Ebook: How Language Works: the Cognitive Science of Linguistics

Indiana University, 2006. — 258 pages.Students studying linguistics and other language sciences for the first time often have misconceptions about what they are about and what they can offer them. They may think that linguists are authorities on what is correct and what is incorrect in a given language.
But linguistics is the science of language; it treats language and the ways people use it as phenomena to be studied much as a geologist treats the earth. Linguists want to figure out how language works. They are no more in the business of making value judgments about people's language than geologists are in the business of making value judgments about the behavior of the earth.ContentsIntroduction
Organization and conventions in the book
What we study
How we study language
What we don't do: prescribing and evaluating language
Dialects and languages
Two themes
Why study language
Problems
Word meanings
Reference and proper nouns
Categories and common nouns
Word senses and taxonomies
Metaphor and metonymy
Deixis and person
Lexical differences among languages
Learning meaning
Problems
Word forms: units
Phonemes
Iconicity
Vowels
English consonants
Consonants in other languages
Syllables
Problems
Word forms: processes
Phonetic contexts
Assimilation
Distribution of phones
Learning phonology
English accents
Phonological change
Phonology in the wild
Problems
Composition: combining words
Attributes and attribution
Modification
Compositionality and idiomaticity
Problems
Sentences
States and events
Situation schemas and semantic roles
Constituency and noun phrases
Subjects
Direct objects
Adjuncts
Sentence functions
Problems
Grammatical categories
Morphemes
Grammatical categories and NPs
Grammatical categories and verbs
Morphophonology
Linguistic relativity
Problems
Derivation
Derivational morphology
Foregrounding and backgrounding
Active and passive voice
More verb derivation
Problems
Appendices
Phonetic symbols
Glossary
Languages cited
References