This bestselling textbook provides an engaging and user-friendly introduction to the study of language Assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, Yule presents information in bite-sized sections, clearly explaining the major concepts in linguistics and all the key elements of language This seventh edition has been revised and updated throughout, with substantial changes to the chapters on phonetics and semantics, and forty new study questions To increase student engagement and to foster problem-solving and critical thinking skills, the book includes over twenty new tasks An expanded and revised online study guide provides students with further resources, including answers and tutorials for all tasks, while encouraging lively and proactive learning This is the most fundamental and easy-to-use introduction to the study of language

http://www3.uji.es/~ruiz/1003/Lects/Yule-Chap19.pdf

The Study of Language

This article assesses the contribution of discourse analysis to the study of environmental politics over the period of the past decade. Defining discourse as a particular linguistic regularity that can be found in conversations distinguishes it from ‘deliberation’ and ‘discussion’. Discourse analysis is seen as focused on situational logics studying ‘language-in-use’. Three strengths of discourse analysis are highlighted: its capacity to reveal the role of language in politics, its capacity to reveal the embeddedness of language in practices and its capacity to answer ‘how’ questions and to illuminate mechanisms. The article concludes by sketching some of the challenges lying ahead of discourse analysis. Given the changing nature of policy making, discourse analysts are supposed to have a task in identifying the new sites of politics and analysing the political dynamics therein.

A decade of discourse analysis of environmental politics: Achievements, challenges, perspectives

The Ecology and Semiotics of Language Learning

Action and perception are functionally linked in the brain, but a hotly debated question is whether perception and comprehension of stimuli depend on motor circuits. Brain language mechanisms are ideal for addressing this question. Neuroimaging investigations have found specific motor activations when subjects understand speech sounds, word meanings and sentence structures. Moreover, studies involving transcranial magnetic stimulation and patients with lesions affecting inferior frontal regions of the brain have shown contributions of motor circuits to the comprehension of phonemes, semantic categories and grammar. These data show that language comprehension benefits from frontocentral action systems, indicating that action and perception circuits are interdependent.

Active perception: sensorimotor circuits as a cortical basis for language

It is hypothesized that creole languages are largely invented by children and show fundamental similarities, which derive from a biological program for language. The structures of Hawaiian Pidgin and Hawaiian Creole are contrasted, and evidence is provided to show that the latter derived from the former in a single generation. A realistic model of the processes of Creole formation shows how several specific historical and demographic factors interacted to restrict, in varying degrees, the access of pidgin speakers to the dominant language, and hence the nature of input to the children of those speakers. It is shown that the resulting similarities of Creole languages derive from a single grammar with a restricted list of categories and operations. However, grammars of individual Creoles will differ from this grammar to a varying extent: The degree of difference will correlate very closely with the quantity of dominant-language input, which in turn is controlled by extralinguistic factors. Alternative explanations of the above phenomena are surveyed, in particular, substratum theory and monogenesis: Both are found inadequate to account for the facts. Primary acquisition is examined in light of the general hypothesis, and it is suggested that the bioprogram provides a skeletal model of language which the child can then readily convert into the target language. Cases of systematic error and precocious learning provide indirect support for the hypothesis. Some conjectures are made concerning the evolutionary origins of the bioprogram and what study of Creoles and related topics might reveal about language origins.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0140525X00044149

The language bioprogram hypothesis.

Language and social reality a metaphysics for conversation the linguistic analysis of pronouns - decomposition and distribution the diversity of personal pronoun inventories and their description "I" - indexicalities of responsisility and of place "you" - the grammatical expression of social relations "we" - speaking for more than one "yours and mine" - generalizations about possessive pronouns "he", "she" and "it" - the enigmas of grammar and gender on the origins and development of pronouns and pronoun use.

Pronouns and People: The Linguistic Construction of Social and Personal Identity

In this book, the author examines the transformation of the Pacific language region under the impact of colonization, westernization and modernization. By focusing on the linguistic and socio-historical changes of the past 200 years, it aims to bring a new dimension to the study of Pacific linguistics, which up until now has been dominated by questions of historical reconstruction and language typology. In contrast to the traditional portrayal of linguistic change as a natural process, the author focuses on the cultural and historical forces which drive language change. Using the metaphor of language ecology to explain and describe the complex interplay between languages, speakers and social practice, the author looks at how language ecologies have functioned in the past to sustain language diversity, and, at what happens when those ecologies are disrupted. Whilst most of the examples used in the book are taken from the Pacific and Australian region, the insights derived from this area are shown to have global applications. The text should be useful for linguists and all those interested in the large scale loss of human language.

Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Region

Environmental Discourses Linguistic Foundations Rhetorical Uses of Science Environmental Narratives The Power of Metaphor Temporal Dimensions Ethno-ecology Linguistics as Environmentalism The Moral and Aesthetic Domain

Greenspeak: A Study of Environmental Discourse

The genesis of language

This volume brings together the work of precursors in the field, classic authors and more recent contributors. In addition to the original ecolinguistic topics of language interrelation, language endangerment and language pressure, the themes of biological and linguistic diversity are considered.

Peter Mühlhäusler

Papers

Pronouns and People: The Linguistic Construction of Social and Personal Identity

Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Region

Greenspeak: A Study of Environmental Discourse

The genesis of language

The ecolinguistics reader : language, ecology, and environment