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An Introduction to Language

ISBN: 978-1-118-55995-6

June 2014

Wiley-Blackwell

456 pages

Description

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
About the Author

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).

Features
  • Offers an engaging introduction to the nature of language, drawing on 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