How to Study Linguistics
A Guide to Understanding Language
Book
Chapter
For most of us this is where the crunch really comes. Reading about the subject is OK but having to write something intelligible about it is another matter. All that terminology, those diagrams! Well it isn’t ...
Chapter
If you are just starting your studies in linguistics the first piece of advice I have may seem rather odd. It is this: beware of all books on linguistics. And that includes the one you are now reading. A healthy ...
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Introductions to linguistics will usually have a section on some of the ways in which we can assign a meaning to word strings, and for the majority of us it is this ability of words to ‘mean’ which constitutes...
Chapter
One of the extraordinary things about language is the way in which we take it for granted as though it were a given fact of life like being able to breathe. In a sense this is inevitable and to a certain exten...
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Syntax is one of those words which can usually be relied on to send a shudder down the spine of many a prospective student. The word itself conjures up images of Latin grammars with their fearful talk of parsi...
Chapter
We have now looked at the three main levels of linguistics: phonology, syntax, and semantics. Let me remind you what these are. Phonology is concerned with the sound structure of the language, in particular wi...
Chapter
Most introductory books on linguistics will have a section on the sound structure, or phonology, of English, which will aim to tell you how sounds are formed and what the principal symbols of the International Ph...