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. A language is a complex structure represented in the minds of its speakers, and this textbook provides the tools necessary for understanding this structure. Using clear explanations throughout, the book is divided into three main parts: 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; new coverage of sociolinguistic topics, introducing communities of practice; a new subsection introducing the student to Optimality Theory; a wealth of new exercise material and updated further reading.
