An Introduction to Language

An Introduction to Language offers an engaging guide to the nature of language, focusing on how language works – its sounds, words, structures, and phrases – all investigated through wide-ranging examples from Old English to contemporary pop culture.

• Explores the idea of a scientific approach to language, inviting students to consider what qualities of language comprise everyday skills for us, be they sounds, words, phrases, or conversation
• Helps shape our understanding of what language is, how it works, and why it is both elegantly complex and essential to who we are
• Includes exercises within each chapter to help readers explore key concepts and directly observe the patterns that are part of all human language
• Examines linguistic variation and change to illustrate social nuances and language-in-use, drawing primarily on examples from English
• Avoids linguistic jargon, focusing instead on a broader and more general approach to the study of language, and making it ideal for those coming to the subject for the first time
• Supported by additional web resources – available upon publication at www.wiley.com/go/hazen/introlanguage – including student study aids and testbank and notes for instructors

Kirk Hazen is Professor of Linguistics at West Virginia University. He is co-editor of Research Methods in Sociolinguistics (with Janet Holmes, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

Companion Website xiv

Acknowledgments xv

Note to Instructors xvii

Preface: About the Book xix

1 Introduction 1

2 Sounds 31

3 Patterns of Sounds 73

4 Simple Words in the Lexicon 109

5 Idioms, Slang, and the English Lexicon 147

6 Words Made of Many Parts 177

7 Putting Pieces Together 217

8 Building Bigger Phrases 249

9 From Phrases to Meaning 295

10 The Winding Paths of Language in Education 327

11 The Life Cycles of Language 361

Glossary 395

Index 421

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