Everyday Linguistics

This innovative introduction to linguistics connects language structure to everyday use, culture, and context, making the technicalities of language structure accessible, vivid and engaging.

Autorentext

Joanne Cavallaro is a professor emerita of English at St. Catherine University, Minnesota, U.S.A., where she has taught linguistics for 30 years.

Inhalt

Acknowledgments

1 INTRODUCTION

Diverse language experiences

Why study linguisticsand what is it anyway?

How we'll study language

A socially realistic linguistics

Prescriptive and descriptive perspectives on language

Navigating your way through this book

2 A LANGUAGE IS A LANGUAGE, RIGHT?

Introduction

What is language?

Design features of human language

Do animals have language?

Other characteristics of human language

3 MORPHOLOGY: WORD HISTORIES AND STRUCTURE

Introduction

Lexical categories

Words and their histories

Words and their structure

Morphology in languages other than English

Hierarchical structure in words

L1 acquisition in focus: She comed, those mouses

4 PHONETICS: THE SOUNDS OF ENGLISH

Introduction

International Phonetic Alphabet

Classifying language sounds

Consonants and vowels

Natural classes

Accents

Prosody

Phonetics in your world: What's in a name?

Phonetics in your world: Local acts of identity

Sign language phonetics

Phonetics in other languages

L1 acquisition in focus: Acquiring language sounds and signs

5 PHONOLOGY: WHY DO WE SAY IT LIKE THAT?

Introduction

Systematic structuring of sounds

Articulatory processes: Changing sounds

Phonology in your world: ask vs aks revisited

Morphophonology

L1 acquisition in focus: Learning phonemes and more

6 SYNTAX: ORDERING WORDS, MAKING SENTENCES

Introduction

Syntax and grammar

Constituents of a sentence

Phrase structure rules

Recursion

Structural ambiguity

Structural relationships among sentences

Syntactic operations

Using syntax in writing

Universal Grammar

L1 acquisition in focus: Acquiring syntax

Syntax in your (natural) world: Do birds have syntax?

Syntax in other languages

A note about theory

7 SEMANTICS: RELATIONSHIPS AMONG WORDS

Introduction

Meaning and meanings

Semantic relations: Is salt the opposite of pepper?

Figurative language

Semantic fields

Semantic roles and sentence meaning

Corpus linguistics

8 LANGUAGE IN EVERYDAY INTERACTION

Introduction

Discourse

Conversation patterns and organization

Pragmatics

Politeness

9 LANGUAGE VARIATION AND SOCIETY

Introduction

Structured variation

Standards and standardization

Critical sociolinguistics

10 AFRICAN AMERICAN LANGUAGE

Introduction

Overview

History of AAL

Structure of AAL

Variation within AAL

AAL in the courtroom

Micro-aggressions

Language, race, and identity

AAL and education

11 GENDERS, IDENTITIES, AND LINGUISTIC PERFORMANCE

Introduction

Early studies of language and gender

Multiple identities: Black Masculine Language

Gender as performance

12 MULTILINGUALISM

Introduction

What is multilingualism?

Language planning

Language contact

Superdiversity

Linguistic relativity

Learning to be multilingual

Multilingualism in education

13 LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH

Introduction

Origins of language

Language spread and language families

A very brief history of English

Origins of American Sign Language

Language loss and endangerment

14 ECOLINGUISTICS: LANGUAGE AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Introduction

Language and its natural environment

Eco-critical linguistics

Index