This is an ideal text for introducing linguistics at the undergraduate level. It is the product of numerous years of collaboration on the part of the authors in teaching introductory linguistics courses at the University of Arizona. Concentrating on how linguists actually do linguistics, the book presents more than just facts and results to students; it shows in simple and concise terms how one goes about arguing for a position, how evidence is gathered, and how hypotheses are tested.

Part I deals with animal communication systems, contrasting these with human language. The study of bee, bird and primate communication systems is not only interesting to beginning students, it provides them with background concepts in communication that are developed and built on in the next section of the book.

Part II concentrates on human language. It covers major areas of linguistics, showing in each chapter how linguists analyze phenomena and establish hypotheses within their given subfields. This part of the book includes not only the traditional fundamentals of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, language variation, and language change but also includes a comprehensive chapter on the recently emerging field of pragmatics and linguistic communication.

Part III focuses on two special topics—neurolinguistics, the exciting nascent discipline of language and the brain, and the recent attempts to teach chimpanzees a form of language," a topic that allows students to integrate material already covered in the book in order to evaluate claims about the linguistic abilities of chimpanzees.

Students and teachers in linguistics will find the approach taken in this text both stimulating and challenging. Just as important, it presents crucial ideas from linguistics for students, teachers, and researchers in related fields such as philosophy, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence and computer science, speech and hearing sciences, neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, language teaching, and education, among others. By varying the selection of chapters and subsections in a particular course, teachers of different backgrounds and in different academic disciplines can "custom-make" an introductory linguistics course for their own purposes, whether the course is a basic general survey or a detailed approach to individual topics.

Review

"This book provides a basic orientation to linguistic science, primarily through a descriptive linguistic approach. Its intended purpose is to serve as an introductory text to linguistics, and its clarity in writing style and tight organization are obvious strengths in serving this purpose."-- "Journal of the American Speech and Hearing Association"

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