Linguistics An Introduction to Linguistic Theory

Аннотация

This textbook is intended for introductory courses in linguistic theory for undergraduate linguistics majors or first-year graduate students. Its aim is to provide the students who have no previous knowledge of linguistics with the background necessary to continue with courses in the core areas of the field – phonetics, phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics. In each part the book is concerned with discussing the underlying principles of Universal Grammar common to all languages, showing how these are revealed in language acquisition and in the specific grammars of the world’s languages. Theoretical concepts are introduced through the analysis of a wide set of linguistic data from Arabic to Zulu. By working through real linguistic data, students will learn how to do linguistics. Theoretical Linguistics (the concern of this textbook), often referred to as generative linguistics, has its basis in views first put forth by Chomsky’s 1955 The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory.