How Language Works: the Cognitive Science of Linguistics

Description

Indiana University, 2006. — 258 pages.Students studying linguistics and other language sciences for the first time often have misconceptions about what they are about and what they can offer them. They may think that linguists are authorities on what is correct and what is incorrect in a given language. But linguistics is the science of language; it treats language and the ways people use it as phenomena to be studied much as a geologist treats the earth. Linguists want to figure out how language works. They are no more in the business of making value judgments about people's language than geologists are in the business of making value judgments about the behavior of the earth.ContentsIntroduction Organization and conventions in the book What we study How we study language What we don't do: prescribing and evaluating language Dialects and languages Two themes Why study language Problems Word meanings Reference and proper nouns Categories and common nouns Word senses and taxonomies Metaphor and metonymy Deixis and person Lexical differences among languages Learning meaning Problems Word forms: units Phonemes Iconicity Vowels English consonants Consonants in other languages Syllables Problems Word forms: processes Phonetic contexts Assimilation Distribution of phones Learning phonology English accents Phonological change Phonology in the wild Problems Composition: combining words Attributes and attribution Modification Compositionality and idiomaticity Problems Sentences States and events Situation schemas and semantic roles Constituency and noun phrases Subjects Direct objects Adjuncts Sentence functions Problems Grammatical categories Morphemes Grammatical categories and NPs Grammatical categories and verbs Morphophonology Linguistic relativity Problems Derivation Derivational morphology Foregrounding and backgrounding Active and passive voice More verb derivation Problems Appendices Phonetic symbols Glossary Languages cited References