Linguistics

H. G. Widdowson
Oxford University Press 1996
ISBN 0 19 437206 5

134pp.

Linguistics, the first in the new series of Oxford Introductions to Language Study, is a
much-awaited book. There are three main reasons for this. Firstly, many existing introductions (eg
Crystal 1985, Brown 1984, Yule 1985) are intended for students of linguistics: guiding them
through fundamental concepts and ideas and preparing them for more advanced studies in
particular areas. Secondly, although language is an essential part of our everyday life,
introductions to linguistics can make considerable academic demands on the reader. Thirdly, there
are many people who are interested in how language works but are not concerned with a more
serious study of linguistics.
In the Preface, Widdowson states two purposes for the present series of introductions: (1) to
provide a large-scale view of different areas of language study as the precondition for more
particular enquiry (p. ix), and (2) to accommodate the broader interests of many people who
take an interest in language without being academically engaged in linguistics per se so these
books are meant to be introductions to language more generally as well as to linguistics as a
discipline (p. x).
Linguistics serves these two purposes. The book follows no particular theories or schools of
linguistic analysis and does not go into technicalities on any particular subject (like phonology or
syntax or semantics). The survey constitutes six chapters: 1. the nature of language; 2. the scope of
linguistics; 3. principles and levels of analysis; 4. areas of enquiry: focus on form; 5. areas of
enquiry: focus on meaning; 6. current issues.
The book consists of four sections: 1. Survey; 2. Readings; 3. References; and 4. Glossary.
77 pages are devoted to the survey and, though one third of the size of other introductions,
touch upon the nature of language, the scope of linguistics, principles and levels of analysis, form,
meaning, and current issues. Section 2 consists of 24 selections from original texts, accompanied
by questions, to complement each of the survey chapters. Section 3 is an annotated bibliography,
with indication of three levels of difficulty (introductory, more advanced and technical, and
specialized and very demanding). Section 4 lists alphabetically 100 key concepts introduced in the
book, and each is followed by a brief definition and page references to the Survey section.
The first chapter opens with the beginning of language and language as a distinctive
characteristic of the human being and other animals. Normally, books of this kind would cite the
Bible, discuss existing theories of possible origins of language, and describe experiments to show
that human beings and animals are different. However, the author of this book cites the Talmud,
Shakespeare and W. H. Auden, using his literary craft to give the reader a sense of freshness and
urge her to read on.
In the second chapter, you even see a map of the London Underground (p. 19)! This is not an
unfamiliar sight for many teachers of English as a foreign language who employ the
communicative approach to language teaching. Nevertheless the purpose of such a map here is not
to discuss CLT, but to use the relation of a map to the actual complex underground network to

show that complex as language is, linguistics is there to provide models of language which reveal
features which are not immediately apparent (p. 18). This is exactly the same point that
Widdowson has made to language teachers (eg Widdowson 1990). The chapter also discusses
such fundamental issues in linguistics as langue and parole, competence and performance, and
knowledge and ability.
The third chapter shows how analysis of language can be made at different levels, referring to
such concepts as lexical items, phonetic and phonemic, syntagmatic and paradigmatic, constituent
structure, graphology, phonology, morphology, syntax, text, cohesion, context, discourse, and
pragmatics. The author shows the relations between these concepts in a smooth flow of language,
naturally picking up samples of language from Shakespeare and the Oxford Handbook (q.v. p. 35).
Chapters Four and Five focus on the essential areas of linguistic enquiry: phonetics and
phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. These are the central areas of interest
for linguists of today and it is thus particularly difficult to write briefly without following
particular schools of thought. While most basic ideas in phonetics and phonology, morphology,
semantics and pragmatics are common ground (and the theoretical issues frequently discussed and
argued about by professional scholars are not the concern of the book anyway) in syntactic
analysis, it is not always easy to shy away from current theoretical issues and approaches
developed in the field of syntactic theories. However, in this part of the chapter, only the term
constituent structure is introduced (pp. 50~2), and this, to me at least, is inadequate and out-dated.
Compared with Chapter Four, Chapter Five deals with semantics and pragmatics in much
more detail, and the author goes into issues in pragmatics in some depth.
Chapter Six, Current Issues, is not concerned with theoretical arguments in the field of
linguistics, as these would not be appropriate here. Instead it outlines how linguistic study can be
extended to wider horizons including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, functional linguistics,
formal linguistics, corpus linguistics, and applied linguistics and second language acquisition
(SLA). It also touches upon error analysis and interlanguage, which is essential to SLA studies.
I would recommend this book highly to all trainee language teachers as an easily accessible
introduction to the essential field of linguistics.

( ELT Journal1998 1 )