is Grammar? Animal Languages." In the Beginning: The Origin of Language and Thought. What We Know about Language.
2. Brain and Language.
The Human Brain. The Autonomy of Language. Language and Brain Development.
Part 2: GRAMMATICAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE.
3. Morphology: The Words of Language.
Dictionaries. Content Words and Function Words. Morphemes: The Minimal Units of Meaning. Rules of Word Formation. Sign Language Morphology. Morphological Analysis: Identifying Morphemes.
4. Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language.
What the Syntax Rules Do. Sentence Structure. Sentence Relatedness. UG Principles and Parameters. Sign Language Syntax.
5. The Meaning of Language.
What Speakers Know about Sentence Meaning. Compositional Semantics. Lexical Semantics (Word Meanings). Pragmatics.
6. Phonetics: The Sounds of Language.
Sound Segments. Articulatory Phonetics. Prosodic Features.
Phonetic Symbols and Spelling Correspondences. The "Phonetics" of Signed Languages.
7. Phonology: The Sound Patterns 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.
Part 3: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE.
8. Language Acquisition.
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition. Knowing More Than One Language.
9. Language Processing: Humans and Computers.
The Human Mind at Work: Human Language Processing. Computer Processing of Human Language.
Part 4: LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY.
10. Language in Society.
Dialects. Language and Education. Language in Use.
11. 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?
12. Writing: The ABCs of Language.
The History of Writing. Modern Writing Systems. Writing and Speech.
Glossary.
Index."

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 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.