Tone, the use of pitch to provide phonological contrast between morphemes, plays an integral role in the structures of many languages. This book teaches linguists a tried-and-proven methodology for analyzing tone in any part of the world. Significant features: • Delivers the most comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to tone analysis for field linguists • Emphasizes the discovery of contrastive tone patterns of morphemes, as opposed to contrastive tones of tone-bearing units • Focuses ...

Accessible, succinct, and including numerous student-friendly features, this introductory textbook offers an exceptional foundation to the field for those who are coming to it for the first time.Provides an ideal first course book in phonology, written by a renowned phonologistDeveloped and tested in the classroom through years of experience and useEmphasizes analysis of phonological data, placing this in its scientific context, and explai...

What is Morphology? is a concise and critical introduction to the central ideas of morphology, which has been revised and expanded to include additional material on morphological productivity and the mental lexicon, experimental and computational methods, and new teaching material.Introduces the fundamental aspects of morphology to students with minimal background in linguisticsIncludes additional material on morphological productivity and the mental lexico...

A classic book about language acquisition and conceptual structure, with a new preface by the author, "The Secret Life of Verbs."Before Steven Pinker wrote bestsellers on language and human nature, he wrote several technical monographs on language acquisition that have become classics in cognitive science. Learnability and Cognition, first published in 1989, brought together two big topics: how do children learn their mother tongue, and how does the mind r...

A lively introduction to morphology, this textbook is intended for undergraduates with relatively little background in linguistics. It shows students how to find and analyze morphological data and presents them with basic concepts and terminology concerning the mental lexicon, inflection, derivation, morphological typology, productivity, and the interfaces between morphology and syntax on the one hand and phonology on the other. By the end of the text students are ready to understand morph...

How does human language work? How do we put ideas into words that others can understand? Can linguistics shed light on the way the brain operates? Foundations of Language puts linguistics back at the centre of the search to understand human consciousness. Ray Jackendoff begins by surveying the developments in linguistics over the years since Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. He goes on to propose a radical re-conception of how the brain processes language. T...

A novel cognitive theory of semantics that proposes that the meanings of words can be described in terms of geometric structures.In The Geometry of Meaning, Peter Gärdenfors proposes a theory of semantics that bridges cognitive science and linguistics and shows how theories of cognitive processes, in particular concept formation, can be exploited in a general semantic model. He argues that our minds organize the information involved in communicative acts i...

The latest edition of the bestselling introduction to the field of linguistic semantics, updated throughout and featuring a wholly new chapter on inferential pragmaticsSemantics, Fifth Edition, is a comprehensive and well-balanced introduction to the study of the communication of meaning in language. Assuming no previous background in semantics and limited familiarity with formal linguistics, this student-friendly textbook describes the concepts, theory, a...

This book fills a long standing need for a basic introduction to Cognitive Grammar that is current, authoritative, comprehensive, and approachable. It presents a synthesis that draws together and refines the descriptive and theoretical notions developed in this framework over the course of three decades. In a unified manner, it accommodates both the conceptual and the social-interactive basis of linguistic structure, as well as the need for both functional explanation and explicit structur...

Understanding Semantics, Second Edition, provides an engaging and accessible introduction to linguistic semantics. The first part takes the reader through a step-by-step guide to the main phenomena and notions of semantics, covering levels and dimensions of meaning, ambiguity, meaning and context, logical relations and meaning relations, the basics of noun semantics, verb semantics and sentence semantics. The second part provides a critical introduction to the basic notions of the...

Provides a critical introduction to the central ideas and perennial problems of morphology, fully revised and updated in a new editionWhat is Morphology? is a concise, student-friendly introduction to the fundamentals of contemporary morphological theory and practice. Requiring only a basic knowledge of linguistics, this popular textbook describes morphological phenomena and their interactions with phonology, syntax, and semantics while familiarizing stude...

This book offers a unique perspective on meaning in language, broadening the scope of existing understanding of meaning by introducing a comprehensive and cohesive account of meaning that draws on a wide range of linguistic approaches.The volume seeks to build up a complete picture of what meaning is, different types of meaning, and different ways of structuring the same meaning across myriad forms and varieties of language across such domains, such as everyday speech, advertising,...