Introduction to English Linguistics

Ingo Plag, Sabine Arndt-Lappe, Maria Braun, Mareile Schramm

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783110425543
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The new and updated third edition of this highly successful textbook contains an additional chapter that presents modern empirical research methods in the form of exemplary small-scale studies. In these projects the authors invite the reader to develop and address research questions from phonetics/phonology, morphology and syntax. The pertinent experimental and corpus-linguistic techniques are introduced and students are familiarized with some basic statistical tools necessary for the analysis of the data.
The major difference between this book and its potential competitors lies in its hands-on didactic orientation, with a strong focus on linguistic analysis and argumentation. Language and linguistic theory are approached from a strictly empirical perspective: given a certain set of data to be accounted for, theoretical and methodological problems must be solved in order to analyze and understand the data properly. The book is not written from the perspective of a particular theoretical framework and draws on insights from various research traditions. Introduction to English Linguistics concentrates on gaining expertise and analytical skills in the traditional core areas of linguistics, i.e. phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. The chapter on "Extensions and applications" widens the perspective to other areas of linguistic research, such as historical, socio- and psycholinguistics. Each chapter is accompanied by exercises and suggestions for further reading. A glossary and an index facilitate access to terms and topics.

1 The sounds: phonetics

1.1 Introduction

Speaking is such a normal and everyday process for us that most of the time we do not consciously think about what we are doing. Fortunately, you might say. Imagine you had to think carefully about every sound in every word in every sentence you want to produce. It could take hours to finish a single sentence. Luckily, there is no need for this: we have developed such efficient routines for speaking that most of the necessary actions do not require conscious thought. You could compare it to walking: once you have learned what to do, some sort of automatism takes over.

This works fine as long as we stick to our respective native language. The situation changes, however, when we start learning a new, foreign language. Not only are the words different, but in many cases the foreign language also has some sounds which are unfamiliar. German learners of English, for instance, very often have problems with the “lisping” sound in words such as bath, therapy, or mathematics (we use italics whenever we cite words as examples). There are no German words which include this type of sound. That does not mean, of course, that native speakers of German cannot achieve a correct pronunciation of bath or therapy, but before they can do so they have to learn how to produce the new sound. English learners of German, on the other hand, encounter the same problem with the vowel that appears in German Müsli ‘muesli’ and Hüte ‘hats’ (we use single inverted commas to indicate the meanings of examples cited). This vowel is not part of the pool of sounds which English speakers use to construct the words of their language, the English sound inventory (we use bold print whenever we introduce an important new term).

There are some general conclusions we can draw from this. Firstly, languages may use only a subset of all possible speech sounds. In fact, there is no language which makes use of all of them. Secondly, languages differ in which sounds they include in their inventory: German uses a different selection than English does. Foreign language learners are thus bound to encounter sounds which do not occur in their native language and which they do not have routines for. They have to learn the gestures necessary to produce these unfamiliar sounds. In other words, learners have to find out which muscle movements in which combination and sequence are required for the production of the respective new sound.

There is an entire subdiscipline of linguistics, phonetics, which deals with these and other characteristics of speech sounds. It focuses on questions such as the following: What types of speech sounds do we find in the languages of the world and in individual languages? How can we describe these sounds? Which criteria can we use to distinguish different sounds?

Several approaches have been taken to the investigation of speech sounds and different branches of phonetics have developed, each focussing on a different aspect of speech. Articulatory phonetics aims at describing the process of articulation. How do we create speech sounds? In what way does the production of one sound differ from that of another? Which articulation-related criteria can we use to distinguish and classify different speech sounds? Acoustic phonetics, on the other hand, concentrates on the physical properties of the speech sounds themselves. What is the physical reality of a speech sound and how can we measure acoustic differences between speech sounds? Which physical properties are charac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Content
• Preface to the first edition
• Preface to the second edition
• Preface to the third edition
• Abbreviations and notational conventions
• Introduction: what this book is about and how it can be used
• 1 The sounds: phonetics
• 2 The sound system: phonology
• 3 The structure of words: morphology
• 4 The structure of sentences: syntax
• 5 The meaning of words and sentences: semantics
• 6 Studying language in use: pragmatics
• 7 Extensions and applications: historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics
• 8 Linguistics as an empirical science
• Glossary
• References
• Subject index