About...
The book
The author
Contents
1
Introduction
1.1
Organization and conventions in the book
1.2
What we study
1.3
How we study language
1.4
What we don't do: prescribing and evaluating language
1.5
Dialects and languages
1.6
Two themes
1.7
Why study language
1.8
Problems
2
Word meanings
2.1
Reference and proper nouns
2.2
Categories and common nouns
2.3
Word senses and taxonomies
2.4
Metaphor and metonymy
2.5
Deixis and person
2.6
Lexical differences among languages
2.7
Learning meaning
2.8
Problems
3
Word forms: units
3.1
Phonemes
3.2
Iconicity
3.3
Vowels
3.4
English consonants
3.5
Consonants in other languages
3.6
Syllables
3.7
Problems
4
Word forms: processes
4.1
Phonetic contexts
4.2
Assimilation
4.3
Distribution of phones
4.4
Learning phonology
4.5
English accents
4.6
Phonological change
4.7
Phonology in the wild
4.8
Problems
5
Composition: combining words
5.1
Attributes and attribution
5.2
Modification
5.3
Compositionality and idiomaticity
5.4
Problems
6
Sentences
6.1
States and events
6.2
Situation schemas and semantic roles
6.3
Constituency and noun phrases
6.4
Subjects
6.5
Direct objects
6.6
Adjuncts
6.7
Sentence functions
6.8
Problems
7
Grammatical categories
7.1
Morphemes
7.2
Grammatical categories and NPs
7.3
Grammatical categories and verbs
7.4
Morphophonology
7.5
Linguistic relativity
7.6
Problems
8
Derivation
8.1
Derivational morphology
8.2
Foregrounding and backgrounding
8.3
Active and passive voice
8.4
More verb derivation
8.5
Problems
Appendices
A1
Phonetic symbols
A2
Glossary
A3
Languages cited
A4
References
