Theoretical Issues

For Bachelor & Master Degree

Department of English Philology
Ivan Franko National University (Lviv)

Fundamentals of the History of the

English Language
1. Periodization of the history of the development of the English Language

(Phonetic peculiarities, peculiarities of the grammar

structure, vocabulary of the Germanic languages);

2. Old English Period in the History of the English Language

(Main Historic Events of the Period, Germanic invasion,

phonetics, morphology, syntax, vocabulary)

3. Middle English Period in the History of the English Language

(Main Historic Events of the Period, Norman Conquest,

phonetics, morphology, syntax, vocabulary)

4. The Period of the formation of the national language (XV-XVI c.)

(The Great Vowel Shift, phonetics, morphology, syntax,
borrowings in the language)

5. New English Period in the History of the English Language

(Main Historic Events of the Period, the language of XVII-

XVIII centuries, phonetics, grammar structure, vocabulary).

Recommended Literature on the topic:

1. Иванова И.П., Чахоян Л.П. История английского языка. – М.:
Высшая школа, 1976. – 319 с.
2. Аракин В.Д. Исторя английского языка. – М.: Высшая школа,
1985. – 256 с.
3. Костюченко Ю.П. Історія англійскої мови. – К.: Радянська
школа, 1953. – 352 с.
4. Ильиш Б.А. История английского языка. – М.: Высшая школа,
1968. – 415 с.
5. Левицький В.В. Основи германістики. – Вінниця: Нова книга,
2006. – 528 с.
6. Расторгуева Т.А. История английского языка. – М., 1983.
7. Верба Л.Г. Історія англійської мови. – Вінниця, 2004.
 FUNDAMENTALS OF ENGLISH
STYLISTICS
1. Phonetic Expressive Means and Stylistic Devices
(phonemic repetitions: alliteration, assonance, rhyme;
direct and indirect onomatopoeia – sound imitation)

2. The Notion of Rhetorical Image. Major Tropes. Lexical and Lexical-

Syntactic Stylistic Devices
(figurative language, name-transference; metaphor, metonymy,
verbal irony; hyperbole, meiosis, litotes; epithet,
antonomasia, periphrasis; simile; oxymoron; pun, zeugma)
3. Expressive Syntax
(Loose and periodic sentences, suspense; ellipsis, asyndeton,
aposiopesis; stylistic inversion, detachment, parenthesis)

4. Lexical and Syntactic Repetitions. Syntactic Parallelism

(repetitions in strong position: anaphora, etc.; parallel
patterns; chiasmus; antithesis; gradation – climax and
anticlimax; polysyndeton; enumeration; pleonasm and tautology;
rhythm)

5. Functional Styles of English

(the belles-lettres style – emotive (imaginative) prose,
poetry, drama; poetic diction, poetic metre, English verse
forms – blank, stanzaic, and free verse; the official style
– military, business, etc. documents; the scientific
(prose) style; the newspaper style – brief news items,
advertisements, the language peculiarities of headlines;
the publicist style – speeches, essays, journalistic
articles)

Recommended Literature
1. Galperin I.R. Stylistics – M., 1977.
2. Kukharenko V.A. A Book of Practice in Stylistics - M., 1986.
3. Kuznetsova L.A., Smykalova L.A. Lectures on English
Stylistics – Lviv, 1972.
4. Skrebnev Yu. M. Fundamentals of English Stylistics – M., 2000.
5. Baldick Ch. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary
Terms – OUP, 1990.
6. Арнольд И.В. Стилистика современного английского языка –
М., 1990.
7. Мороховский А.Н., Воробьева О.П. и др. Стилистика
английского языка – К., 1984.
8. Пелевина Н.Ф. Стилистический анализ художественного текста
– Л., 1986.
9. Кухаренко В.А. Практикум по интерпретации художественного
текста – М., 1987.
 Fundamentals of English Lexicology

1. The Etymological Structure of the English Vocabulary

(Native and borrowed elements: prefixes, suffixes, Indo-
European and Germanic roots, international words, etymological
doublets)

2. Word-Building
(Main types of word-building: affixation, conversion,
composition, shortening; minor means: sound-
imitation/onomatopoeia, reduplication, back-formation)

3. The Problem of Meaning

(Types of meaning: denotative, connotative; change of meaning:
broadening, narrowing, degradation, elevation; transference of
meaning: metaphor, metonymy; polysemy: main meaning, secondary
meanings)

4. Homonyms
(Sources of homonymy, classification of homonyms:
a)homophones, homographs, homonyms proper;
b) full homonyms, partial homonyms)

5. Synonyms. Euphemisms. Antonyms

(Types of synonyms, types of connotation, dominant synonym,
euphemisms, antonyms)

6. Phraseology. Principles of Classification

(Idioms and free word-groups, proverbs, classification of
idioms)

6. Methods and Procedures of the Lexicological Analysis

(Distributional analysis, IC analysis, Transformational
analysis)

Recommended Literature on the topic:

1. O.D. Soloshenko, U. A. Zavgorodnev. Lecture Notes on

English Lexicology. - Lviv: Evro Swit, 1998. – 225 p.
2. Антрушина Г.Б., Афанасьева О.В., Морозова Н.Н. Лексикология
английского языка. – м.,1985.
3. Арнольд И.В. Лексикология современного английского языка
(The English Word). – М., 1973.
4. Мостовий М.І. Лексикологія англійської мови. – Харків:
Основа, 1993. – 256 с.
 Fundamentals of The Theory of the
English Language

1. Development of Modern Grammatical Theory: Types of Grammars

(Early Prescriptive Grammar, Classical Scientific
Grammar/Descriptive (O.Jespersen), Structural Grammar(Theory
of Oppositions by N.Trubetskoy, Distributional analysis, IC
Analysis, Generative Grammar (surface/deep structure of the
sentence), Transformational Grammar, Text Grammar,
Communicative Grammar)

2. Morphological Level and its Units

(Morpheme, types of morphemes, word: structure, lexical and
grammatical aspects; morphological typology of languages:
synthetical/analytical types)

3. Lexico-Grammatical Word-Classes
(Approaches to LG classification, principles of
classification, the system of parts of speech, notional and
functional parts of speech)

4. Syntactical Units
(Word-groups, classification of word-groups, sentence,
classification of sentences, non-sentence utterances)

5. The Verb and Its Categories

(part of speech characteristics of the verb, lexico-
grammatical subclasses of verbs, categories of tense, aspect,
time correlation, voice, mood, person, number)

Recommended Literature on the topic:

1. Федоренко О.І., Сухорольська С.М. Граматика англійської

мови. Теоретичний курс. – Львів, 2008.
2. Кошевая И.Г. Теоретическая грамматика английского языка. –
М. : Просвещение, 1982. – 336 с.
3. Н.П. Алова, О.М. Старикова. Семінарій з курсу теоретичної
граматики англійської мови. –К.: Вища школа, 1980. – 119 c.
4. Blokh M.Y. A Course in English Theoretical Grammar. - M.,
1983.
 Fundamentals of English Phonetics
1. Functional Aspects of Speech Sounds (vowels and consonants)
(The phoneme; main trends in phoneme theory; the system of
English phonemes; English consonants as units of phonological
system; English vowels as units of phonological system)

2. Articulatory transition of vowel and consonant phonemes

(Articulatory transitions in English and Ukrainian;
peculiarities of CC, CV, VC, VV articulatory transitions;
assimilation, adaptation, elision, merging of stages,
aspiration, palatalization, labialization, nasalization, loss of
plosion)

3. Sounds of speech and their phonetic aspects

(Acoustic aspect of speech sounds; articulatory aspect of
speech sound; auditory aspect of speech sound;
articulatory / physiological classification of the English
consonants and vowels;
monophthongs and diphthongs; diphthongoids)

4. Syllable. Stress. Intonation in the present day English

(syllable structure → syllable formation, syllable division;

word stress, manifestation of word stress and its linguistic
function, the degrees and the position of word stress; basic
intonation patterns, classification of intonation patterns,
intonation patterns and meanings; rhythm)

Recommended Literature on the topic:

1. Соколова М.А., К.П. Гинтовт, И.С. Тихонова, Р.М. Тихонова.

Теоретическая фонетика английского языка. – М.: Владос, 1996.
– 285 с.
2. Соколова М.А., К.П. Гинтовт, Л.А. Кантер и др.
Практическая фонетика английского языка. – М.: Владос, 1997. –
384 с.
3. Leonteva S.F. A Theoretical Course of English Phonetics. –
M.: Vyshaya Shkola, 1980. – 271 p.
4. Babiychuk L.V., Bekhta I.A. Lecture Notes on the English
Phonetics. – Lviv: Aral, 2008. – 106 p.
 Fundamentals of Methods of
Teaching of the English Language
1. Exercises for Teaching Grammar
()

2. Testing Vocabulary (methodological aspect)

()

3. Teaching listening at the intermediate level

()

4. Variety of reading types of exercises

()

5. Explanation of the sounds and the stress at the English lesson

()

Recommended Literature on the topic:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS

Stylistics – aspect of literary study that emphasizes the analysis of

various elements of style (such as metaphor and diction). The ancients saw style as the proper
adornment of thought. In this view, which prevailed throughout the Renaissance, devices of style
can be catalogued and ideas can be framed with the help of model sentences and prescribed types
of figures suited to the mode of discourse. In more recent theories, the relationship of style and
the individual writer's unique vision of reality is emphasized.

Stylistics is the study of varieties of language whose properties position that language in context.
For example, the language of advertising, politics, religion, individual authors, etc., or the
language of a period in time, all are used distinctively and belong in a particular situation. In
other words, they all have ‘place’ or are said to use a particular 'style'.

Stylistics also attempts to establish principles capable of explaining the particular choices made
by individuals and social groups in their use of language, such as socialization, the production
and reception of meaning, critical discourse analysis and literary criticism.

Other features of stylistics include the use of dialogue, including regional accents and people’s
dialects, descriptive language, the use of grammar, such as the active voice or passive voice, the
distribution of sentence lengths, the use of particular language registers, etc.

Many linguists do not like the term ‘stylistics’. The word ‘style’, itself, has several connotations
that make it difficult for the term to be defined accurately. However, in Linguistic Criticism,
Roger Fowler makes the point that, in non-theoretical usage, the word stylistics makes sense and
is useful in referring to an enormous range of literary contexts, such as John Milton’s ‘grand
style’, the ‘prose style’ of Henry James, the ‘epic’ and ‘ballad style’ of classical Greek literature,
etc. (Fowler. 1996, 185). In addition, stylistics is a distinctive term that may be used to determine
the connections between the form and effects within a particular variety of language. Therefore,
stylistics looks at what is ‘going on’ within the language; what the linguistic associations are that
the style of language reveals.

In linguistic analysis, different styles of language are technically called register. Register refers
to properties within a language variety that associate that language with a given situation. This is
distinct from professional terminology that might only be found, for example, in a legal
document or medical journal. The linguist Michael Halliday defines register by emphasizing its
semantic patterns and context. For Halliday, register is determined by what is taking place, who
is taking part and what part the language is playing. (Halliday. 1978, 23) In Context and
Language, Helen Leckie-Tarry suggests that Halliday’s theory of register aims to propose
relationships between language function, determined by situational or social factors, and
language form. (Leckie-Tarry. 1995, 6) The linguist William Downes makes the point that the
principal characteristic of register, no matter how peculiar or diverse, is that it is obvious and
immediately recognisable. (Downes. 1998, 309)

Halliday places great emphasis on the social context of register and distinguishes register from
dialect, which is a variety according to user, in the sense that each speaker uses one variety and
uses it all the time, and not, as is register, a variety according to use, in the sense that each
speaker has a range of varieties and chooses between them at different times. (Halliday. 1964,
77) For example, Cockney is a dialect of English that relates to a particular region of the United
Kingdom, however, Cockney rhyming slang bears a relationship between its variety and the
situation in which it appears, i.e. the ironic definitions of the parlance within the distinctive tones
of the East-End London patois. Subsequently, register is associated with language situation and
not geographic location.

Orwell and Swift on writing methods

In ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), George Orwell writes against the use of
‘conventional’ language as, in doing so, there is the danger that the traditional ‘style’ of language
that is seemingly appropriate to a specific context will eventually overpower its precise meaning.
In other words, the stylistic qualities of language will degenerate the meaning through the
overuse of jargon and familiar, hackneyed and/or clichéd words and phrases. Orwell condemns
the use of metaphors such as ‘toe the line; ride roughshod over; no axe to grind’. He suggests
that these phrases are often used without thought of their literal meaning. Orwell hits out at
pretentious diction and the use of Latin phrases like ‘deus ex machina’ and even ‘status quo’.
He also argues against unnecessary clauses, such as ‘have the effect of; play a leading part in;
give grounds for’. These are all familiar phrases, but are they really useful in any context?
Orwell says that one reason we use this kind of language is because it is easy. He writes:

It is easier - even quicker, once you have the habit - to say In my opinion it is a not
unjustifiable assumption that ... than to say I think. (Orwell. 1964, 150)

Furthermore, Orwell says:

It [modern language] consists in gumming together long strips of words which have
already been set in order by someone else, and making the result presentable by sheer
humbug. (Orwell. 1964, 150)

In Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the English language is distilled and sanitized
and then imposed upon a population who, out of terror, actively conform to the process. The
language is dehumanizing as it does not allow for any form of communication other than that
permitted by the state. Similarly, in the appendix to the novel, ‘The Principles of Newspeak’,
more subversive linguistic gymnastics are in evidence:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-
view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of
thought impossible. (Orwell. 1949, 305)
On the language of George Orwell, Fowler says that the rapidity and fluency are made possible
by the fact that the speaker is simply uttering strings of orthodox jargon and is in no sense
choosing the words in relation to intended meanings or to some state of affairs in the world.
(Fowler. 1995, 212)
Today we have word processor programs that will effortlessly write a letter for any occasion.
Stock phrases and paragraphs can be cut and pasted at random to appear coherent. An extreme
example of this practice is found in Jonathan Swift’s satiric novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726).
When Lemuel Gulliver arrives at the Grand Academy of Lagado he enters the school of writing,
where a professor has devised an enormous ‘frame’ that contains every word in the language.
The machine is put into motion and the words are jumbled up, and when three or four words are
arranged into a recognizable phrase they are written down. The phrases are then collated into
sentences, the sentences into paragraphs, the paragraphs into pages and the pages into books,
which, the professor hopes, will eventually ‘give the world a complete body of all arts and
sciences’. (Swift. 1994, 105)
This method of writing is not only absurd but produces nothing original. It also relies on both the
writer and the reader interpreting what is created in exactly the same way. And it is highly
political as the writer and the reader are indoctrinated into using a particular form of language
and conditioned towards its function and understanding. As Orwell says: ‘A speaker who uses
this kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine.’
(Orwell. 1964, 152)

References and related reading

• Richard Bradford. 1997. Stylistics (London and New York: Routledge)
 • Guy Cook. 1994. Discourse and Literature: the Interplay of Form and Mind (Oxford:
Oxford University Press)

1985. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, 2nd edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell)
1997. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press)

• Roger Fowler. 1996. Linguistic Criticism, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

• MAK Halliday. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of

Language and Meaning (London: Edward Arnold)
• Geoffrey Leech and Michael H. Short. 1981. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction
to English Fictional Prose (London: Longman)
• A McIntosh and P Simpson. 1964. The Linguistic Science and Language Teaching
(London: Longman)
• George Orwell. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Heinemann)

• Michael Toolan. 1998. Language in Literature: An Introduction to Stylistics (London:

Hodder Arnold)
• Jonathan Swift. 1994. Gulliver’s Travels (London: Penguin Popular Classics)
• Katie Wales. 2001. A Dictionary of Stylistics, 2nd edition, (Harlow: Longman)
• ed. Jean Jacques Weber. 1996. The Stylistics Reader: From Roman Jakobson to the
Present (London: Arnold Hodder)
• PM Wetherill. 1974. Literary Text: An Examination of Critical Methods (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell)
• HG Widdowson. 1992. Practical Stylistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
• Joseph Williams. 2007. Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, 9th edition (New York:
Pearson Longman).

Morphology is one of the fields of linguistics which studies the

internal structure of words. (Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology.)
While words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear
that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example,
English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs, and dog catcher are closely related. English
speakers recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of word formation in
English. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly, dog is to dog
catcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns (or
regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact
in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word
formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the
knowledge of the speakers of those languages. The term morphology was coined by August
Schleicher in 1859[2].

Paradigms and Morphosyntax

A paradigm is the complete set of related word forms associated with a given lexeme. The
familiar examples of paradigms are the conjugations of verbs, and the declensions of nouns.
Accordingly, the word forms of a lexeme may be arranged conveniently into tables, by
classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as tense, aspect, mood, number,
gender or case. For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables,
using the categories of person (1st., 2nd., 3rd.), number (singular vs. plural), gender (masculine,
feminine, neuter), and case (subjective, objective, and possessive). See English personal
pronouns for the details.

The inflectional categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen
arbitrarily; they must be categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the language.
For example, person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English,
because English has grammatical agreement rules that require the verb in a sentence to appear in
an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. In other words, the
syntactic rules of English care about the difference between dog and dogs, because the choice
between these two forms determines which form of the verb is to be used. In contrast, however,
no syntactic rule of English cares about the difference between dog and dog catcher, or
dependent and independent. The first two are just nouns, and the second two just adjectives, and
they generally behave like any other noun or adjective behaves.

An important difference between inflection and word formation is that inflected word forms of
lexemes are organized into paradigms, which are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules,
whereas the rules of word formation are not restricted by any corresponding requirements of
syntax. Inflection is therefore said to be relevant to syntax, and word formation is not. The part
of morphology that covers the relationship between syntax and morphology is called
morphosyntax, and it concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, but not with word formation
or compounding.

Models of Morphology
There are three principal approaches to morphology, which each try to capture the distinctions
above in different ways. These are,

• Morpheme-based morphology, which makes use of an Item-and-Arrangement approach.

• Lexeme-based morphology, which normally makes use of an Item-and-Process approach.
• Word-based morphology, which normally makes use of a Word-and-Paradigm approach.

Note that while the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list is very
strong, it is not absolute.

Morpheme-based Morphology

In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes. A

morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word like
independently, we say that the morphemes are in-, depend, -ent, and ly; depend is the root and
the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.[5] In a word like dogs, we say that dog
is the root, and that -s is an inflectional morpheme. This way of analyzing word forms as if they
were made of morphemes put after each other like beads on a string, is called Item-and-
Arrangement.

The morpheme-based approach is the first one that beginners to morphology usually think of,
and which laymen tend to find the most obvious. This is so to such an extent that very often
beginners think that morphemes are an inevitable, fundamental notion of morphology, and many
five minute explanations of morphology are, in fact, five minute explanations of morpheme-
based morphology. This is, however, not so. The fundamental idea of morphology is that the
words of a language are related to each other by different kinds of rules. Analyzing words as
sequences of morphemes is a way of describing these relations, but is not the only way. In actual
academic linguistics, morpheme-based morphology certainly has many adherents, but is by no
means the dominant approach.

Lexeme-based Morphology

Lexeme-based morphology is (usually) an Item-and-Process approach. Instead of analyzing a

word form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence, a word form is said to be the result of
applying rules that alter a word form or stem in order to produce a new one. An inflectional rule
takes a stem, changes it as is required by the rule, and outputs a word form; a derivational rule
takes a stem, changes it as per its own requirements, and outputs a derived stem; a compounding
rule takes word forms, and similarly outputs a compound stem.

Word-based Morphology

Word-based morphology is a (usually) Word-and-paradigm approach. This theory takes

paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word forms, or
to generate word forms from stems, word-based morphology states generalizations that hold
between the forms of inflectional paradigms. The major point behind this approach is that many
such generalizations are hard to state with either of the other approaches. The examples are
usually drawn from fusional languages, where a given "piece" of a word, which a morpheme-
based theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical
categories, for example, "third person plural." Morpheme-based theories usually have no
problems with this situation, since one just says that a given morpheme has two categories. Item-
and-Process theories, on the other hand, often break down in cases like these, because they all
too often assume that there will be two separate rules here, one for third person, and the other for
plural, but the distinction between them turns out to be artificial. Word-and-Paradigm approaches
treat these as whole words that are related to each other by analogical rules. Words can be
categorized based on the pattern they fit into. This applies both to existing words and to new
ones. Application of a pattern different from the one that has been used historically can give rise
to a new word, such as older replacing elder (where older follows the normal pattern of
adjectival superlatives) and cows replacing kine (where cows fits the regular pattern of plural
formation). While a Word-and-Paradigm approach can explain this easily, other approaches have
difficulty with phenomena such as these.

References and related reading

• Anderson, Stephen R. (1992). A-Morphous Morphology. Cambridge: CUP.
• Aronoff, Mark (1993). "Morphology by Itself". Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Beard, Robert (1995). Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology. Albany, N.Y.: State
University of New York Press. ISBN 0-7914-2471-5.
• Bauer, Laurie. (2003). Introducing linguistic morphology (2nd ed.). Washington, D.C.:
Georgetown University Press. ISBN 0-87840-343-4.
• Bauer, Laurie. (2004). A glossary of morphology. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown UP.
• Bubenik, Vit. (1999). An introduction to the study of morphology. LINCON coursebooks
in linguistics, 07. Muenchen: LINCOM Europa. ISBN 3-89586-570-2.
• Matthews, Peter. (1991). Morphology (2nd ed.). CUP. ISBN 0-521-41043-6 (hb). ISBN
0-521-42256-6 (pbk).
• Scalise, Sergio (1983). Generative Morphology, Dordrecht, Foris.
• Singh, Rajendra and Stanley Starosta (eds). (2003). Explorations in Seamless
Morphology. SAGE Publications. ISBN 0-7619-9594-3 (hb).
 • Spencer, Andrew. (1991). Morphological theory: an introduction to word structure in
generative grammar. No. 2 in Blackwell textbooks in linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
ISBN 0-631-16143-0 (hb); ISBN 0-631-16144-9 (pb)
• Spencer, Andrew, & Zwicky, Arnold M. (Eds.) (1998). The handbook of morphology.
Blackwell handbooks in linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-18544-5.
• Stump, Gregory T. (2001). Inflectional morphology: a theory of paradigm structure. No.
93 in Cambridge studies in linguistics. CUP. ISBN 0-521-78047-0 (hb).
• van Valin, Robert D., and LaPolla, Randy. 1997. Syntax : Structure, Meaning And
Function. CUP

Syntax (from Ancient Greek συν- syn-, "together", and τάξις táxis,
"arrangement") is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural
languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly
to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in
"the syntax of Modern Irish". Modern research in syntax attempts to describe languages in
terms of such rules. Many professionals in this discipline attempt to find general rules that apply
to all natural languages. The term syntax is also sometimes used to refer to the rules governing
the behavior of mathematical systems, such as logic, artificial formal languages, and computer
programming languages.

Modern theories
There are a number of theoretical approaches to the discipline of syntax. Many linguists (e.g.
Noam Chomsky) see syntax as a branch of biology, since they conceive of syntax as the study of
linguistic knowledge as embodied in the human mind. Others (e.g. Gerald Gazdar) take a more
Platonistic view, since they regard syntax to be the study of an abstract formal system.[3] Yet others
(e.g. Joseph Greenberg) consider grammar a taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations
across languages. Some of the major approaches to the discipline are listed below.

Generative grammar

The hypothesis of generative grammar is that language is a structure of the human mind. The
goal of generative grammar is to make a complete model of this inner language (known as i-
language). This model could be used to describe all human language and to predict the
grammaticality of any given utterance (that is, to predict whether the utterance would sound
correct to native speakers of the language). This approach to language was pioneered by Noam
Chomsky. Most generative theories (although not all of them) assume that syntax is based upon
the constituent structure of sentences. Generative grammars are among the theories that focus
primarily on the form of a sentence, rather than its communicative function.

Among the many generative theories of linguistics, the Chomskyan theories are:

• Transformational Grammar (TG) (Original theory of generative syntax laid out by

Chomsky in Syntactic Structures in 1957[4])
• Government and binding theory (GB) (revised theory in the tradition of TG developed
mainly by Chomsky in the 1970s and 1980s).[5]
• The Minimalist Program (MP) (revised version of GB published by Chomsky in 1995)[6]

Other theories that find their origin in the generative paradigm are:
 • Generative semantics (now largely out of date)
• Relational grammar (RG) (now largely out of date)
• Arc Pair grammar
• Generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG; now largely out of date)
• Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG)
• Lexical-functional grammar (LFG)

Categorial grammar

Categorial grammar is an approach that attributes the syntactic structure not to rules of grammar,
but to the properties of the syntactic categories themselves. For example, rather than asserting
that sentences are constructed by a rule that combines a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP)
(e.g. the phrase structure rule S → NP VP), in categorial grammar, such principles are embedded
in the category of the head word itself. So the syntactic category for an intransitive verb is a
complex formula representing the fact that the verb acts as a functor which requires an NP as an
input and produces a sentence level structure as an output. This complex category is notated as
(NP\S) instead of V. NP\S is read as " a category that searches to the left (indicated by \) for a NP
(the element on the left) and outputs a sentence (the element on the right)". The category of
transitive verb is defined as an element that requires two NPs (its subject and its direct object) to
form a sentence. This is notated as (NP/(NP\S)) which means "a category that searches to the
right (indicated by /) for an NP (the object), and generates a function (equivalent to the VP)
which is (NP\S), which in turn represents a function that searches to the left for an NP and
produces a sentence).

Tree-adjoining grammar is a categorial grammar that adds in partial tree structures to the
categories.

Dependency grammar

Dependency grammar is a different type of approach in which structure is determined by the

relations (such as grammatical relations) between a word (a head) and its dependents, rather than
being based in constituent structure. For example, syntactic structure is described in terms of
whether a particular noun is the subject or agent of the verb, rather than describing the relations
in terms of phrases.

Some dependency-based theories of syntax:

• Algebraic syntax
• Word grammar
• Operator Grammar

Stochastic/probabilistic grammars/network theories

Theoretical approaches to syntax that are based upon probability theory are known as stochastic
grammars. One common implementation of such an approach makes use of a neural network or
connectionism. Some theories based within this approach are:

• Optimality theory
• Stochastic context-free grammar
Functionalist grammars

Functionalist theories, although focused upon form, are driven by explanation based upon the
function of a sentence (i.e. its communicative function). Some typical functionalist theories
include:

• Functional grammar – (T. van Dijk)

• Prague Linguistic Circle – ()
• Systemic functional grammar – ()
• Cognitive grammar – ()
• Construction grammar – (CxG)
• Role and reference grammar – (RRG)
• Emergent grammar – ()

SOME SPECIAL DIFFICULTIES OF ANALYSIS

(syncretical forms, syntactical homonyms, dubious cases of

analysis)
Though each sentence can be divided into parts, the attribution of some of such parts
may present certain difficulties. Here we may distinguish three cases.

1.The analysis of parts of the sentence which contain two meanings

at one and the same time (the so-called syncretical forms).
2.The analysis of phrases built on one and the same pattern in different syntactical
functions (the so-called syntactical homonyms).
3.The analysis of parts of the sentence whose attribution is dubious due to their nature.

1. Syncretical Forms

Difficulties of this kind arise where a part of the sentence contains two meanings at once
and it is not always clear which of them is the prominent. This is usually the case with various
classes of adverbials, especially those expressed by an infinitive, a participle, or phrases and
complexes with these verbals.
Here are some examples.

She looked under the cot and laughed to see the girl crouched there.
The work done, I felt as free as a bird.
It growing dark, she hurried the boys home.

In all these sentences the parts in italics express at the same time the idea of the cause of the
action of the predicate verb and an indication of the time of these actions.
In the sentence To hear him talk, you'll think he's at least ten years old the underlined part
combines the idea of time with that of condition.
 In the sentences She was clever enough to keep silent; I've watched you work too long to
underrate you the adverbials combine the idea of result with the idea of degree.
Sometimes an adverbial expressed by a noun with a preposition which name the place
where the action of the predicate verb was performed actually denotes rather the time of the
action than its place. This is usually the case where the adverbial is detached, as in: At home
she took off her hat and cloak and hurried to the kitchen. Here At home has rather the meaning
'when she came home'.

2. Syntactical Homonyms

Sometimes certain difficulties in analysis may arise from the fact that phrases,
complexes or clauses of similar pattern can have different syntactical functions. They are
then called syntactical homonyms. Here are a few simplest examples:

I'll do it with great pleasure (adverbial of manner). She says she's cut her finger with
that table knife (object). At last there appeared in the distance the house with the green
roof (attribute).
He's always with the losing party (predicative).
He looked as if he did not quite recognize the place (predicative clause).
He looked around as if he did not quite recognize the place (adverbial clause of manner).

The parts in italics have different syntactical functions due to the difference in lexical and
grammatical semantics of the words they comprise or the words they are connected with, or both.

3. Dubious Cases

Difficulties of this kind usually arise because of the subtlety of the border-line between
secondary parts of the sentence expressed by a noun with a preposition or by an infinitive, or
sometimes even by a noun without a preposition, which makes it in some cases hardly
possible to tell an object from an adverbial, or an attribute from an adverbial.

Object or A d v e r b i a l

We come across such difficulties in the sentences She was slowly moving towards Mrs.
Carver; She made the policeman look for the cat among the boxes piled up by the wall and the
like, in which the underlined parts allow of two alternative interpretations each as an adverbial
of place or as an indirect non-recipient object. The possible identifying questions are of no help
here for such parts may equally answer the while re-question and a question with a preposition
what/who: Where was she moving? Towards whom was she moving?
 Compare the above sentences with the following: At last she came up to me and. He usually
spent his winters in London, where the underlined parts are respectively an indirect non-
recipient object and an adverbial of place, each allowing of only one identifying question.
In the same way some adverbials of manner may border on an indirect non-recipient
object with an instrumental meaning. Compare: He opened the tin with a knife (object what
he opened the tin with?) and He was wounded with a bullet, where the part underlined may be
analyzed in two ways, as an object or as an adverbial of manner (What was he wounded with?
or How was he wounded?).
Sometimes there is no rigid border-line between a direct object and an adverbial of
measure. This is the case where the formal position of the direct object is filled by a word
denoting a unit of measure (money, weight, time, etc.). Thus in the sentence The job paid her
the minimum rate the underlined part may be analyzed in two ways, that is, either as a
direct object (what?) or as an adverbial of measure (how much?).

Attribute or A d v e r b i a l

Sometimes it may be impossible to tell an attribute from an adverbial of purpose. This

often occurs where an infinitive or an infinitive phrase follows a noun which is a direct
object to some verb. In this case it may not be clear whether the infinitive is grammatically
connected with the noun or with the group "verb of noun". Thus in the sentence She gave me a
book to read on the train the syntactical function of the infinitive may be either that of an
attribute (=which I might read...) or that of an adverbial of purpose (=m order that I might
read it...). Compare this with the following: She turned her head to see who it was
(adverbial). But I have two kids to look after (attribute).

SUGGESTED WAYS OF SENTENCE ANALYSIS

I. The Simple Sentence

1. Dusk of a summer night.
It is a simple extended one-member declarative sentence.
Dusk is the main principal part of this sentence. It is expressed by a common noun in the
common case.
of a summer night is an attribute to the main part. It is expressed by a prepositional
phrase.
2. Stop talking!
It is an imperative, exclamatory sentence.
 Stop talking is the predicate. It is a compound phasal verbal predicate. It consists of two
parts. The first part is expressed by the phasal verb stop in the imperative mood. It denotes the
end of the action. The second part is expressed by a non-perfect gerund active denoting the
action itself.
3. Could've been professional.
It is a simple, unextended, two-member, elliptical, declarative sentence. The position of
the subject is not filled with a word form.
Could've been professional is the predicate. It is a mixed type of predicate.
Could is the modal part expressed by the verb can in the subjunctive mood. It denotes a
possibility referring to the past.
have been is a link-verb expressed by a perfect infinitive. It is a link-verb of being.
professional is a predicative expressed by an adjective in the positive degree.
4. Old Jolyon watching from his corner saw his brother's face change.
It is a simple, extended, two-member sentence.
Jolyon is the subject expressed by a proper noun in the common case.
Old is an attribute to the subject. It is expressed by an adjective in the positive degree.
watching from his corner is an attribute to the subject (or an adverbial modifier of time)
expressed by a participial phrase with participle I as headword.
saw is the predicate. It is a simple verbal predicate expressed by the verb to see in the past
indefinite, active.
his brother's face change is a direct complex object expressed by an objective with the
infinitive construction.
Note. Verbal and non-verbal complexes are to be treated as one indivisible part of the sentence.

6. Is the weather not likely to change?

It is a simple, unextended, two-member interrogative sentence.
the weather is the subject expressed by a common noun in the common case.
Is not likely to change is the predicate. It is a compound verbal predicate of double
orientation. It consists of two parts.
Is not likely is the first part. It denotes the estimate of the speaker of the situation described
in the sentence. It is expressed by a phrase with a modal meaning.
to change is the second part. It denotes the action itself and is expressed by a non-perfect infinitive.
6. The whole house being made of wood, it looked good.
It is a simple, extended, two-member, declarative sentence.
it is the subject expressed by a personal pronoun of the 3rd person singular.
 looked good is the predicate. It is a compound nominal predicate, consisting of a link verb
and a predicative.
looked is a link verb expressed by the past indefinite of the link verb to look which is a link
verb of being in a state.
the whole house being made of wood is an adverbial modifier of reason expressed by a
nominative absolute participial construction.
7. / found my life dull.
It is a simple, extended, two-member, declarative sentence.
/ is the subject expressed by a personal pronoun of the 1st person singular.
found is a simple verbal predicate expressed by the past indefinite of the verb to find.
my life dull is a complex object expressed by an objective non-verbal construction.

II. The Composite Sentence / Складне речення

A. T h e Compound Sentence/ Складносурядне

речення

1. (a) Coffee was served and the ladies went upstairs.

It is a compound sentence consisting of two coordinate clauses connected by copulative
coordination with the help of the conjunction and.
(b) He loved his work and he counted himself fortunate to have such
an opportunity so early in his career.
It is a compound sentence containing two clauses joined by causative-consecutive
relations with the help of the copulative conjunction and.
(a)/ wanted to go on, whereas my friend wanted to go back.
It is a compound sentence comprising two coordinate clauses which are connected by
contrasting relations expressed by the adversative conjunction whereas. Note. In sentences (b),
(c) the graphical presentation is the same as in sentence (a).

References
• Brown, Keith; Jim Miller (eds.) (1996). Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories.
New York: Elsevier Science. ISBN 0-08-042711-1.
• Carnie, Andrew (2006). Syntax: A Generative Introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
ISBN 1405133848.
• Freidin, Robert; Howard Lasnik (eds.) (2006). Syntax. Critical Concepts in Linguistics.
New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-24672-5.
 • Graffi, Giorgio (2001). 200 Years of Syntax. A Critical Survey. Studies in the History of
the Language Sciences 98. Amsterdam: Benjamins. ISBN 90-272-4587-8.

Sentence (linguistics)
Sentence is a grammatical unit of one or more words, bearing minimal
syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it, often preceded and followed in speech
by pauses, having one of a small number of characteristic intonation patterns, and typically
expressing an independent statement, question, request, command, etc.[1] Sentences are generally
characterized in most languages by the presence of a finite verb, e.g. "The quick brown fox
jumps over the lazy dog".

Components of a sentence
A simple complete sentence consists of a subject and a predicate. The subject is typically a noun
phrase, though other kinds of phrases (such as gerund phrases) work as well, and some languages
allow subjects to be omitted. The predicate is a finite verb phrase: it's a finite verb together with
zero or more objects, zero or more complements, and zero or more adverbials. See also copula
for the consequences of this verb on the theory of sentence structure.

Clauses

A clause consists of a subject and a verb. There are two types of clauses: independent and
subordinate (dependent). An independent clause consists of a subject verb and also demonstrates
a complete thought: for example, "I am sad." A subordinate clause consists of a subject and a
verb, but demonstrates an incomplete thought: for example, "Because I had to really move."

Classification
By structure

One traditional scheme for classifying English sentences is by the number and types of finite
clauses:

• A simple sentence consists of a single independent clause with no dependent clauses.

• A compound sentence consists of multiple independent clauses with no dependent
clauses. These clauses are joined together using conjunctions, punctuation, or both.
• A complex sentence consists of one or more independent clauses with at least one
dependent clause.
• A complex-compound sentence (or compound-complex sentence) consists of multiple
independent clauses, at least one of which has at least one dependent clause.

By purpose

Sentences can also be classified based on their purpose:

• A declarative sentence or declaration, the most common type, commonly makes a

statement: I am going home.
 • A negative sentence or negation denies that a statement is true: I am not going home.
• An interrogative sentence or question is commonly used to request information — When
are you going to work? — but sometimes not; see rhetorical question.
• An exclamatory sentence or exclamation is generally a more emphatic form of statement:
What a wonderful day this is!
• An imperative sentence or command tells someone to do something: Go to work at 7:30
tomorrow morning.

Major and minor sentences

A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate. For example: I have a
ball. In this sentence one can change the persons: We have a ball. However, a minor sentence is
an irregular type of sentence. It does not contain a finite verb. For example, "Mary!" "Yes."
"Coffee." etc. Other examples of minor sentences are headings (e.g. the heading of this entry),
stereotyped expressions (Hello!), emotional expressions (Wow!), proverbs, etc. This can also
include sentences which do not contain verbs (e.g. The more, the merrier.) in order to intensify
the meaning around the nouns (normally found in poetry and catchphrases)[2].

Sentences that comprise a single word are called word sentences, and the words themselves
sentence words.[3]

References
1. 'Sentence' - Definitions from Dictionary.com". Dictionary.com.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sentence. Retrieved on 2008-05-23.
2. Jan Noordegraaf (2001). "J. M. Hoogvliet as a teacher and theoretician". in Marcel Bax,
C. Jan-Wouter Zwart, and A. J. van Essen. Reflections on Language and Language
Learning. John Benjamins B.V.. pp. 24. ISBN 9027225842.

Complex-compound sentence
In syntax, a sentence with at least two independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses
(which can also be called subordinate clause) is referred to as a complex-compound sentence.
Sometimes also called a compound-complex sentence.

Examples
The cat lived in the backyard, but the dog, who knew he was superior, lived inside the
house.

Independent clauses:

• The cat lived in the backyard.

• The dog lived inside the house.

Dependent clause:

• who knew he was superior

Though the movie had been tested on the market, The Last Shadow did not fare well in the
United States, but it did develop a huge following in Europe, which usually does not go for
this movie genre.

Independent clauses:

• The Last Shadow did not fare well in the United States.
• It did develop a huge following in Europe.

Dependent clauses:

• though the movie had been tested on the market

• which usually does not go for this movie genre

Gene thought that Finny wanted venerability, but Finny, who did not care, thought that he
was just being a friend.

Independent clauses:

• Gene thought that Finny wanted venerability.

• Finny thought that he was just being a friend.

Dependent clause:

• who did not care

• Simple sentence
• Compound sentence
• Complex sentence

The Structure of a Sentence

Remember that every clause is, in a sense, a miniature sentence. A simple sentences contains
only a single clause, while a compound sentence, a complex sentence, or a compound-complex
sentence contains at least two clauses.

The Simple Sentence

The most basic type of sentence is the simple sentence, which contains only one clause. A
simple sentence can be as short as one word:

Run!

Usually, however, the sentence has a subject as well as a predicate and both the subject and the
predicate may have modifiers. All of the following are simple sentences, because each contains
only one clause:

Melt!
Ice melts.
The ice melts quickly.
The ice on the river melts quickly under the warm March sun.
 Lying exposed without its blanket of snow, the ice on the river melts quickly under the
warm March sun.

As you can see, a simple sentence can be quite long -- it is a mistake to think that you can tell a
simple sentence from a compound sentence or a complex sentence simply by its length.

The most natural sentence structure is the simple sentence: it is the first kind which children
learn to speak, and it remains by far the most common sentence in the spoken language of people
of all ages. In written work, simple sentences can be very effective for grabbing a reader's
attention or for summing up an argument, but you have to use them with care: too many simple
sentences can make your writing seem childish.

When you do use simple sentences, you should add transitional phrases to connect them to the
surrounding sentences.

The Compound Sentence

A compound sentence consists of two or more independent clauses (or simple sentences) joined
by co-ordinating conjunctions like "and," "but," and "or":

Simple
Canada is a rich country.
Simple
Still, it has many poor people.
Compound
Canada is a rich country, but still it has many poor people.

Compound sentences are very natural for English speakers -- small children learn to use them
early on to connect their ideas and to avoid pausing (and allowing an adult to interrupt):

Today at school Mr. Moore brought in his pet rabbit, and he showed it to the class, and I
got to pet it, and Kate held it, and we coloured pictures of it, and it ate part of my carrot
at lunch, and ...

Of course, this is an extreme example, but if you over-use compound sentences in written work,
your writing might seem immature.

A compound sentence is most effective when you use it to create a sense of balance or contrast
between two (or more) equally-important pieces of information:

Montéal has better clubs, but Toronto has better cinemas.

Special Cases of Compound Sentences

There are two special types of compound sentences which you might want to note. First, rather
than joining two simple sentences together, a co-ordinating conjunction sometimes joins two
complex sentences, or one simple sentence and one complex sentence. In this case, the sentence
is called a compound-complex sentence:

compound-complex
 The package arrived in the morning, but the courier left before I could check the
contents.

The second special case involves punctuation. It is possible to join two originally separate
sentences into a compound sentence using a semicolon instead of a co-ordinating conjunction:

Sir John A. Macdonald had a serious drinking problem; when sober, however, he
could be a formidable foe in the House of Commons.

Usually, a conjunctive adverb like "however" or "consequently" will appear near the beginning
of the second part, but it is not required:

The sun rises in the east; it sets in the west.

The Complex Sentence

A complex sentence contains one independent clause and at least one dependent clause. Unlike a
compound sentence, however, a complex sentence contains clauses which are not equal.
Consider the following examples:

Simple
My friend invited me to a party. I do not want to go.
Compound
My friend invited me to a party, but I do not want to go.
Complex
Although my friend invited me to a party, I do not want to go.

In the first example, there are two separate simple sentences: "My friend invited me to a party"
and "I do not want to go." The second example joins them together into a single sentence with
the co-ordinating conjunction "but," but both parts could still stand as independent sentences --
they are entirely equal, and the reader cannot tell which is most important. In the third example,
however, the sentence has changed quite a bit: the first clause, "Although my friend invited me to
a party," has become incomplete, or a dependent clause.

A complex sentence is very different from a simple sentence or a compound sentence because it
makes clear which ideas are most important. When you write

My friend invited me to a party. I do not want to go.

or even

My friend invited me to a party, but I do not want to go.

The reader will have trouble knowing which piece of information is most important to you.
When you write the subordinating conjunction "although" at the beginning of the first clause,
however, you make it clear that the fact that your friend invited you is less important than, or
subordinate, to the fact that you do not want to go.

Written by David Megginson

 The Parts of Speech
Traditional grammar classifies words based on eight parts of speech: the verb, the noun, the
pronoun, the adjective, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction, and the interjection.

Each part of speech explains not what the word is, but how the word is used. In fact, the same
word can be a noun in one sentence and a verb or adjective in the next. The next few examples
show how a word's part of speech can change from one sentence to the next, and following them
is a series of sections on the individual parts of speech, followed by an exercise.

Books are made of ink, paper, and glue.

In this sentence, "books" is a noun, the subject of the sentence.

Deborah waits patiently while Bridget books the tickets.

Here "books" is a verb, and its subject is "Bridget."

We walk down the street.

In this sentence, "walk" is a verb, and its subject is the pronoun "we."

The mail carrier stood on the walk.

In this example, "walk" is a noun, which is part of a prepositional phrase describing where the
mail carrier stood.

The town decided to build a new jail.

Here "jail" is a noun, which is the object of the infinitive phrase "to build."

The sheriff told us that if we did not leave town immediately he would jail us.

Here "jail" is part of the compound verb "would jail."

They heard high pitched cries in the middle of the night.

In this sentence, "cries" is a noun acting as the direct object of the verb "heard."

The baby cries all night long and all day long.

But here "cries" is a verb that describes the actions of the subject of the sentence, the baby.

The next few sections explain each of the parts of speech in detail. When you have finished, you
might want to test yourself by trying the exercise.

Written by Heather MacFadyen

 Cognitive linguistics
In linguistics and cognitive science, cognitive linguistics (CL) refers to the school of linguistics
that understands language creation, learning, and usage as best explained by reference to human
cognition in general. It is characterized by adherence to three central positions. First, it denies
that there is an autonomous linguistic faculty in the mind; second, it understands grammar in
terms of conceptualization; and third, it claims that knowledge of language arises out of
language use. [1]

Cognitive linguists deny that the mind has any module for language-acquisition that is unique
and autonomous. This stands in contrast to the work done in the field of generative grammar.
Although cognitive linguists do not necessarily deny that part of the human linguistic ability is
innate, they deny that it is separate from the rest of cognition. Thus, they argue that knowledge
of linguistic phenomena — i.e., phonemes, morphemes, and syntax — is essentially conceptual
in nature. Moreover, they argue that the storage and retrieval of linguistic data is not significantly
different from the storage and retrieval of other knowledge, and use of language in understanding
employs similar cognitive abilities as used in other non-linguistic tasks.

Departing from the tradition of truth-conditional semantics, cognitive linguists view meaning in
terms of conceptualization. Instead of viewing meaning in terms of models of the world, they
view it in terms of mental spaces.

Finally, cognitive linguistics argues that language is both embodied and situated in a specific
environment. This can be considered a moderate offshoot of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in that
language and cognition mutually influence one another, and are both embedded in the
experiences and environments of its users.

Areas of study
Cognitive linguistics is divided into three main areas of study:

• Cognitive semantics, dealing mainly with lexical semantics

• Cognitive approaches to grammar, dealing mainly with syntax, morphology and other
traditionally more grammar-oriented areas.
• Cognitive phonology.

Aspects of cognition that are of interest to cognitive linguists include:

• Construction grammar and cognitive grammar.

• Conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending.
• Image schemas and force dynamics.
• Conceptual organization: Categorization, Metonymy, Frame semantics, and Iconicity.
• Construal and Subjectivity.
• Gesture and sign language.
• Linguistic relativism.
• Cognitive neuroscience.

Related work that interfaces with many of the above themes:

• Computational models of metaphor and language acquisition.

 • Psycholinguistics research.
• Conceptual semantics, pursued by generative linguist Ray Jackendoff is related because
of its active psychological realism and the incorporation of prototype structure and
images.

Cognitive linguistics, more than generative linguistics, seeks to mesh together these findings into
a coherent whole. A further complication arises because the terminology of cognitive linguistics
is not entirely stable, both because it is a relatively new field and because it interfaces with a
number of other disciplines.

Insights and developments from cognitive linguistics are becoming accepted ways of analysing
literary texts, too. Cognitive Poetics, as it has become known, has become an important part of
modern stylistics. The best summary of the discipline as it is currently stands is Peter Stockwell's
Cognitive Poetics.[2]

References
1. ^ Croft, William and D. Alan Cruse (2004). Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. p. 1.
2. ^ Stockwell, Peter (2002). Cognitive poetics: An Introduction. London and New York:
Routledge.

• Evans, Vyvyan & Melanie Green (2006). Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Evans, Vyvyan (2007). A Glossary of Cognitive Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.

• Evans, Vyvyan; Benjamin Bergen & Joerg Zinken (2007). The Cognitive Linguistics
Reader. London: Equinox.
• Evans, Vyvyan, Benjamin K. Bergen and Jörg Zinken. The Cognitive Linguistics
Enterprise: An Overview. In Vyvyan Evans, Benjamin K. Bergen and Jörg Zinken (Eds).
The Cognitive Linguistics Reader. Equinox Publishing Co.
• Geeraerts, D. & H. Cuyckens, eds. (2007). The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive
Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Geeraerts, D., ed. (2006). Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings. Berlin / New York:
Mouton de Gruyter.
• Kristiansen et al., eds. (2006). Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future
Perspectives. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Rohrer, T. Embodiment and Experientialism in Cognitive Linguistics. In the Handbook of
Cognitive Linguistics, Dirk Geeraerts and Herbert Cuyckens, eds., Oxford University
Press, forthcoming.
• Gilles Fauconnier has written a brief, manifesto-like introduction to Cognitive linguistics,
which compares it to mainstream, Chomsky-inspired linguistics. See Introduction to
Methods and Generalizations. In T. Janssen and G. Redeker (Eds). Scope and
Foundations of Cognitive Linguistics. The Hague: Mouton De Gruyter. Cognitive
Linguistics Research Series. (on-line version)
• Grady, Oakley, and Coulson (1999). "Blending and Metaphor". In Metaphor in cognitive
linguistics, Steen and Gibbs (eds.). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. (online version)
• Schmid, H. J. et al. (1996). An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. New York,
Longman.
• Fauconnier, G. (1997). Mappings in Thought and Language.
 • Taylor, J. R. (2002). Cognitive Grammar. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
• Croft, W. & D.A. Cruse (2004) Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
• Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a Language. A Usage-Based Theory of Language
Acquisition. Harvard University Press.
• Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner (2003). The Way We Think. New York: Basic Books.
• Lakoff, George (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal
About the Mind University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-46804-6.

Cognitive poetics is a school of literary criticism that applies the

principles of cognitive science, particularly cognitive psychology, to the interpretation of literary
texts. It has ties to reader-response criticism, and is also closely related to stylistics, whose
application to literary study has been most popular in continental Europe. Like the New Critics,
cognitive poetics engages in close analysis of the text, but it recognizes that context has an
important role to play in the creation of meaning.

Due to its focus on how readers process the language of texts, cognitive poetics represents
simultaneously a turn back in time, to the ancient study of rhetoric; but it also has a grounding in
modern principles of cognitive linguistics.

Topics addressed by cognitive poetics include deixis; text world theory (the feeling of immersion
within texts); schema, script, and their role in reading; attention; foregrounding; and genre.

One of the main focal points of cognitive literary analysis is conceptual metaphor, an idea
pioneered and popularized by the works of Lakoff, as a tool for examining texts. Rather than
regarding metaphors as ornamental figures of speech, cognitive poetics examines how the
conceptual bases of such metaphors interact with the text as a whole.

Prominent figures in the field include Reuven Tsur, who is credited for originating the term,
Ronald Langacker, Mark Turner and Peter Stockwell.

• Cognitive psychology
• Cognitive philology
• Cognitive rhetoric
• Critical theory
• Literary theory

References
• Semino, Elena and Jonathan Culpeper (2002).Cognitive Stylistics: Language and
Cognition in Text Analysis. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
• Stockwell, Peter (2002).Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge.
 Cognitive philology is the science that studies written and oral texts,
considering them as results of human mental processes. This science, therefore, compares the
results of textual science with those results of experimental research of both psychological field
and artificial intelligence production systems. This discipline:

• deals with transmission modalities of written and textes, and processes through which
different knowledges are classified, availing itself, firstly, of the information theory
• studies the narrative subject, especially regarding its selecting nature
• examines the developing function of rhythm and metre and the pertinence of the semantic
association during processing the cognitive maps
• Finally, it provides the scientific ground for the realization of critical multimedial
editions.

Among the founding fathers and noteworthy students of these matters: Gilles Fauconnier, Alan
Richardson and Mark Turner in the USA; Benoît de Cornulier and François Recanati in France;
David Herman and Manfred Jahn in Germany; Paolo Canettieri, Domenico Fiormonte, Anatole
Pierre Fuksas and Luca Nobile in Italy; Julián Santano Moreno in Spain.

• Cognitive linguistics
• Philology
• Information Theory
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Poetics
• Artificial Intelligence

Psycholinguistics
or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that
enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics
were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the human
brain functioned. Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and
information theory to study how the brain processes language. There are a number of
subdisciplines; for example, as non-invasive techniques for studying the neurological workings
of the brain become more and more widespread, neurolinguistics has become a field in its own
right.

Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical
and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes
that make it possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc. Developmental psycholinguistics
studies children's ability to learn language.

Areas of study
Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature and is studied by people in a variety of fields,
such as psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics. There are several subdivisions within
psycholinguistics that are based on the components that make up human language.

Linguistic-related areas:
 • Phonetics and phonology are concerned with the study of speech sounds. Within
psycholinguistics, research focuses on how the brain processes and understands these
sounds.
• Morphology is the study of word structures, especially the relationships between related
words (such as dog and dogs) and the formation of words based on rules (such as plural
formation).
• Syntax is the study of the patterns which dictate how words are combined together to
form sentences.
• Semantics deals with the meaning of words and sentences. Where syntax is concerned
with the formal structure of sentences, semantics deals with the actual meaning of
sentences.
• Pragmatics is concerned with the role of context in the interpretation of meaning.

Psychology-related areas:

• The study of word recognition and reading examines the processes involved in the
extraction of orthographic, morphological, phonological, and semantic information from
patterns in printed text.
• Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants' and children's ability to learn language,
usually with experimental or at least quantitative methods (as opposed to naturalistic
observations such as those made by Jean Piaget in his research on the development of
children).

Theories
Theories about how language works in the human mind attempt to account for, among other
things, how we associate meaning with the sounds (or signs) of language and how we use syntax
—that is, how we manage to put words in the proper order to produce and understand the strings
of words we call "sentences." The first of these items—associating sound with meaning—is the
least controversial and is generally held to be an area in which animal and human
communication have at least some things in common (See animal communication). Syntax, on
the other hand, is controversial, and is the focus of the discussion that follows.

There are essentially two schools of thought as to how we manage to create syntactic sentences:
(1) syntax is an evolutionary product of increased human intelligence over time and social
factors that encouraged the development of spoken language; (2) language exists because
humans possess an innate ability, an access to what has been called a "universal grammar." This
view holds that the human ability for syntax is "hard-wired" in the brain. This view claims, for
example, that complex syntactic features such as recursion are beyond even the potential abilities
of the most intelligent and social non-humans. (Recursion, for example, includes the use of
relative pronouns to refer back to earlier parts of a sentence—"The girl whose car is blocking my
view of the tree that I planted last year is my friend.") The innate view claims that the ability to
use syntax like that would not exist without an innate concept that contains the underpinnings for
the grammatical rules that produce recursion. Children acquiring a language, thus, have a vast
search space to explore among possible human grammars, settling, logically, on the language(s)
spoken or signed in their own community of speakers. Such syntax is, according to the second
point of view, what defines human language and makes it different from even the most
sophisticated forms of animal communication.

The first view was prevalent until about 1960 and is well represented by the mentalistic theories
of Jean Piaget and the empiricist Rudolf Carnap. As well, the school of psychology known as
behaviorism (see Verbal Behavior (1957) by B.F. Skinner) puts forth the point of view that
language is behavior shaped by conditioned response. The second point of view (the "innate"
one) can fairly be said to have begun with Noam Chomsky's highly critical review of Skinner's
book in 1959 in the pages of the journal Language.[1] That review started what has been termed
"the cognitive revolution" in psychology.

The field of psycholinguistics since then has been defined by reactions to Chomsky, pro and con.
The pro view still holds that the human ability to use syntax is qualitatively different from any
sort of animal communication. That ability might have resulted from a favorable mutation
(extremely unlikely) or (more likely) from an adaptation of skills evolved for other purposes.
That is, precise syntax might, indeed, serve group needs; better linguistic expression might
produce more cohesion, cooperation, and potential for survival, BUT precise syntax can only
have developed from rudimentary—or no—syntax, which would have had no survival value and,
thus, would not have evolved at all. Thus, one looks for other skills, the characteristics of which
might have later been useful for syntax. In the terminology of modern evolutionary biology,
these skills would be said to be "pre-adapted" for syntax (see also exaptation). Just what those
skills might have been is the focus of recent research—or, at least, speculation.

The con view still holds that language—including syntax—is an outgrowth of hundreds of
thousands of years of increasing intelligence and tens of thousands of years of human interaction.
From that view, syntax in language gradually increased group cohesion and potential for
survival. Language—syntax and all—is a cultural artifact. This view challenges the "innate"
view as scientifically unfalsifiable; that is to say, it can't be tested; the fact that a particular,
conceivable syntactic structure does not exist in any of the world's finite repertoire of languages
is an interesting observation, but it is not proof of a genetic constraint on possible forms, nor
does it prove that such forms couldn't exist or couldn't be learned.

Contemporary theorists, besides Chomsky, working in the field of theories of psycholinguistics

include George Lakoff, Steven Pinker, and Michael Tomasello.

Methodologies
Much methodology in psycholinguistics takes the form of behavioral experiments incorporating
a lexical decision task. In these types of studies, subjects are presented with some form of
linguistic input and asked to perform a task (e.g. make a judgment, reproduce the stimulus, read
a visually presented word aloud). Reaction times (usually on the order of milliseconds) and
proportion of correct responses are the most often employed measures of performance. Such
experiments often take advantage of priming effects, whereby a "priming" word or phrase
appearing in the experiment can speed up the lexical decision for a related "target" word later.[2]

Such tasks might include, for example, asking the subject to convert nouns into verbs; e.g.,
"book" suggests "to write," "water" suggests "to drink," and so on. Another experiment might
present an active sentence such as "Bob threw the ball to Bill" and a passive equivalent, "The
ball was thrown to Bill by Bob" and then ask the question, "Who threw the ball?" We might then
conclude (as is the case) that active sentences are processed more easily (faster) than passive
sentences. More interestingly, we might also find out (as is the case) that some people are unable
to understand passive sentences; we might then make some tentative steps towards
understanding certain types of language deficits (generally grouped under the broad term,
aphasia).[3]

Until the recent advent of non-invasive medical techniques, brain surgery was the preferred way
for language researchers to discover how language works in the brain. For example, severing the
corpus callosum (the bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain) was at one
time a treatment for some forms of epilepsy. Researchers could then study the ways in which the
comprehension and production of language were affected by such drastic surgery. Where an
illness made brain surgery necessary, language researchers had an opportunity to pursue their
research.

Newer, non-invasive techniques now include brain imaging by positron emission tomography
(PET); functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); event-related potentials (ERPs) in
electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG); and transcranial magnetic
stimulation (TMS). Brain imaging techniques vary in their spatial and temporal resolutions
(fMRI has a resolution of a few thousand neurons per pixel, and ERP has millisecond accuracy).
Each type of methodology presents a set of advantages and disadvantages for studying a
particular problem in psycholinguistics.

Computational modeling - e.g. the DRC model of reading and word recognition proposed by
Coltheart and colleagues[4] - is another methodology. It refers to the practice of setting up
cognitive models in the form of executable computer programs. Such programs are useful
because they require theorists to be explicit in their hypotheses and because they can be used to
generate accurate predictions for theoretical models that are so complex that they render
discursive analysis unreliable. One example of computational modeling is McClelland and
Elman's TRACE model of speech perception.[5]

More recently, eye tracking has been used to study online language processing. Beginning with
Rayner (1978)[6] the importance and informativity of eye-movements during reading was
established. Tanenhaus et al.,[7] have performed a number of visual-world eye-tracking studies to
study the cognitive processes related to spoken language. Since eye movements are closely
linked to the current focus of attention, language processing can be studied by monitoring eye
movements while a subject is presented with linguistic input.

Issues and areas of research

Psycholinguistics is concerned with the nature of the computations and processes that the brain
undergoes to comprehend and produce language. For example, the cohort model seeks to
describe how words are retrieved from the mental lexicon when an individual hears or sees
linguistic input.[8][2]

Recent research using new non-invasive imaging techniques seeks to shed light on just where
certain language processes occur in the brain.

There are a number of unanswered questions in psycholinguistics, such as whether the human
ability to use syntax is based on innate mental structures or emerges from interaction with other
humans, and whether some animals can be taught the syntax of human language.

Another major subfield of psycholinguistics investigates first language acquisition, the process
by which infants acquire language. In addition, it is much more difficult for adults to acquire
second languages than it is for infants to learn their first language (bilingual infants are able to
learn both of their native languages easily). Thus, critical periods may exist during which
language is able to be learned readily. A great deal of research in psycholinguistics focuses on
how this ability develops and diminishes over time. It also seems to be the case that the more
languages one knows, the easier it is to learn more.
The field of aphasiology deals with language deficits that arise because of brain damage. Studies
in aphasiology can both offer advances in therapy for individuals suffering from aphasia, and
further insight into how the brain processes language.

References
1. ^ Chomsky, N. (1959). "A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior". Language 35 (1): 26–58.
doi:10.2307/411334. ISSN 0097-8507.
2. ^ a b Packard, Jerome L (2000). "Chinese words and the lexicon." The Morphology of Chinese: A
Linguistic and Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 284-309.
3. ^ Linebarger MC, Schwartz MF, Saffran EM. (1983). Sensitivity to grammatical structure in so-
called agrammatic aphasics. Cognition, 13:361-92.
4. ^ Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & Ziegler, J. (2001). DRC: "A dual route
cascaded of visual word recognition and reading aloud." Psychological Review, 108, 204-256.
5. ^ McClelland, J.L., & Elman, J.L. (1986). The TRACE model of speech perception. Cognitive
Psychology, 18, 1-86.
6. ^ Rayner, K. Eye movements in reading and information processing. Psychological Bulletin,
1978, 85, 618-660
7. ^ Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M. & Sedivy, J. E. (l995).
"Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension." Science,
268, 1632-1634.
8. ^ Altmann, Gerry T.M. (1997). "Words, and how we (eventually) find them." The Ascent of
Babel: An Exploration of Language, Mind, and Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
pp. 65-83.

Further reading
A short list of books that deal with psycholinguistics, written in language accessible to the non-
expert, includes:

• Belyanin V.P. Foundations of Psycholinguistic Diagnostics (Models of the World).

Moscow, 2000 (in Russian) [1]
• Chomsky, Noam. (2000) New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
• Harley, Trevor (2008) The Psychology of Language: From data to theory (3rd. ed.) Hove:
Psychology Press.
• Lakoff, George. (1987) Women, fire, and dangerous things: what categories reveal about
the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo. (ed.) (1980) Language and learning: the debate between
Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• Pinker, Steven. (1994) The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow.
• Rayner, K. and Pollatsek, A. (1989) The Psychology of Reading. New York:Prentice Hall.
• Steinberg, Danny D., Hiroshi Nagata, and David P. Aline, ed. (2001) Psycholinguistics:
Language, Mind and World, 2nd ed. Longman [2]
• Steinberg, Danny D. & Sciarini, Natalia. (2006) Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd
edition. London: Longman.
• Aitchison, Jean. (1998). The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics.
Routledge.
• Scovel, Thomas. (1998). Psycholinguistics. Oxford University Press.
 Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples
(corpora) or "real world" text. This method represents a digestive approach to deriving a set of
abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or else relates to another language.
Originally done by hand, corpora are largely derived by an automated process, which is
corrected.

The corpus approach runs counter to Noam Chomsky's view that real language is riddled with
performance-related errors, thus requiring careful analysis of small speech samples obtained in a
highly controlled laboratory setting.

The problem of laboratory-selected sentences is similar to that facing lab-based psychology:

researchers do not have any measure of the ethnographic representativity of their data.

Corpus linguistics does away with Chomsky's competence/performance split; adherents believe
that reliable language analysis best occurs on field-collected samples, in natural contexts and
with minimal experimental interference. Within CL there are divergent views as to the value of
corpus annotation, from John Sinclair[1] advocating minimal annotation and allowing texts to
'speak for themselves', to others, such as the Survey of English Usage team[2] advocating
annotation as a path to greater linguistic understanding and rigour.

History
A landmark in modern corpus linguistics was the publication by Henry Kucera and Nelson
Francis of Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English in 1967, a work based on
the analysis of the Brown Corpus, a carefully compiled selection of current American English,
totalling about a million words drawn from a wide variety of sources. Kucera and Francis
subjected it to a variety of computational analyses, from which they compiled a rich and
variegated opus, combining elements of linguistics, language teaching, psychology, statistics,
and sociology. A further key publication was Randolph Quirk's 'Towards a description of English
Usage' (1960)[3] in which he introduced The Survey of English Usage.

Shortly thereafter, Boston publisher Houghton-Mifflin approached Kucera to supply a million

word, three-line citation base for its new American Heritage Dictionary, the first dictionary to be
compiled using corpus linguistics. The AHD made the innovative step of combining prescriptive
elements (how language should be used) with descriptive information (how it actually is used).

Other publishers followed suit. The British publisher Collins' COBUILD monolingual learner's
dictionary, designed for users learning English as a foreign language, was compiled using the
Bank of English. The Survey of English Usage Corpus was used in the development of one of
the most important Corpus-based Grammars, the Comprehensive Grammar of English (Quirk et
al 1985)[4].

The Brown Corpus has also spawned a number of similarly structured corpora: the LOB Corpus
(1960s British English), Kolhapur (Indian English), Wellington (New Zealand English),
Australian Corpus of English (Australian English), the Frown Corpus (early 1990s American
English), and the FLOB Corpus (1990s British English). Other corpora represent many
languages, varieties and modes, and include the International Corpus of English, and the British
National Corpus, a 100 million word collection of a range of spoken and written texts, created in
the 1990s by a consortium of publishers, universities (Oxford and Lancaster) and the British
Library. For contemporary American English, work has stalled on the American National
Corpus, but the 385+ million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (1990-
present) is now available.

The first computerized corpus of transcribed spoken language was constructed in 1971 by the
Montreal French Project [5], containing one million words, which inspired Shana Poplack's much
larger corpus of spoken French in the Ottawa-Hull area [6]

Methods
Corpus Linguistics has generated a number of research methods, attempting to trace a path from
data to theory. Wallis and Nelson (2001)[7] first introduced what they called the 3A perspective:
Annotation, Abstraction and Analysis.

• Annotation consists of the application of a scheme to texts. Annotations may include

structural markup, POS-tagging, parsing, and numerous other representations.

• Abstraction consists of the translation (mapping) of terms in the scheme to terms in a

theoretically motivated model or dataset. Abstraction typically includes linguist-directed
search but may include e.g., rule-learning for parsers.

• Analysis consists of statistically probing, manipulating and generalising from the dataset.
Analysis might include statistical evaluations, optimisation of rule-bases or knowledge
discovery methods.

Most lexical corpora today are POS-tagged. However even corpus linguists who work with
'unannotated plain text' inevitably apply some method to isolate terms that they are interested in
from surrounding words. In such situations annotation and abstraction are combined in a lexical
search.

The advantage of publishing an annotated corpus is that other users can then perform
experiments on the corpus. Linguists with other interests and differing perspectives than the
originators can exploit this work. By sharing data, corpus linguists are able to treat the corpus as
a locus of linguistic debate, rather than as an exhaustive fount of knowledge.

References
1. ^ Sinclair, J. 'The automatic analysis of corpora', in Svartvik, J. (ed.) Directions in Corpus
Linguistics (Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 82). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 1992.
2. ^ Wallis, S. 'Annotation, Retrieval and Experimentation', in Meurman-Solin, A. & Nurmi, A.A.
(ed.) Annotating Variation and Change. Helsinki: Varieng, University of Helsinki. 2007. e-
Published
3. ^ Quirk, R. 'Towards a description of English Usage', Transactions of the Philological Society.
1960. 40-61.
4. ^ Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. and Svartvik, J. A Comprehensive Grammar of the
English Language London: Longman. 1985.
5. ^ Sankoff, D. & Sankoff, G. Sample survey methods and computer-assisted analysis in the study
of grammatical variation. In Darnell R. (ed.) Canadian Languages in their Social Context
Edmonton: Linguistic Research Incorporated. 1973. 7-64.
6. ^ Poplack, S. The care and handling of a mega-corpus. In Fasold, R. & Schiffrin D. (eds.)
Language Change and Variation, Amsterdam: Benjamins. 1989. 411-451.
7. ^ Wallis, S. and Nelson G. 'Knowledge discovery in grammatically analysed corpora'. Data
Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 5: 307-340. 2001.
Journals

There are several international peer-reviewed journals dedicated to corpus linguistics, for
example, Corpora, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, ICAME Journal and the
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.

Book series

Book series in this field include Language and Computers, Studies in Corpus Linguistics and
English Corpus Linguistics

Other

• Biber, D., Conrad, S., Reppen R. Corpus Linguistics, Investigating Language Structure
and Use, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. ISBN 0-521-49957-7
• McCarthy, D., and Sampson G. Corpus Linguistics: Readings in a Widening Discipline,
Continuum, 2005. ISBN 0-826-48803-X
• Facchinetti, R. Theoretical Description and Practical Applications of Linguistic Corpora.
Verona: QuiEdit, 2007 ISBN 978-88-89480-37-3
• Facchinetti, R. (ed.) Corpus Linguistics 25 Years on. New York/Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2007 ISBN 978-90-420-2195-2
• Facchinetti, R. and Rissanen M. (eds.) Corpus-based Studies of Diachronic English.
Bern: Peter Lang, 2006 ISBN 3-03910-851-4

Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of

society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used.
Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics.

It also studies how lects differ between groups separated by certain social variables, e.g.,
ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc., and how creation and adherence
to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social class or socio-economic classes. As the
usage of a language varies from place to place (dialect), language usage varies among social
classes, and it is these sociolects that sociolinguistics studies.

The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by Indian and Japanese
linguists in the 1930s, and also by Gauchat in Switzerland in the early 1900s, but none received
much attention in the West until much later. The study of the social motivation of language
change, on the other hand, has its foundation in the wave model of the late 19th century.
Sociolinguistics in the west first appeared in the 1960s and was pioneered by linguists such as
William Labov in the US and Basil Bernstein in the UK.

Applications of sociolinguistics
For example, a sociolinguist might determine through study of social attitudes that a particular
vernacular would not be considered appropriate language use in a business or professional
setting. Sociolinguists might also study the grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, and other aspects of
this sociolect much as dialectologists would study the same for a regional dialect.
The study of language variation is concerned with social constraints determining language in its
contextual environment. Code-switching is the term given to the use of different varieties of
language in different social situations.

William Labov is often regarded as the founder of the study of sociolinguistics. He is especially
noted for introducing the quantitative study of language variation and change,[1] making the
sociology of language into a scientific discipline.

Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the
effect of the society on the language, while the latter's focus is on the language's effect on the
society.

Sociolinguistic variables
Studies in the field of sociolinguistics typically take a sample population and interview them,
assessing the realisation of certain sociolinguistic variables. Labov specifies the ideal
sociolinguistic variable to

• be high in frequency,
• have a certain immunity from conscious suppression,
• be an integral part of larger structures, and
• be easily quantified on a linear scale.

Phonetic variables tend to meet these criteria and are often used, as are grammatical variables
and, more rarely, lexical variables. Examples for phonetic variables are: the frequency of the
glottal stop, the height or backness of a vowel or the realisation of word-endings. An example of
a grammatical variable is the frequency of negative concord (known colloquially as a double
negative).

Traditional sociolinguistic interview

Sociolinguistic interviews are an integral part of collecting data for sociolinguistic studies. There
is an interviewer, who is conducting the study, and a subject, or informant, who is the
interviewee. In order to get a grasp on a specific linguistic form and how it is used in the dialect
of the subject, a variety of methods are used to elicit certain registers of speech. There are five
different styles, ranging from formal to casual. The most formal style would be elicited by
having the subject read a list of minimal pairs (MP). Minimal pairs are pairs of words that differ
in only one phoneme, such as cat and bat. Having the subject read a word list (WL) will elicit a
formal register, but generally not as formal as MP. The reading passage (RP) style is next down
on the formal register, and the interview style (IS) is when an interviewer can finally get into
eliciting a more casual speech from the subject. During the IS the interviewer can converse with
the subject and try to draw out of him an even more casual sort of speech by asking him to recall
childhood memories or maybe a near death experience, in which case the subject will get deeply
involved with the story since strong emotions are often attached to these memories. Of course,
the most sought after type of speech is the casual style (CS). This type of speech is difficult if not
impossible to elicit because of the Observer's Paradox. The closest one might come to CS in an
interview is when the subject is interrupted by a close friend or family member, or perhaps must
answer the phone. CS is used in a completely unmonitored environment where the subject feels
most comfortable and will use their natural vernacular without overtly thinking about it.

Fundamental Concepts in Sociolinguistics

While the study of sociolinguistics is very broad, there are a few fundamental concepts on which
many sociolinguistic inquiries depend.

Speech Community

Speech community is a concept in sociolinguistics that describes a more or less discrete group of
people who use language in a unique and mutually accepted way among themselves.

Speech communities can be members of a profession with a specialized jargon, distinct social
groups like high school students or hip hop fans, or even tight-knit groups like families and
friends. Members of speech communities will often develop slang or jargon to serve the group's
special purposes and priorities.

High prestige and low prestige varieties

Crucial to sociolingusitic analysis is the concept of prestige; certain speech habits are assigned a
positive or a negative value which is then applied to the speaker. This can operate on many
levels. It can be realised on the level of the individual sound/phoneme, as Labov discovered in
investigating pronunciation of the post-vocalic /r/ in the North-Eastern USA, or on the macro
scale of language choice, as realised in the various diglossias that exist throughout the world,
where Swiss-German/High German is perhaps most well known. An important implication of
sociolinguistic theory is that speakers 'choose' a variety when making a speech act, whether
consciously or subconsciously.

Social network

Understanding language in society means that one also has to understand the social networks in
which language is embedded. A social network is another way of describing a particular speech
community in terms of relations between individual members in a community. A network could
be loose or tight depending on how members interact with each other (Wardhaugh, 2002:126-
127). For instance, an office or factory may be considered a tight community because all
members interact with each other. A large course with 100+ students be a looser community
because students may only interact with the instructor and maybe 1-2 other students. A multiplex
commmunity (Wardhaugh, 2002:126-127) is one in which members have multiple relationships
with each other. For instance, in some neighborhoods, members may live on the same street,
work for the same employer and even intermarry.

The looseness or tightness of a social network may affect speech patterns adopted by a speaker.
For instance, Dubois and Hovarth (1998:254) found that speakers in one Cajun Louisiana
community were more likely to pronounce English "th" [θ] as [t] (or [ð] as [d]) if they
participated in a relatively dense social network (i.e. had strong local ties and interacted with
many other speakers in the community), and less likely if their networks were looser (i.e. fewer
local ties).[2]

A social network may apply to the macro level of a country or a city, but also to the inter-
personal level of neighborhoods or a single family. Recently, social networks have been formed
by the Internet, through chat rooms, MySpace groups, organizations, and online dating services.

Internal vs. external language

In Chomskian linguistics, a distinction is drawn between I-language (internal language) and E-

language (external language). In this context, internal language applies to the study of syntax and
semantics in language on the abstract level; as mentally represented knowledge in a native
speaker. External language applies to language in social contexts, i.e. behavioral habits shared by
a community. Internal language analyses operate on the assumption that all native speakers of a
language are quite homogeneous in how they process and perceive language. External language
fields, such as sociolinguistics, attempt to explain why this is in fact not the case. Many
sociolinguists reject the distinction between I- and E-language on the grounds that it is based on
a mentalist view of language. On this view, grammar is first and foremost an interactional
(social) phenomenon (e.g. Elinor Ochs, Emanuel Schegloff, Sandra Thompson).

Differences according to class

Sociolinguistics as a field distinct from dialectology was pioneered through the study of
language variation in urban areas. Whereas dialectology studies the geographic distribution of
language variation, sociolinguistics focuses on other sources of variation, among them class.
Class and occupation are among the most important linguistic markers found in society. One of
the fundamental findings of sociolinguistics, which has been hard to disprove, is that class and
language variety are related. Members of the working class tend to speak less standard language,
while the lower, middle, and upper middle class will in turn speak closer to the standard.
However, the upper class, even members of the upper middle class, may often speak 'less'
standard than the middle class. This is because not only class, but class aspirations, are
important.

Class aspiration

Studies, such as those by William Labov in the 1960s, have shown that social aspirations
influence speech patterns. This is also true of class aspirations. In the process of wishing to be
associated with a certain class (usually the upper class and upper middle class) people who are
moving in that direction socio-economically will adjust their speech patterns to sound like them.
However, not being native upper class speakers, they often hypercorrect, which involves
overcorrecting their speech to the point of introducing new errors. The same is true for
individuals moving down in socio-economic status.

Social language codes

Basil Bernstein, a well-known British socio-linguist, devised in his book, 'Elaborated and
restricted codes: their social origins and some consequences,' a social code system which he used
to classify the various speech patterns for different social classes. He claimed that members of
the middle class have ways of organizing their speech which are fundamentally very different
from the ways adopted by the working class.

Restricted code

In Basil Bernstein's theory, the restricted code was an example of the speech patterns used by the
working-class. He stated that this type of code allows strong bonds between group members,
who tend to behave largely on the basis of distinctions such as 'male', 'female', 'older', and
'younger'. This social group also uses language in a way which brings unity between people, and
members often do not need to be explicit about meaning, as their shared knowledge and common
understanding often bring them together in a way which other social language groups do not
experience. The difference with the restricted code is the emphasis on 'we' as a social group,
which fosters greater solidarity than an emphasis on 'I'.
 Elaborated code

Basil Bernstein also studied what he named the 'elaborated code' explaining that in this type of
speech pattern the middle and upper classes use this language style to gain access to education
and career advancement. Bonds within this social group are not as well defined and people
achieve their social identity largely on the basis of individual disposition and temperament.
There is no obvious division of tasks according to sex or age and generally, within this social
formation members negotiate and achieve their roles, rather than have them there ready-made in
advance. Due to the lack of solidarity the elaborated social language code requires individual
intentions and viewpoints to be made explicit as the 'I' has a greater emphasis with this social
group than the working class.

Deviation from standard language varieties

A diagram showing variation in the English language by region (the bottom axis) and by social
class (the side axis). The higher the social class, the less variation.

The existence of differences in language between social classes can be illustrated by the
following table:

Bristolian Dialect ... Standard English

I ain't done nothing ... I haven't done anything
I done it yesterday ... I did it yesterday
It weren't me that done it ... I didn't do it

Any native speaker of English would immediately be able to guess that speaker 1 was likely of a
different social class than speaker 2. The differences in grammar between the two examples of
speech is referred to as differences between social class dialects or sociolects.

It is also notable that, at least in England, the closer to standard English a dialect gets, the less
the lexicon varies by region, and vice-versa.

It is generally assumed that non-standard language is low-prestige language. However, in certain

groups, such as traditional working class neighborhoods, standard language may be considered
undesirable in many contexts. This is because the working class dialect is a powerful in-group
marker, and especially for non-mobile individuals, the use of non-standard varieties (even
exaggeratedly so) expresses neighborhood pride and group and class solidarity. There will thus
be a considerable difference in use of non-standard varieties when going to the pub or having a
neighborhood barbecue (high), and going to the bank (lower) for the same individual.
Differences according to age groups
There are several different types of age-based variation one may see within a population. They
are: vernacular of a subgroup with membership typically characterized by a specific age range,
age-graded variation, and indications of linguistic change in progress.

One example of subgroup vernacular is the speech of street youth. Just as street youth dress
differently from the "norm", they also often have their own "language". The reasons for this are
the following: (1) To enhance their own cultural identity (2) To identify with each other, (3) To
exclude others, and (4) To invoke feelings of fear or admiration from the outside world. Strictly
speaking, this is not truly age-based, since it does not apply to all individuals of that age bracket
within the community.

Age-graded variation is a stable variation which varies within a population based on age. That is,
speakers of a particular age will use a specific linguistic form in successive generations. This is
relatively rare. Chambers (1995) cites an example from southern Ontario, Canada where the
pronunciation of the letter 'Z' varies. Most of the English-speaking world pronounces it 'zed';
however, in the United States, it is pronounced 'zee'. A linguistic survey found that in 1979 two-
thirds of the 12 year olds in Toronto ended the recitation of the alphabet with the letter 'zee'
where only 8% of the adults did so. Then in 1991, (when those 12 year olds were in their mid-
20s) a survey showed only 39% of the 20-25 year olds used 'zee'. In fact, the survey showed that
only 12% of those over 30 used the form 'zee'. This seems to be tied to an American children's
song frequently used to teach the alphabet. In this song, the rhyme scheme matches the letter Z
with V 'vee', prompting the use of the American pronunciation. As the individual grows older,
this marked form 'zee' is dropped in favor of the standard form 'zed'.[3]

People tend to use linguistic forms that were prevalent when they reached adulthood. So, in the
case of linguistic change in progress, one would expect to see variation over a broader range of
ages. Bright (1997) provides an example taken from American English where there is an on-
going merger of the vowel sounds in such pairs of words as 'caught' and 'cot'.[4] Examining the
speech across several generations of a single family, one would find the grandparents' generation
would never or rarely merge these two vowel sounds; their children's generation may on
occasion, particularly in quick or informal speech; while their grandchildren's generation would
merge these two vowels uniformly. This is the basis of the apparent-time hypothesis where age-
based variation is taken as an indication of linguistic change in progress.

Differences according to gender

Men and women, on average, tend to use slightly different language styles. These differences
tend to be quantitative rather than qualitative. That is, to say that women make more minimal
responses (see below) than men is akin to saying that men are taller than women (i.e., men are on
average taller than women, but some women are taller than some men). The initial identification
of a women's register was by Robin Lakoff in 1975, who argued that the style of language served
to maintain women's (inferior) role in society ("female deficit approach").[5] A later refinement of
this argument was that gender differences in language reflected a power difference (O'Barr &
Atkins, 1980) ("dominance theory"). However, both these perspectives have the language style
of men as normative, implying that women's style is inferior.

More recently, Deborah Tannen has compared gender differences in language as more similar to
'cultural' differences ("cultural difference approach"). Comparing conversational goals, she
argued that men have a report style, aiming to communicate factual information, whereas women
have a rapport style, more concerned with building and maintaining relationships.[6] Such
differences are pervasive across media, including face-to-face conversation (e.g., Fitzpatrick,
Mulac, & Dindia, 1995: Hannah & Murachver, 1999), written essays of primary school children
(Mulac, Studley, & Blau, 1990), email (Thomson & Murachver, 2001), and even toilet graffiti
(Green, 2003).[7][8][9][10]

Communication styles are always a product of context, and as such, gender differences tend to be
most pronounced in single-gender groups. One explanation for this, is that people accommodate
their language towards the style of the person they are interacting with. Thus, in a mixed-gender
group, gender differences tend to be less pronounced. A similarly important observation is that
this accommodation is usually towards the language style, not the gender of the person
(Thomson, Murachver, & Green, 2001). That is, a polite and empathic male will tend to be
accommodated to on the basis of their being polite and empathic, rather than their being male.[11]

Minimal responses

One of the ways in which the communicative competence of men and women differ is in their
use of minimal responses, i.e., paralinguistic features such as ‘mhm’ and ‘yeah’, which is
behaviour associated with collaborative language use (Carli, 1990).[12] Men, on the other hand,
generally use them less frequently and where they do, it is usually to show agreement, as
Zimmerman and West’s (1975) study of turn-taking in conversation indicates.[13]

Questions

Men and women differ in their use of questions in conversations. For men, a question is usually a
genuine request for information whereas with women it can often be a rhetorical means of
engaging the other’s conversational contribution or of acquiring attention from others
conversationally involved, techniques associated with a collaborative approach to language use
(Barnes, 1971).[14] Therefore women use questions more frequently (Fitzpatrick, et al., 1995;
Todd, 1983).[7][15][16] In writing, however, both genders use rhetorical questions as literary devices.
For example, Mark Twain used them in "A War Prayer" to provoke the reader to question his
actions and beliefs.

Turn-taking

As the work of DeFrancisco (1991) shows, female linguistic behaviour characteristically

encompasses a desire to take turns in conversation with others, which is opposed to men’s
tendency towards centering on their own point or remaining silent when presented with such
implicit offers of conversational turn-taking as are provided by hedges such as "y’ know" and
"isn’t it".[17] This desire for turn-taking gives rise to complex forms of interaction in relation to
the more regimented form of turn-taking commonly exhibited by men (Sacks et al., 1974).[18]

Changing the topic of conversation

According to Dorval (1990), in his study of same-sex friend interaction, males tend to change
subject more frequently than females. This difference may well be at the root of the conception
that women chatter and talk too much, and may still trigger the same thinking in some males. In
this way lowered estimation of women may arise.[19] Incidentally, this androcentric attitude
towards women as chatterers arguably arose from the idea that any female conversation was too
much talking according to the patriarchal consideration of silence as a womanly virtue common
to many cultures.
Self-disclosure

Female tendencies toward self-disclosure, i.e., sharing their problems and experiences with
others, often to offer sympathy (Dindia & Allen, 1992; Tannen, 1991:49), contrasts with male
tendencies to non-self disclosure and professing advice or offering a solution when confronted
with another’s problems.[20][6]

Verbal aggression

Men tend to be more verbally aggressive in conversing (Labov, 1972), frequently using threats,
profanities, yelling and name-calling.[21] Women, on the whole, deem this to disrupt the flow of
conversation and not as a means of upholding one’s hierarchical status in the conversation.
Where women swear, it is usually to demonstrate to others what is normal behaviour for them.[22]

Listening and attentiveness

It appears that women attach more weight than men to the importance of listening in
conversation, with its connotations of power to the listener as confidant of the speaker. This
attachment of import by women to listening is inferred by women’s normally lower rate of
interruption — i.e., disrupting the flow of conversation with a topic unrelated to the previous one
(Fishman, 1980) — and by their largely increased use of minimal responses in relation to men
(Zimmerman and West, 1975).[23][13] Men, however, interrupt far more frequently with non-
related topics, especially in the mixed sex setting (Zimmerman and West,1975) and, far from
rendering a female speaker's responses minimal, are apt to greet her conversational spotlights
with silence, as the work of DeFrancisco (1991) demonstrates.[17]

Dominance versus subjection

This, in turn, suggests a dichotomy between a male desire for conversational dominance – noted
by Leet-Pellegrini (1980) with reference to male experts speaking more verbosely than their
female counterparts – and a female aspiration to group conversational participation.[24] One
corollary of this is, according to Coates (1993: 202), that males are afforded more attention in the
context of the classroom and that this can lead to their gaining more attention in scientific and
technical subjects, which in turn can lead to their achieving better success in those areas,
ultimately leading to their having more power in a technocratic society.[25]

Politeness

Politeness in speech is described in terms of positive and negative face.[26] Positive face refers to
one's desire to be liked and admired, while negative face refers to one's wish to remain
autonomous and not to suffer imposition. Both forms, according to Brown’s study of the Tzeltal
language (1980), are used more frequently by women whether in mixed or single-sex pairs,
suggesting for Brown a greater sensitivity in women than have men to face the needs of
others.[27] In short, women are to all intents and purposes largely more polite than men. However,
negative face politeness can be potentially viewed as weak language because of its associated
hedges and tag questions, a view propounded by O’Barr and Atkins (1980) in their work on
courtroom interaction.[28]

Complimentary language

Compliments are closely linked to politeness in that, as Coates believes (1983), they cater for
positive face needs.[29]
Notes
1. ^ Paolillo, John C. Analyzing Linguistic Variation: Statistical Models and Methods CSLI Press
2001, Tagliamonte, Sali Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation Cambridge, 2006
2. ^ Dubois, Sylvie and Hovarth, Barbara. (1998). "Let's tink about dat: Interdental Fricatives in
Cajun English." Language Variation and Change 10 (3), pp 245-61.
3. ^ Chambers, J.K. (1995). Sociolinguistic Theory, Oxford: Blackwell.
4. ^ Bright, William (1997). "Social Factors in Language Change." In Coulmas, Florian (ed) The
Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
5. ^ Lakoff, R. (1975). Language and Women’s Place. New York: Harper & Row.
6. ^ a b Tannen, Deborah. (1991). You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation.
London: Virago.
7. ^ a b Fitzpatrick, M. A., Mulac, A., & Dindia, K. (1995). Gender-preferential language use in
spouse and stranger interaction. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 14, 18-39.
8. ^ Mulac, A., Studley, L.B., & Blau, S. (1990). "The gender-linked language effect in primary and
secondary students’ impromptu essays." Sex Roles 23, 439-469.
9. ^ Thomson, R., & Murachver, T. (2001). "Predicting gender from electronic discourse." British
Journal of Social Psychology 40, 193-208.
10. ^ Green, J. (2003). "The writing on the stall: Gender and graffiti." Journal of Language and
Social Psychology 22, 282-296.
11. ^ Thomson, R., Murachver, T., & Green, J. (2001). "Where is the gender in gendered language?"
Psychological Science 12, 171-175.
12. ^ Carli, L.L. (1990). "Gender, language, and influence." Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 5, 941-951.
13. ^ a b Zimmerman, Don and West, Candace. (1975) "Sex roles, interruptions and silences in
conversation." In Thorne, Barrie and Henly, Nancy (eds) Language and Sex: Difference and
Dominance pp. 105-29. Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury.
14. ^ Barnes, Douglas (1971). "Language and Learning in the Classroom." Journal of Curriculum
Studies. 3:1.
15. ^ Todd, Alexandra Dundas. (1983) "A diagnosis of doctor-patient discourse in the prescription of
contraception."
16. ^ In Fisher, Sue and Todd, Alexandra D. (eds) The Social Organization of Doctor-Patient
Communication pp. 159-87. , Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics.
17. ^ a b DeFrancisco, Victoria (1991). "The sound of silence: how men silence women in marital
relationships." Discourse and Society 2 (4):413-24.
18. ^ Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. (1974) "A simple systematics for the
organization of turn-taking for conversation." Language 50: 696-735.
19. ^ Dorval, Bruce. (1990). Conversational Organization and its Development. Norwood, NJ:
Ablex.
20. ^ Dindia, K. & Allen, M. (1992). Sex differences in disclosure: A meta-analysis. Psychological
Bulletin, 112, 106-124.
21. ^ Labov, William. (1972). Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia
Press.
22. ^ Eder, Donna. (1990). "Serious and Playful Disputes: variation in conflict talk among female
adolescents." In Grimshaw, Allan (ed)Conflict Talk pp. 67-84. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
23. ^ Fishman, Pamela. (1980). "Interactional Shiftwork." Heresies 2: 99-101.
24. ^ Leet-Pellegrini, Helena M. (1980) "Conversational dominance as a function of gender and
expertise." In Giles, Howard, Robinson, W. Peters, and Smith, Philip M (eds) Language: Social
Psychological Perspectives. pp. 97-104. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
25. ^ Coates, Jennifer (1993). Women, Men and language. London: Longman.
26. ^ Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen. (1978). "Universals in Language Usage: Politeness
Phenomena." In Goody, Esther (ed) Questions and Politeness pp 56-289. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
 27. ^ Brown, Penelope. (1980). "How and why are women more polite: some evidence from a
Mayan community." In McConnell-Ginet, S. et al. (eds) Women and Language in Literature and
Society pp. 111-36. New York: Praeger.
28. ^ O’Barr, William and Bowman Atkins. (1980) "'Women’s Language' or 'powerless language'?"
In McConnell-Ginet et al. (eds) Women and languages in Literature and Society. pp. 93-110. New
York: Praeger.
29. ^ Coates, Jennifer (1983). Language and Sexism, LAUD Paper No. 173, University of Duisburg.

References
• Barnes, Douglas (1971), Language and Learning in the Classroom, Journal of
Curriculum Studies. 3:1
• Bright, William (1997), Social Factors in Language Change, p 83 in Coulmas, Florian
[ed] The Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
• Brown, Penelope (1980), How and why are women more polite: some evidence from a
Mayan community, pp. 111-36 in McConnell-Ginet, S. et al. [eds] Women and Language
in Literature and Society. Praeger, New York.
• Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen (1978), Universals in Language Usage:
Politeness Phenomena, pp 56-289 in Goody, Esther [ed] Questions and Politeness.
Cambridge University Press. Reprinted separately in 1987 as Politeness: Some
Universals in Language Usage, ISBN 978-0521313551.
• Carli, L.L. (1990). Gender, language, and influence. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 5, 941-951.
• Chambers, J.K. (1995), Sociolinguistic Theory, Oxford, England: Blackwell; p206-208.
• Coates, Jennifer (1983), Language and Sexism, LAUD Paper No. 173, University of
Duisburg.
• Coates, Jennifer (1987), Epistemic modality and spoken discourse, Transactions of the
Philological Society, 110-31.
• Coates, Jennifer (1993), Women, Men and language. London: Longman
• Coates, Jennifer (ed.) (1998), Language and Gender: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
• DeFrancisco, Victoria (1991), The sound of silence: how men silence women in marital
relationships, Discourse and Society 2 (4):413-24.
• Dindia, K. & Allen, M. (1992). Sex differences in disclosure: A meta-analysis.
Psychological Bulletin, 112, 106-124.
• Dorval, Bruce (1990), Conversational Organization and its Development, Ablex,
Norwood, NJ.
• Dubois, Sylvie and Hovarth, Barbara. (1998) "Let's tink about dat: Interdental Fricatives
in Cajun English," Language Variation and Change, 10 (3), pp 245-61.
• Eder, Donna (1990), Serious and Playful Disputes: variation in conflict talk among
female adolescents, pp. 67-84 in Grimshaw, Allan [ed]Conflict Talk, Cambridge
University Press.
• Fishman, Pamela(1980), Interactional Shiftwork, Heresies 2:99-101.
• Fitzpatrick, M. A., Mulac, A., & Dindia, K. (1995). Gender-preferential language use in
spouse and stranger interaction. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 14, 18-39.
• Green, J. (2003). The writing on the stall: Gender and graffiti. Journal of Language and
Social Psychology, 22, 282-296.
• Holmes, Janet (1988), Paying Compliments: a sex-preferential politeness strategy,
Journal of Pragmatics 12:445-65
• Labov, William (1966), The Social Stratification of English in New York City, Diss.
Washington.
• Labov, William (1972), Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of
Philadelphia Press.
 • Lakoff, R. (1975). Language and Women’s Place. New York: Harper & Row.
• Leet-Pellegrini, Helena M. (1980) Conversational dominance as a function of gender
and expertise, pp. 97-104 in Giles, Howard, Robinson, W. Peters, and Smith, Philip M
[eds] Language: Social Psychological Perspectives. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
• Mulac, A., Studley, L.B., & Blau, S. (1990). The gender-linked language effect in
primary and secondary students’ impromptu essays. Sex Roles, 23, 439-469.
• O’Barr and Atkins (1980) ‘Women’s Language’ or ‘powerless language’?, pp. 93-110 in
McConnell-Ginet et al. [eds] Women and languages in Literature and Society. New York:
Praeger.
• Sacks et al (1974) A simple systematics for the organization of turn-taking for
conversation, Language 50:696-735.
• Tannen, Deborah (1991), You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation,
London: Virago.
• Thomson, R., & Murachver, T. (2001). Predicting gender from electronic discourse.
British Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 193-208.
• Thomson, R., Murachver, T., & Green, J. (2001). Where is the gender in gendered
language? Psychological Science, 12, 171-175.
• Wardhaugh, Ronald. (2004) An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Fourth Edition. London:
Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 1-631-22540-4.
• Todd, Alexandra Dundas (1983), A diagnosis of doctor-patient discourse in the
prescription of contraception, pp. 159-87 in Fisher, Sue and Todd, Alexandra D. [eds]
The Social Organization of Doctor-Patient Communication, Center for Applied
Linguistics, Washington D.C.
• Zimmerman, Don and West, Candace (1975) Sex roles, interruptions and silences in
conversation, pp. 105-29 in Thorne, Barrie and Henly, Nancy [eds] Language and Sex:
Difference and Dominance. Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House

Further reading
• Lakoff, Robin T. (2000). The Language War. Berkely, CA: University of California Press.
ISBN 0-520-21666-0
• Meyerhoff, Miriam. (2006). Introducing Sociolinguistics. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-
415-39948-3
• Milroy, Lesley and Gordon. Matthew. (2003) Sociolinguistics: Method and Interpretation
London: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 0-631-22225-1. (More advanced, but has lots of
good examples and describes research methodologies to use.)
• Paulston, Christina Bratt and G. Richard Tucker, editors. 1997. The early days of
sociolinguistics: memories and reflections. (Publications in Sociolinguistics, 2.) Dallas:
Summer Institute of Linguistics.
• Trudgill, Peter. (2000). Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society(4th
Ed.). London: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-028921-6 This book is a very readable, if
Anglo-centric, introduction for the non-linguist.
• Wardhaugh, Ronald. (2005) An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Fifth Edition. Wiley-
Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 1-405-13559-X. A sociolinguistics textbook, but assumes
little or no previous experience with linguistics.
• Watts, Richard J. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-
0-521-79406-0. A sociolinguistics book specializing in the research in politeness. It's a
little tough at times, but very helpful and informational.
 Descriptive linguistics
is the work of analyzing and describing how language is spoken (or how it was spoken in the
past) by a group of people in a speech community. All scholarly research in linguistics is
descriptive; like all other sciences, its aim is to observe the linguistic world as it is, without the
bias of preconceived ideas about how it ought to be. Modern descriptive linguistics is based on a
structural approach to language, as exemplified in the work of Bloomfield and others.

Linguistic description is often contrasted with linguistic prescription, which is found especially
in education and in publishing. Prescription seeks to define standard language forms and give
advice on effective language use, and can be thought of as the attempt to present the fruits of
descriptive research in a learnable form, though it also draws on more subjective aspects of
language aesthetics. Prescription and description are essentially complementary, but have
different priorities and sometimes are seen to be in conflict.

Accurate description of real speech is a difficult problem, and linguists have often been reduced
to approximations. Almost all linguistic theory has its origin in practical problems of descriptive
linguistics. Phonology (and its theoretical developments, such as the phoneme) deals with the
function and interpretation of sound in language. Syntax has developed to describe the rules
concerning how words relate to each other in order to form sentences. Lexicology collects
"words" and their derivations and transformations: it has not given rise to much generalized
theory.

An extreme "mentalist" viewpoint denies that the linguistic description of a language can be
done by anyone but a competent speaker. Such a speaker has internalized something called
"linguistic competence", which gives them the ability to extrapolate correctly from their
experience new but correct expressions, and to reject unacceptable expressions.

There are tens of thousands of linguistic descriptions of thousands of languages that were
prepared by people without adequate linguistic training. Prior to 1900, there was little academic
descriptions of language.

A linguistic description is considered descriptively adequate if it achieves one or more of the

following goals of descriptive linguistics:

1. A description of the phonology of the language in question.

2. A description of the morphology of words belonging to that language.
3. A description of the syntax of well-formed sentences of that language.
4. A description of lexical derivations.
5. A documentation of the vocabulary, including at least one thousand entries.
6. A reproduction of a few genuine texts.

References
• Antoinette Renouf, Andrew Kehoe, The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics - 2006 -
408 pages, p. 377
• Patrick R. Bennett, Comparative Semitic Linguistics: A Manual - 1998 - 269 pages, p. 3
 • William A. Haviland, PRINS, WALRATH, Harald E. L. Prins, Dana Walrath, Bunny
McBride, Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge - HAVILAND - 2004 - 496
pages, p. 93

Theoretical linguistics is the

branch of linguistics that is most concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge.
The fields that are generally considered the core of theoretical linguistics are syntax, phonology,
morphology, and semantics. Although phonetics often informs phonology, it is often excluded
from the purview of theoretical linguistics, along with psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics.
Theoretical linguistics also involves the search for and explanation of linguistic universals, that
is, properties all languages have in common.

Phonetics is the study of speech sounds with concentration on three main

points :

• Articulation : the production of speech sounds in human speech organs.

• Perception : the way human ears respond to speech signals, how the human brain
analyses them.
• Acoustic features : physical characteristics of speech sounds such as color, loudness,
amplitude, frequency etc.

According to this definition, phonetics can also be called linguistic analysis of human speech at
the surface level. That is one obvious difference from phonology, which concerns the structure
and organisation of speech sounds in natural languages, and furthermore has a theoretical and
abstract nature. One example can be made to illustrate this distinction: In English, the suffix -s
can represent either [s], [z] or can be silent (symbolised as ø) depending on context.

Articulatory phonetics

The field of articulatory phonetics is a subfield of phonetics. In studying articulation,

phoneticians attempt to document how humans produce speech sounds (vowels and consonants).
That is, articulatory phoneticians are interested in how the different structures of the vocal tract,
called the articulators (tongue, lips, jaw, palate, teeth etc.), interact to create the specific sounds.

Auditory phonetics

Auditory phonetics is a branch of phonetics concerned with the hearing, acquisition and
comprehension of phonetic sounds of words of a language. As articulatory phonetics explores the
methods of sound production, auditory phonetics explores the methods of reception--the ear to
the brain, and those processes.

Acoustic phonetics

Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics which deals with acoustic aspects of speech sounds.
Acoustic phonetics investigates properties like the mean squared amplitude of a waveform, its
duration, its fundamental frequency, or other properties of its frequency spectrum, and the
relationship of these properties to other branches of phonetics (e.g. articulatory or auditory
phonetics), and to abstract linguistic concepts like phones, phrases, or utterances.

Phonology is the study of language sounds. [1] Phonology

is divided into two separate studies; Phonetics and Phonemics. Phonetics is what depicts the
sounds we hear. It calls attention to the smallest details in language sounds. There are three kinds
of phonetics; Acoustic phonetics, auditory phonetics, and articulatory phonetics. Acoustic
phonetics deals with the physical properties of sound. What sounds exactly are coming from the
person speaking. Auditory phonetics deals with how the sounds are perceived. Exactly what the
person hearing the sounds is perceiving. Finally, articulatory phonetics studies how the speech
sounds are produced. This is what describes the actual sounds in detail. It is also known as
descriptive phonetics.[2] Phonemics studies how the sounds are used. It analyzes the way sounds
are arranged in languages and helps you to hear what sounds are important in a language.[3] It
helps one to understand the culture behind the language. The unit of analysis for phonemics is
called phonemes. "A phoneme is a sound that functions to distinguish one word from another in
a language,".[4] For example, how we distinguish the English word tie from the word die. The
sounds that differentiates two words are [t], and [d].[4]

Morphology
Morphology is the study of word structure. For example, in the sentences The dog runs and The
dogs run, the word forms runs and dogs have an affix -s added, distinguishing them from the
bare forms dog and run. Adding this suffix to a nominal stem gives plural forms, adding it to
verbal stems restricts the subject to third person singular. Some morphological theories operate
with two distinct suffixes -s, called allomorphs of the morphemes Plural and Third person
singular, respectively. Languages differ with respect to their morphological structure. Along one
axis, we may distinguish analytic languages, with few or no affixes or other morphological
processes from synthetic languages with many affixes. Along another axis, we may distinguish
agglutinative languages, where affixes express one grammatical property each, and are added
neatly one after another, from fusional languages, with non-concatenative morphological
processes (infixation, umlaut, ablaut, etc.) and/or with less clear-cut affix boundaries.
 Syntax
Syntax is the study of language structure and word order. It is concerned with the relationship
between units at the level of words or morphology. Syntax seeks to delineate exactly all and only
those sentences which make up a given language, using native speaker intuition. Syntax seeks to
describe formally exactly how structural relations between elements (lexical items/words and
operators) in a sentence contribute to its interpretation. Syntax uses principles of formal logic
and Set Theory to formalize and represent accurately the hierarchical relationship between
elements in a sentence. Abstract syntax trees are often used to illustrate the hierarchical
structures that are posited. Thus, in active declarative sentences in English the subject is followed
by the main verb which in turn is followed by the object (SVO). This order of elements is crucial
to its correct interpretation and it is exactly this which syntacticians try to capture. They argue
that there must be such a formal computational component contained within the language faculty
of normal speakers of a language and seek to describe it.

Semantics
Semantics is the study of intensive meaning in words and sentences.

Semantics can be expressed through diction (word choice) and inflexion. Inflexion may be
conveyed through an author's tone in writing and a speaker's tone of voice, changing pitch and
stress of words to influence meaning.

References
• Ottenheimer, H.J. (2006). The Anthropology of Language: An Introduction to Linguistic
Anthropology.Canada: Thomas Wadsworth.

Pragmatics
Pragmatics is the study of how the arrangement of words and phrases can alter the meaning of a
sentence. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic
competence. An utterance describing pragmatic function is described as metapragmatic. Another
perspective is that pragmatics deals with the ways we reach our goal in communication. Suppose
a person wanted to ask someone else to stop smoking. This could be achieved by using several
utterances. The person could simply say, 'Stop smoking, please!' which is direct and with clear
semantic meaning; alternatively, the person could say, 'Whew, this room could use an air purifier'
which implies a similar meaning but is indirect and therefore requires pragmatic inference to
derive the intended meaning.
Pragmatics is regarded as one of the most challenging aspects for language learners to grasp, and
can only truly be learned with experience.
Pragmatics was a reaction to structuralist linguistics outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure. In many
cases, it expanded upon his idea that language has an analyzable structure, composed of parts
that can be defined in relation to others. Pragmatics first engaged only in synchronic study, as
opposed to examining the historical development of language. However, it rejected the notion
that all meaning comes from signs existing purely in the abstract space of langue. Meanwhile,
historical pragmatics has also come into being.
While Chomskyan linguistics famously repudiated Bloomfieldian anthropological linguistics,
pragmatics continues its tradition. Also influential were Franz Boas, Edward Sapir and Benjamin
Whorf.

Areas of interest
Pragmatics differs from linguistics in its main areas of interest, which are:
• The study of the speakers' meaning, which means focusing not on the phonetic or
grammatical form of an utterance, but instead on what are the speakers' intentions and
beliefs.
• The study of the meaning in its context, and the influence that a given context can have
on the message. It requires knowledge of the speakers' identities, and the place and time
of the utterance.
• The study of implicatures, i.e. the things that are communicated even though they are not
explicitly expressed.
• The study of the relative distance, both social and physical, between speakers in order to
understand what determines the choice of what is said and what is not said.

Non-referential uses of language

Roman Jakobson identified six functions of language, only one of which is the traditional system
of reference.
• referential: conveys information about some real phenomenon
• expressive: describes feelings of the speaker
• conative: attempts to elicit some behavior from the addressee
• phatic: builds a relationship between both parties in a conversation
• metalingual: self-references
• poetic: focuses on the text independent of reference
Émile Benveniste discussed pronouns "I" and "you", arguing that they are fundamentally distinct
from other pronouns because of their role in creating the subject.
Michael Silverstein has argued that the "non-referential index" communicates meaning without
being explicitly attached to semantic content.

Related fields
There is a considerable overlap between pragmatics and sociolinguistics, since both share an
interest in linguistic meaning as determined by usage in a speech community. However,
sociolinguists tend to be more oriented towards variations within such communities.
According to Charles W. Morris, pragmatics tries to understand the relationship between signs
and their users, while semantics tends to focus on the actual objects or ideas to which a word
refers, and syntax (or "syntactics") examines relationships among signs.
Semantics is the literal meaning of an idea whereas pragmatics is the implied meaning of the
given idea.
Suzette Haden Elgin has also written a number of books known of as the Gentle Art of Verbal
Self Defense series, where she extensively outlines structured methods like those surveyed in
pragmatics to defend against the use of pejoratives in various common situations, drawing
parallels between applied linguistics and martial arts techniques.

Linguistic anthropology
Pragmatics helps anthropologists relate elements of language to broader social phenomena; it
thus pervades the field of linguistic anthropology. Because pragmatics describes generally the
forces in play for a given utterance, it includes the study of power, gender, race, identity, and
their interactions with individual speech acts. For example, the study of code switching directly
relates to pragmatics, since a switch in code effects a shift in pragmatic force.[1]

Pragmatics in philosophy
Jaques Derrida once remarked that some of linguistic pragmatics aligned well with the program
he outlined in Of Grammatology.
Linguistic pragmatics underpins Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. In Gender
Trouble, she claims that gender and sex are not natural categories, but called into being by
discourse. In Excitable Speech she extends her theory of performativity to hate speech, arguing
that the designation of certain utterances as "hate speech" affects their pragmatic function.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari discuss linguistic pragmatics in the fourth chapter of A
Thousand Plateaus ("November 20, 1923--Postulates of Linguistics"). They draw three
conclusions from Austin: (1) A performative utterance doesn't communicate information about
an act second-hand—it does the act; (2) Every aspect of language ("semantics, syntactics, or
even phonematics") functionally interacts with pragmatics; (3) The distinction between language
and speech is untenable. This last conclusion attempts to simultaneously refute Saussure's
division between langue and parole and Chomsky's distinction between surface structure and
deep structure. [2]

Significant works
• J. L. Austin's How To Do Things With Words
• Paul Grice's cooperative principle and conversational maxims
• Brown & Levinson's Politeness Theory
• Geoffrey Leech's politeness maxims
• Levinson's Presumptive Meanings
• Jürgen Habermas's universal pragmatics
• Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's relevance theory
Footnotes
• ^ Duranti, Alessandro (1997). Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge University Press.
• ^ Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987) [1980]. A Thousand Plateaus. University of
Minnesota Press.

References
• Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things With Words. Oxford University Press.
• Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. (1978) Politeness: Some Universals in
Language Usage. Cambridge University Press.
• Carston, Robyn (2002) Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit
Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Clark, Herbert H. (1996) "Using Language". Cambridge University Press.
• Cole, Peter, ed.. (1978) Pragmatics. (Syntax and Semantics, 9). New York: Academic
Press.
• Dijk, Teun A. van. (1977) Text and Context. Explorations in the Semantics and
Pragmatics of Discourse. London: Longman.
• Grice, H. Paul. (1989) Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University
Press.
• Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward. (2005) The Handbook of Pragmatics. Blackwell.
• Leech, Geoffrey N. (1983) Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
• Levinson, Stephen C. (1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.
• Levinson, Stephen C. (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized
conversational implicature. MIT Press.
• Mey, Jacob L. (1993) Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell (2nd ed. 2001).
• Kepa Korta and John Perry. (2006) Pragmatics. The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy.
• Potts, Christopher. (2005) The Logic of Conventional Implicatures. Oxford Studies in
Theoretical Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. (2005) Pragmatics. In F. Jackson and M. Smith (eds.)
Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy. OUP, Oxford, 468-501. (Also available
here.)
• Thomas, Jenny (1995) Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics. Longman.
• Verschueren, Jef. (1999) Understanding Pragmatics. London, New York: Arnold
Publishers.
• Verschueren, Jef, Jan-Ola Östman, Jan Blommaert, eds. (1995) Handbook of Pragmatics.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
• Watzlawick, Paul, Janet Helmick Beavin and Don D. Jackson (1967) Pragmatics of
Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes.
New York: Norton.
• Wierzbicka, Anna (1991) Cross-cultural Pragmatics. The Semantics of Human
Interaction. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Yule, George (1996) Pragmatics (Oxford Introductions to Language Study). Oxford
University Press.
 Lexis (linguistics)
In linguistics, lexis (in Greek λέξις = word) describes the storage of language in our mental
lexicon as prefabricated patterns (lexical units) that can be recalled and sorted into meaningful
speech and writing. Recent research in corpus linguistics suggests that the long-held dichotomy
between grammar and vocabulary does not exist.[citation needed] Lexis as a concept differs from the
traditional paradigm of grammar in that it defines probable language use, not possible language
usage. This notion contrasts starkly with the Chomskian proposition of a “Universal Grammar”
as the prime mover for language; grammar still plays an integral role in lexis, of course, but it is
the result of accumulated lexis, not its generator.

Register
Michael K. Halliday (1987) proposes a useful dichotomy of spoken and written language which
actually entails a shift in paradigm: while linguistic theory posits the superiority of the spoken
language over written language (as the former is the origin, comes naturally, and thus precedes
the written language), or the written over the spoken (for the same reasons: the written language
being the highest form of rudimentary speech), Halliday states they are two entirely different
entities. In short, he claims that speech is grammatically complex while writing is lexically dense
(Halliday, 1993). In other words, a sentence such as “a cousin of mine, the one who I was talking
about the other day –the one who lives in Houston, not the one in Dallas – called me up
yesterday to tell me the very same story about Mary, who…” is most likely to be found in
conversation, not as a newspaper headline. “Prime Minister vows conciliation”, on the other
hand, would be a typical news headline.

Halliday’s work suggests something radically different: language behaves in registers. Biber et al
working on the LGSWE worked with four (these are not exhaustive, merely exemplary):
conversation, literature, news, academic. These four registers clearly highlight distinctions within
language use which would not be clear through a “grammatical” approach. Not surprisingly, each
register favors the use of different words and structures: whereas news headline stories, for
example, are grammatically simple, conversational anecdotes are full of lexical repetition. The
lexis of the news, however, can be quite dense, just as the grammar of speech can be incredibly
complicated.

Lexis (linguistics)
In linguistics, lexis (in Greek λέξις = word) describes the storage of language in our mental
lexicon as prefabricated patterns (lexical units) that can be recalled and sorted into meaningful
speech and writing. Recent research in corpus linguistics suggests that the long-held dichotomy
between grammar and vocabulary does not exist.[citation needed] Lexis as a concept differs from the
traditional paradigm of grammar in that it defines probable language use, not possible language
usage. This notion contrasts starkly with the Chomskian proposition of a “Universal Grammar”
as the prime mover for language; grammar still plays an integral role in lexis, of course, but it is
the result of accumulated lexis, not its generator.

Lexicon
In short, the lexicon is

• Formulaic: it relies on partially-fixed expressions and highly probable word combinations

• Idiomatic: it follows conventions and patterns for usage
• Metaphoric: concepts such as time and money, business and sex, systems and water all
share a large portion of the same vocabulary
• Grammatical: it uses rules based on sampling of the Lexicon
• Register-specific: it uses the same word differently and/or less frequently in different
contexts

A major area of study psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics involves the question of how words
are retrieved from the mental lexicon in online language processing and production. For
example, the cohort model seeks to describe lexical retrieval in terms of segment-by-segment
activation of competing lexical entries.[1][2]

Formulaic Language
In recent years,the compilation of language databases using real samples from speech and
writing has enabled researchers to take a fresh look at the composition of languages. Among
other things, statistical research methods offer reliable insight into the ways in which words
interact. The most interesting findings have taken place in the dichotomy between language use
(how language is used) and language usage (how language could be used).

Language use shows which occurrences of words and their partners are most probable. The
major finding of this research is that language users rely to a very high extent on ready-made
language “lexical chunks”, which can be easily combined to form sentences. This eliminates the
need for the speaker to analyze each sentence grammatically, yet deals with a situation
effectively. Typical examples include “I see what you mean” or “Could you please hand me the
…” or “Recent research shows that…”

Language usage, on the other hand, is what takes place when the ready-made chunks do not
fulfill the speaker’s immediate needs; in other words, a new sentence is about to be formed and
must be analyzed for correctness. Grammar rules have been internalized by native speakers,
allowing them to determine the viability of new sentences. Language usage might be defined as a
fall-back position when all other options have been exhausted.

Context and Co-Text

When analyzing the structure of language statistically, a useful place to start is with high
frequency context words, or so-called Key Words in Context (KWICs). After millions of samples
of spoken and written language have been stored in a database, these KWICs can be sorted and
analyzed for their co-text, or words which commonly co-occur with them. Valuable principles
with which KWICs can be analyzed include:

• Collocation: words and their co-occurrences (examples include “fulfill needs” and “fall-
back position”)

• Semantic prosody: the connotation words carry (“pay attention” can be neutral or
remonstrative, as when a teacher says to a pupil: “Pay attention!” (or else)
 • Colligation: the grammar words use (while “I hope that suits you” sounds natural, “I hope
that you are suited by that” does not).

• Register: the text style a word is used in (“President vows to support allies” is most likely
found in news headlines, whereas “vows” in speech most likely refer to “marriages”; in
speech, the verb “vow” is most likely used as “promise”).

(partially adapted from Lewis, 1997)

Once data has been collected, it can be sorted to determine the probability of co-occurrences.
One common and well-known way is with a concordance: the KWIC is centered and shown with
dozens of examples of it in use, as with the example for “possibility” below.

Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning in communication. The word is derived from the Greek word
σημαντικός (semantikos), "significant",[1] from σημαίνω (semaino), "to signify, to indicate" and
that from σήμα (sema), "sign, mark, token".[2] In linguistics it is the study of interpretation of
signs as used by agents or communities within particular circumstances and contexts.[3] It has
related meanings in several other fields.

Semanticists differ on what constitutes meaning in an expression. For example, in the sentence,
"John loves a bagel", the word bagel may refer to the object itself, which is its literal meaning or
denotation, but it may also refer to many other figurative associations, such as how it meets
John's hunger, etc., which may be its connotation. Traditionally, the formal semantic view
restricts semantics to its literal meaning, and relegates all figurative associations to pragmatics,
but many find this distinction difficult to defend.[4] The degree to which a theorist subscribes to
the literal-figurative distinction decreases as one moves from the formal semantic, semiotic,
pragmatic, to the cognitive semantic traditions.

The word semantic in its modern sense is considered to have first appeared in French as
sémantique in Michel Bréal's 1897 book, Essai de sémantique'. In International Scientific
Vocabulary semantics is also called semasiology. The discipline of Semantics is distinct from
Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics, which is a system for looking at the semantic reactions of
the whole human organism in its environment to some event, symbolic or otherwise.

Linguistics
In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as inherent at the
levels of words, phrases, sentences, and even larger units of discourse (referred to as texts). The
basic area of study is the meaning of signs, and the study of relations between different linguistic
units: homonymy, synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, paronyms, hypernymy, hyponymy,
meronymy, metonymy, holonymy, exocentricity / endocentricity, linguistic compounds. A key
concern is how meaning attaches to larger chunks of text, possibly as a result of the composition
from smaller units of meaning. Traditionally, semantics has included the study of connotative
sense and denotative reference, truth conditions, argument structure, thematic roles, discourse
analysis, and the linkage of all of these to syntax.
Formal semanticists are concerned with the modeling of meaning in terms of the semantics of
logic. Thus the sentence John loves a bagel above can be broken down into its constituents
(signs), of which the unit loves may serve as both syntactic and semantic head.

In the late 1960s, Richard Montague proposed a system for defining semantic entries in the
lexicon in terms of lambda calculus. Thus, the syntactic parse of the sentence above would now
indicate loves as the head, and its entry in the lexicon would point to the arguments as the agent,
John, and the object, bagel, with a special role for the article "a" (which Montague called a
quantifier). This resulted in the sentence being associated with the logical predicate loves (John,
bagel), thus linking semantics to categorial grammar models of syntax. The logical predicate
thus obtained would be elaborated further, e.g. using truth theory models, which ultimately relate
meanings to a set of Tarskiian universals, which may lie outside the logic. The notion of such
meaning atoms or primitives are basic to the language of thought hypothesis from the 70s.

Despite its elegance, Montague grammar was limited by the context-dependent variability in
word sense, and led to several attempts at incorporating context, such as :

• situation semantics ('80s): Truth-values are incomplete, they get assigned based on
context
• generative lexicon ('90s): categories (types) are incomplete, and get assigned based on
context

The dynamic turn in semantics

In the Chomskian tradition in linguistics there was no mechanism for the learning of semantic
relations, and the nativist view considered all semantic notions as inborn. Thus, even novel
concepts were proposed to have been dormant in some sense. This traditional view was also
unable to address many issues such as metaphor or associative meanings, and semantic change,
where meanings within a linguistic community change over time, and qualia or subjective
experience. Another issue not addressed by the nativist model was how perceptual cues are
combined in thought, e.g. in mental rotation.[5]

This traditional view of semantics, as an innate finite meaning inherent in a lexical unit that can
be composed to generate meanings for larger chunks of discourse, is now being fiercely debated
in the emerging domain of cognitive linguistics[6] and also in the non-Fodorian camp in
Philosophy of Language.[7] The challenge is motivated by

• factors internal to language, such as the problem of resolving indexical or anaphora (e.g.
this x, him, last week). In these situations "context" serves as the input, but the interpreted
utterance also modifies the context, so it is also the output. Thus, the interpretation is
necessarily dynamic and the meaning of sentences is viewed as context-change potentials
instead of propositions.
• factors external to language, i.e. language is not a set of labels stuck on things, but "a
toolbox, the importance of whose elements lie in the way they function rather than their
attachments to things."[7] This view reflects the position of the later Wittgenstein and his
famous game example, and is related to the positions of Quine, Davidson, and others.

A concrete example of the latter phenomenon is semantic underspecification — meanings are not
complete without some elements of context. To take an example of a single word, "red", its
meaning in a phrase such as red book is similar to many other usages, and can be viewed as
compositional.[8] However, the colours implied in phrases such as "red wine" (very dark), and
"red hair" (coppery), or "red soil", or "red skin" are very different. Indeed, these colours by
themselves would not be called "red" by native speakers. These instances are contrastive, so "red
wine" is so called only in comparison with the other kind of wine (which also is not "white" for
the same reasons). This view goes back to de Saussure:

Each of a set of synonyms like redouter ('to dread'), craindre ('to fear'), avoir peur ('to be
afraid') has its particular value only because they stand in contrast with one another. No
word has a value that can be identified independently of what else is in its vicinity.[9]

and may go back to earlier Indian views on language, especially the Nyaya view of words as
indicators and not carriers of meaning.[10]

An attempt to defend a system based on propositional meaning for semantic underspecification

can be found in the Generative Lexicon model of James Pustejovsky, who extends contextual
operations (based on type shifting) into the lexicon. Thus meanings are generated on the fly
based on finite context.

Prototype theory

Another set of concepts related to fuzziness in semantics is based on prototypes. The work of
Eleanor Rosch and George Lakoff in the 1970s led to a view that natural categories are not
characterizable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but are graded (fuzzy at their
boundaries) and inconsistent as to the status of their constituent members.

Systems of categories are not objectively "out there" in the world but are rooted in people's
experience. These categories evolve as learned concepts of the world — meaning is not an
objective truth, but a subjective construct, learned from experience, and language arises out of
the "grounding of our conceptual systems in shared embodiment and bodily experience".[4] A
corollary of this is that the conceptual categories (i.e. the lexicon) will not be identical for
different cultures, or indeed, for every individual in the same culture. This leads to another
debate (see the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis or Eskimo words for snow).

English nouns are found by language analysis to have 25 different semantic features, each
associated with its own pattern of fMRI brain activity. The individual contribution of each
parameter predicts the fMRI pattern when nouns are considered thus supporting the view that
nouns derive their meaning from prior experience linked to a common symbol.[11]

Morphology (linguistics)
Morphology is one of the fields of linguistics which studies the internal structure of words.
(Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology.) While words are generally
accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all)
languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, English speakers
recognize that the words dog, dogs, and dog catcher are closely related. English speakers
recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of word formation in English.
They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly, dog is to dog catcher as dish
is to dishwasher. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in
the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In
this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within
and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers
of those languages.

History of the English

language
English is a West Germanic language which originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought
to Britain by Germanic settlers and Roman auxiliary troops from various parts of what is now
northwest Germany and the northern Netherlands. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of
dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of England. One of these
dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate. The original Old English language was
then influenced by two waves of invasion: the first by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the
Germanic language family, who conquered and colonized parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th
centuries; the second by the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately
developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. These two invasions caused English
to become "mixed" to some degree, though it was never a truly mixed language in the strict
linguistic sense of the word, as mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of
different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication.

Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and

lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English; the later Norman occupation led to the
grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance
languages. This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government.
Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility, resulting in an
enormous and varied vocabulary.

Proto-English
The Germanic tribes that gave rise to the English language (the Angles, Saxons, Frisians, Jutes
and perhaps even the Franks), both traded and fought with the Latin-speaking Roman Empire in
the centuries-long process of the Germanic peoples' expansion into Western Europe. Many Latin
words for common objects entered the vocabulary of these Germanic peoples before any of their
tribes reached Britain; examples include camp, cheese, cook, fork, inch, kettle, kitchen, linen,
mile, mill, mint (coin), noon, pillow, pin, pound, punt (boat), street and wall. The Romans also
gave the English language words which they had themselves borrowed from other languages:
anchor, butter, chest, devil, dish, sack and wine.

Our main source for the culture of the Germanic peoples (the ancestors of the English) in ancient
times is Tacitus' Germania. While remaining quite conversant with Roman civilisation and its
economy, including serving in the Roman military, they retained political independence. We can
be certain that Germanic settlement in Britain was not intensified until the time of Hengist and
Horsa in the fifth century, since had the English arrived en-masse under Roman rule, they would
have been thoroughly Christianised as a matter of course. As it was, the Angles, Saxons and
Jutes arrived as pagans, independent of Roman control.

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, around the year 449, Vortigern (or Gwrtheyrn from the
Welsh tradition), King of the Britons, invited the "Angle kin" (Angles led by Hengest and Horsa)
to help him in conflicts with the Picts. In return, the Angles were granted lands in the southeast
of England. Further aid was sought, and in response "came men of Ald Seaxum of Anglum of
Iotum" (Saxons, Angles and Jutes). The Chronicle talks of a subsequent influx of settlers who
eventually established seven kingdoms, known as the heptarchy. Modern scholarship considers
most of this story to be legendary and politically motivated, and the identification of the tribes
with the Angles, Saxons and Jutes is no longer accepted as an accurate description (Myres, 1986,
p. 46ff), especially since the Anglo-Saxon language is more similar to the Frisian languages than
any of the others.

Old English

The first page of the Beowulf manuscript

Main article: Old English language

The invaders' Germanic language displaced the indigenous Brythonic languages of what became
England. The original Celtic languages remained in parts of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall. The
dialects spoken by the Anglo-Saxons formed what is now called Old English. Later, it was
strongly influenced by the North Germanic language Norse, spoken by the Vikings who invaded
and settled mainly in the north-east of England (see Jórvík and Danelaw). The new and the
earlier settlers spoke languages from different branches of the Germanic family; many of their
lexical roots were the same or similar, although their grammars were more distinct, including the
prefix, suffix and inflection patterns for many words. The Germanic language of these Old
English-speaking inhabitants was influenced by contact with Norse invaders, which might have
been responsible for some of the morphological simplification of Old English, including the loss
of grammatical gender and explicitly marked case (with the notable exception of the pronouns).
The most famous surviving work from the Old English period is a fragment of the epic poem
"Beowulf" composed by an unknown poet; it is thought to have been substantially modified,
probably by Christian clerics long after its composition.

The period when England was ruled by Anglo-Saxon kings, with the assistance of their clergy,
was an era in which the Old English language was not only alive, but thriving. Since it was used
for legal, political, religious and other intellectual purposes, Old English is thought to have
coined new words from native Anglo-Saxon roots, rather than to have "borrowed" foreign words.
(This point is made in a standard text, The History of the English Language, by Baugh).
The introduction of Christianity added another wave of Latin and some Greek words.

The Old English period formally ended with the Norman conquest, when the language was
influenced to an even greater extent by the Norman-speaking Normans.

The use of Anglo-Saxon to describe a merging of Anglian and Saxon languages and cultures is a
relatively modern development. According to Lois Fundis (Stumpers-L, Fri, 14 Dec 2001), "The
first citation for the second definition of 'Anglo-Saxon', referring to early English language or a
certain dialect thereof, comes during the reign of Elizabeth I, from a historian named Camden,
who seems to be the person most responsible for the term becoming well-known in modern
times".

Middle English
For about 300 years following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Norman kings and their high
nobility spoke only one of the langues d'oïl called Anglo-Norman, whilst English continued to be
the language of the common people. Various contemporary sources suggest that within fifty
years of the invasion, most of the Normans outside the royal court spoke English[citation needed], with
French remaining the prestige language of government and law, largely out of social inertia. For
example, Orderic Vitalis, a historian born in 1075 and the son of a Norman knight, said that he
learned French only as a second language[citation needed]. A tendency for French-derived words to
have more formal connotations has continued to the present day; most modern English speakers
would consider a "cordial reception" (from French) to be more formal than a "hearty welcome"
(Germanic). Another example is the very unusual construction of the words for animals being
separate from the words for their food products e.g. beef and pork (from the French boeuf and
porc) being the products of the Germanically-named animals 'cow' and 'pig'.

While the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued until 1154, most other literature from this period
was in Old Norman or Latin. A large number of Norman words were taken into Old English,
with many doubling for Old English words. The Norman influence is the hallmark of the
linguistic shifts in English over the period of time following the invasion, producing what is now
referred to as Middle English. English was also influenced by the Celtic languages it was
displacing, most notably with the introduction of the continuous aspect, a feature found in many
modern languages, but developed earlier and more thoroughly in English.[1][2] English spelling
was also influenced by Norman in this period, with the /θ/ and /ð/ sounds being spelled th rather
than with the Old English letters þ (thorn) and ð (eth), which did not exist in Norman. The most
famous writer from the Middle English period was Geoffrey Chaucer and of his works, The
Canterbury Tales is the best known.

English literature started to reappear around 1200, when a changing political climate and the
decline in Anglo-Norman made it more respectable. The Provisions of Oxford, released in 1258,
were the first English government document to be published in the English language since the
Conquest.[3] Edward III became the first king to address Parliament in English when he did so in
1362.[4] By the end of that century, even the royal court had switched to English. Anglo-Norman
remained in use in limited circles somewhat longer, but it had ceased to be a living language.

Early Modern English

Modern English is often dated from the Great Vowel Shift, which took place mainly during the
15th century. English was further transformed by the spread of a standardised London-based
dialect in government and administration and by the standardising effect of printing. By the time
of William Shakespeare (mid-late 16th century), the language had become clearly recognizable
as Modern English.

English has continuously adopted foreign words, especially from Latin and Greek, since the
Renaissance. (In the 17th century, Latin words were often used with the original inflections, but
these eventually disappeared). As there are many words from different languages and English
spelling is variable, the risk of mispronunciation is high, but remnants of the older forms remain
in a few regional dialects, most notably in the West Country.

In 1755, Samuel Johnson published the first significant English dictionary, his Dictionary of the
English Language.

Historic English text samples

Old English

Beowulf lines 1 to 11, approximately AD 900

Hwæt! Wē Gār-
in geārdagum,
Dena
þēodcyninga, þrym gefrūnon,
hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon.
sceaþena
Oft Scyld Scēfing
þrēatum,
monegum meodosetla
mǣgþum, oftēah,
Syððan ǣrest
egsode eorlas.
wearð
hē þæs frōfre
fēasceaft funden,
gebād,
wēox under weorðmyndum
wolcnum, þāh,
oðþæt him þāra
ǣghwylc ymbsittendra
ofer hronrāde hȳran scolde,
Þæt wæs gōd
gomban gyldan.
cyning!

Which, as translated by Francis Gummere, means:

Lo, praise of the prowess of people-kings

of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!
Oft Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes,
from many a tribe, the mead-bench tore,
awing the earls. Since erst he lay
friendless, a foundling, fate repaid him:
for he waxed under welkin, in wealth he throve,
till before him the folk, both far and near,
who house by the whale-path, heard his mandate,
gave him gifts: a good king he!

Here is a sample prose text, the beginning of The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan. The full text
can be found at The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, at Wikisource.

Ōhthere sǣde his hlāforde, Ælfrēde cyninge, ðæt hē ealra Norðmonna norþmest būde. Hē cwæð þæt hē
būde on þǣm lande norþweardum wiþ þā Westsǣ. Hē sǣde þēah þæt þæt land sīe swīþe lang norþ
þonan; ac hit is eal wēste, būton on fēawum stōwum styccemǣlum wīciað Finnas, on huntoðe on wintra,
ond on sumera on fiscaþe be þǣre sǣ. Hē sǣde þæt hē æt sumum cirre wolde fandian hū longe þæt land
norþryhte lǣge, oþþe hwæðer ǣnig mon be norðan þǣm wēstenne būde. Þā fōr hē norþryhte be þǣm
lande: lēt him ealne weg þæt wēste land on ðæt stēorbord, ond þā wīdsǣ on ðæt bæcbord þrīe dagas. Þā
wæs hē swā feor norþ swā þā hwælhuntan firrest faraþ. Þā fōr hē þā giet norþryhte swā feor swā hē
meahte on þǣm ōþrum þrīm dagum gesiglau. Þā bēag þæt land, þǣr ēastryhte, oþþe sēo sǣ in on ðæt
lond, hē nysse hwæðer, būton hē wisse ðæt hē ðǣr bād westanwindes ond hwōn norþan, ond siglde ðā
ēast be lande swā swā hē meahte on fēower dagum gesiglan. Þā sceolde hē ðǣr bīdan ryhtnorþanwindes,
for ðǣm þæt land bēag þǣr sūþryhte, oþþe sēo sǣ in on ðæt land, hē nysse hwæþer. Þā siglde hē þonan
sūðryhte be lande swā swā hē meahte on fīf dagum gesiglan. Ðā læg þǣr ān micel ēa ūp on þæt land. Ðā
cirdon hīe ūp in on ðā ēa for þǣm hīe ne dorston forþ bī þǣre ēa siglan for unfriþe; for þǣm ðæt land
wæs eall gebūn on ōþre healfe þǣre ēas. Ne mētte hē ǣr nān gebūn land, siþþan hē from his āgnum hām
fōr; ac him wæs ealne weg wēste land on þæt stēorbord, būtan fiscerum ond fugelerum ond huntum, ond
þæt wǣron eall Finnas; ond him wæs āwīdsǣ on þæt bæcbord. Þā Boermas heafdon sīþe wel gebūd hira
land: ac hīe ne dorston þǣr on cuman. Ac þāra Terfinna land wæs eal wēste, būton ðǣr huntan
gewīcodon, oþþe fisceras, oþþe fugeleras.

This may be translated as:

Ohthere said to his lord, King Alfred, that he of all Norsemen lived north-most. He quoth that he lived in
the land northward along the North Sea. He said though that the land was very long from there, but it is
all wasteland, except that in a few places here and there Finns [i.e. Sami] encamp, hunting in winter and
in summer fishing by the sea. He said that at some time he wanted to find out how long the land lay
northward or whether any man lived north of the wasteland. Then he traveled north by the land. All the
way he kept the waste land on his starboard and the wide sea on his port three days. Then he was as far
north as whale hunters furthest travel. Then he traveled still north as far as he might sail in another three
days. Then the land bowed east (or the sea into the land — he did not know which). But he knew that he
waited there for west winds (and somewhat north), and sailed east by the land so as he might sail in four
days. Then he had to wait for due-north winds, because the land bowed south (or the sea into the land —
he did not know which). Then he sailed from there south by the land so as he might sail in five days. Then
a large river lay there up into the land. Then they turned up into the river, because they dared not sail forth
past the river for hostility, because the land was all settled on the other side of the river. He had not
encountered earlier any settled land since he travelled from his own home, but all the way waste land was
on his starboard (except fishers, fowlers and hunters, who were all Finns). And the wide sea was always
on his port. The Bjarmians have cultivated their land very well, but they did not dare go in there. But the
Terfinn’s land was all waste except where hunters encamped, or fishers or fowlers.

Middle English

From The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, 14th century

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

Glossary:

• soote: sweet
• swich licour: such liquid
• Zephirus: the west wind (Zephyrus)
• eek: also (Dutch ook; German auch)
• holt: wood (German Holz)
• the Ram: Aries, the first sign of the Zodiac
• yronne: run
• priketh hem Nature: Nature pricks them
• hir corages: their hearts

Early Modern English

From Paradise Lost by John Milton, 1667

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed,
In the beginning how the Heavens and Earth
Rose out of chaos: or if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle Flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, whyle it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

Modern English

Taken from Oliver Twist, 1838, by Charles Dickens

The evening arrived; the boys took their places. The master, in his cook's uniform, stationed himself at the
copper; his pauper assistants ranged themselves behind him; the gruel was served out; and a long grace
was said over the short commons. The gruel disappeared; the boys whispered each other, and winked at
Oliver; while his next neighbours nudged him. Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and
reckless with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said:
somewhat alarmed at his own temerity:

'Please, sir, I want some more'.

The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the
small rebel for some seconds, and then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralysed with
wonder; the boys with fear. 'What!' said the master at length, in a faint voice.

'Please, sir', replied Oliver, 'I want some more'.

The master aimed a blow at Oliver's head with the ladle; pinioned him in his arm; and shrieked aloud for
the beadle.

References
1. ^ John McWhorter (2006-06-20). "Speak We Proper English?". Language Log.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003270.html.
2. ^ Filppula, Markku, Juhani Klemola und Heli Pitkänen (eds.). 2002. The Celtic Roots of English.
Joensuu: UUniversity of Joensuu, Faculty of Humanities.
3. ^ English and its Historical Development, Part 20 (English was re-established in Britain)
4. ^ Edward3rd

• American Heritage Dictionary A full-scale dictionary emphasising the earliest theoretical

Proto-Indo-European origins of English words, including an interactive list of Proto-
Indo-European roots.
• Project Gutenberg's Beowulf translation by Francis Gummere
• John C. Wells (1982). Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN
0-521-22919-7 (vol. 1), ISBN 0-521-24224-X (vol. 2), ISBN 0-521-24225-8 (vol. 3).
• J.N.L. Myres, The English Settlements (Oxford History of England), Oxford University
Press, 1986. ISBN 0-19-821719-6.
• EnglishClub.com - A short history of the origins and development of the English
language
• An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary The largest dictionary covering the earliest stages of the
English language.
• Catto, Jeremy, "Written English; The Making of the Language 1370-1400," Past and
Present, no. 179, May 2003, pp. 24-59.
• Elly van Gelderen, A History of the English language

Scott Shay (2008). The History of English: A Linguistic Introduction. Washington: Wardja Press.
ISBN 0615168175