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The fourth edition of
General Linguistics provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to linguistics.
The book considers:
- semantics and pragmatics
- dialect and style
- phonetics and phonology
- morphology and syntax, with reference both to traditional and current theories
- comparative-historical linguistics and linguistic typology
- linguistics' relation to other disciplines
- the practical application of linguistics
- the 2,500 years of linguistic thought that lies behind what we do and think today
List of contents
Part 1: General linguistics - the scope of the subject: linguistics as the study of language, and as a science; semantics
Part 2: Theoretical and methodological considerations: abstractions; dialect, idiolect, style; the structural treatment of lexical meaning
Part 3: Phonetics: articulatory phonetics; the organs of speech; segmentation - vowel and consonant; acoustic phonetics; plurisegmental features; phonetics in linguistics
Part 4: Phonology: speech and writing; narrow and broad transcription; the phoneme theory; further developments
Part 5: Grammar - grammatical elements: the sentence; the word; the morpheme; the semantic status of morphemes
Part 6: Grammar - grammatical classes, structures and categories: syntactic relations; word classes; immediate constituents; grammatical categories; subclasses and irregularities; transformational-generative linguistics (TG), the theory of syntax, generalized phase structure grammar (GPSG), dependency grammars, post-"structuralist" theories, tagmemics, M.A.K.Halliday - systemic grammar, and stratificational linguistics
Part 7: Linguistic comparison: historically orientated comparison of languages (comparative and historical linguistics); typological comparison
Part 8: Wider perspectives: linguistics and anthropology; - and sociology; - and philosophy; - and psychology; - and language teaching; - and communications engineering; - and literature; outline of the history of linguistic studies in Western Europe
About the author
R.H. Robins
Summary
This fourth edition seeks to cover recent developments in linguistic theory while continuing to provide an introductory survey of the whole range of general linguistic studies. It is aimed at both students and the interested general reader.
