Linguistics: an introduction

by Andrew Radford, Martin Atkinson, David Britain

Written by a team based at one of the world's leading centres for linguistic teaching and research, the second edition of this highly successful textbook offers a unified approach to language, viewed from a range of perspectives essential for students' understanding of the subject. Using clear explanations throughout, the book is divided into three main sections: sounds, words, and sentences. In each, the foundational concepts are introduced, along with their application to the fields of child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, language disorders, and sociolinguistics, giving the book a unique yet simple structure that helps students to engage with the subject more easily than other textbooks on the market. This edition includes a completely new section on sentence use, including an introduction and discussion of core areas of pragmatics and conversational analysis; coverage of sociolinguistic topics, introducing communities of practice; a wealth of new exercise material and updated further reading.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction, Reference

447 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 1999

Reviews

[Tamisha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Theory: The poor rating is likely due to undergrads having this textbook forced upon them as compulsory reading.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

A highly technical deep dive into the world of linguistics and introduction to the different facets of phonology, morphology, syntax, and speech disorders. Definitely will be rereading this at some point. The only draw is that the book does not teach IPA or first order logic very well.

[Remus Rimbu · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good introduction to the field of modern linguistics, using an approach inspired by Noam Chomsky

[Lilli Feldeborn]

the semester is finished (at least i don't have lectures anymore), and i have given up reading this during the sentences part

[Zakaria Bziker · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to read this book in order to enlarge my Linguistics' knowledge seeing that I am a Linguistics' major student. This book did in fact help me to have an overview picture about the science of language.

[Nat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a nice, economical intro to a wide range of linguistic issues from sound to meaning.