The Handbook of Linguistics E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 2017

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

"The first edition of this Handbook is built on surveys by well-known figures from around the world and around the intellectual world, reflecting several different theoretical predilections, balancing coverage of enduring questions and important recent work. Those strengths are now enhanced by adding new chapters and thoroughly revising almost all other chapters, partly to reflect ways in which the field has changed in the intervening twenty years, in some places radically. The result is a magnificent volume that can be used for many purposes." David W. Lightfoot, Georgetown University

"The Handbook of Linguistics, Second Edition is a stupendous achievement. Aronoff and Rees-Miller have provided overviews of 29 subfields of linguistics, each written by one of the leading researchers in that subfield and each impressively crafted in both style and content. I know of no finer resource for anyone who would wish to be better informed on recent developments in linguistics." Frederick J. Newmeyer, University of Washington, University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University

"Linguists, their students, colleagues, family, and friends: anyone interested in the latest findings from a wide array of linguistic subfields will welcome this second updated and expanded edition of The Handbook of Linguistics. Leading scholars provide highly accessible yet substantive introductions to their fields: it's an even more valuable resource than its predecessor." Sally McConnell-Ginet, Cornell University

"No handbook or text offers a more comprehensive, contemporary overview of the field of linguistics in the twenty-first century. New and thoroughly updated chapters by prominent scholars on each topic and subfield make this a unique, landmark publication."Walt Wolfram, North Carolina State University

This second edition of The Handbook of Linguistics provides an updated and timely overview of the field of linguistics. The editor's broad definition of the field ensures that the book may be read by those seeking a comprehensive introduction to the subject, but with little or no prior knowledge of the area.

Building on the popular first edition, The Handbook of Linguistics, Second Edition features new and revised content reflecting advances within the discipline. New chapters expand the already broad coverage of the Handbook to address and take account of key changes within the field in the intervening years. It explores: psycholinguistics, linguistic anthropology and ethnolinguistics, sociolinguistic theory, language variation and second language pedagogy. With contributions from a global team of leading linguists, this comprehensive and accessible volume is the ideal resource for those engaged in study and work within the dynamic field of linguistics.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics

Title Page

Copyright

List of Contributors

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface to the First Edition

List of Abbreviations

Part I: Starting Points

Chapter 1: Origins of Language

1 Introduction

2 Evidence from Anthropology and Archeology

3 Genetic Evidence

4 Primatological Evidence

5 Neurobiological Evidence

6 Linguistic Evidence

7 Conclusion

Suggestions for Further Reading

Relevant Journals and Societies

Emerging Trends and Research Questions

References

Chapter 2: Languages of the World

1 Introduction

2 Languages of Europe and Northern Asia

3 Languages of Southern, Eastern, and Southeastern Asia and Oceania

4 Languages of Africa and Southwestern Asia

5 Languages of the Americas

6 Pidgin and Creole Languages

7 Deaf Sign Languages

Reference

Chapter 3: Typology and Universals

1 Introduction: The Typological and Generative Approaches to Language Universals

2 How Many Languages Are Needed for a Typological Study?

3 How Does One Person Use Data from So Many Languages?

4 How Can One Compare Grammatical Structures from Many Different Languages?

5 The Nature of Language Universals

6 Explanations for Language Universals

References

Chapter 4: Field Linguistics: Gathering Language Data from Native Speakers

1 What Is “Field Linguistics”?

2 How Is “Field” Data Gathered?

3 What to Ask a Speaker, and What a Speaker Says

4 Analyzing the Data, and What to Do with It

6 The Highest Contribution

Notes

References

Chapter 5: Writing Systems

1 The Diversity of Writing Systems

2 The Unity of Writing Systems

3 Writing and Language

4 The Study of Writing

Notes

References

Part II: Theoretical Bases

Chapter 6: The History of Linguistics: Approaches to Linguistics

1 Introduction

2 Grammatical Traditions

3 The Rise of Universal Grammar

4 The Rise of the Comparative Method

5 Philosophical-Psychological (-Typological-Evolutionary) Approaches

6 The Rise of Structuralism

7 Noam Chomsky and Linguistic Theory since 1957

8 Typology

9 Conclusions

References

Chapter 7: Generative Grammar: Rule Systems for Describing Sentence Structure

1 Introduction

2 Tenets of Generative Grammar

3 Common Formal Elements

4 Some Phenomena Studied by Generative Grammarians

5 Varieties of Generative Grammar

6 The Future of Generative Grammar

Suggestions for Further Reading

Relevant Journals and Societies

Emerging Trends and Research Questions

Notes

References

Chapter 8: Functional Linguistics: Communicative Functions and Language Structure

1 Introduction

2 Communicative Functions of Language

3 A Brief Look at the Development of Linguistic Theory in the Twentieth Century

4 Functional Approaches

5 Formal vs. Functional Approaches to Language

6 Conclusion

Suggestions for Further Reading

Relevant Journals

Emerging Trends and Research Questions

Notes

References

Part III: Core Fields

Chapter 9: Linguistic Phonetics: The Sounds of Languages

1 Introduction

2 Linguistic Phonetics and General Phonetic Theory

3 The Scope of Linguistic Phonetics

4 The Coverage of a Linguistic Phonetic Theory

5 The Shape of a General Phonetic Theory

6 Organic and Phonetic Aspects of Speech

7 Articulatory, Acoustic, and Perceptual Levels of Description of Speech

8 Linear and Nonlinear Units of Speech Organization

9 The Componential Organization of Speech Production

10 Speech Production Processes

References

Chapter 10: Phonology: Sound Structure

1 Introduction

2 Inventories and Contrasts

3 Structure Above the Level of the Segment: Prosodic Organization

4 Subsegmental Structure

5 Phonology in a Broader Context

Chapter 11: Morphology

1 Introduction

2 The Morpheme Concept and Agglutinating Morphology

3 Morpheme Order

4 Rule Function Morphology

5 Paradigms and Principal Parts

6 Lexeme Structure and Lexical Relatedness

7 Conclusions

Suggestions for Further Reading

Note

References

Chapter 12: The Lexicon

1 Introduction

2 Words

3 Lexical Semantics

4 How Many Meanings? Contextual Variability of Word Meaning

5 Sense Relations

6 Meaning Extensions and Change

7 Larger Groupings of Words

8 Conclusion

References

Chapter 13: Syntax

1 The Domain of Syntax

2 The Chomskyan Perspective

3 Lessons of Syntactic Research

4 The Similarities and Differences among Human Languages

5 A Glance Ahead

Suggestions for Further Reading

Relevant Journals

Note

References

Chapter 14: Formal Semantics

1 Introduction

2 Meanings and Denotations

3 Dynamic Semantics: Beyond Static Sentence Meanings

4 Meanings and Situations: Beyond Possible Worlds

5 Underspecified Representations: Beyond Compositionality

6 Conclusion

Notes

References

Chapter 15: Historical Linguistics: Language Change Over Time

1 Introduction

2 Framing the Issues

3 Substance of Change: What Types Occur? How Do They Spread?

4 Mechanisms of Change: How Is Change Manifested in Language?

5 Explanation of Change: Why Does It Happen?

6 Some Dramatic Discoveries and Important Methods

7 For the Future: What Remains to Be Done?

8 Conclusion

Notes

References

Part IV: Languages and the Mind

Chapter 16: Neurolinguistics

1 Aphasiology

2 Language and the Brain

3 Conclusion

Relevant journals and societies

Emerging trends and research questions

Note

References

Chapter 17: Psycholinguistics

1 Psycholinguistics as a Field of Study

2 Language Production

3 Language Comprehension

4 Developmental Psycholinguistics

5 Applied Psycholinguistics

References

Chapter 18: Sign Languages

1 Linguistic Structure of Sign Languages

2 Language as an Art Form: Sign Language Poetry

3 The Acquisition of Sign Languages

4 Neural Control of Sign Languages

5 Some Recent Discoveries and Challenges

6 Conclusion

Notes

References

Chapter 19: First Language Acquisition

1 Learning Sounds

2 Learning Words

3 Learning Grammar

4 A Fourth Perspective

5 Conclusion

Suggestions for Further Reading

Relevant Journals and Societies

Emerging Trends and Research Questions

References

Part V: Languages in Use

Chapter 20: Pragmatics: Language and Communication

1 The Puzzle of Language Use: How Do We Ever Understand Each Other?

2 Pragmatics as the Application of Conversational Principles to Sentence Meanings

3 The Process of Reasoning: How Do Hearers Ever Manage to Choose the Right Interpretation?

4 Grammar as Defining Procedures for Proposition Construction

5 Summary

Notes

References

Chapter 21: Discourse Analysis

1 What is Discourse? A Preliminary Characterization

2 Linguistic Resources for Doing and Being

3 Future Directions

4 Discourse Analysis, Linguistics, and More

Note

References

Chapter 22: Linguistics and Literature

1 Literary Language and Its Distinctive Characteristics

2 Poetry: Text Divided into Lines

3 Metrical Poetry

4 Sound Patterning in Poetry

5 Parallelism

6 The Syntax of Poetry

7 The Component Parts of a Narrative

8 The Representation of Thought and Speech

9 Genre

10 Complexity and Difficulty

Suggestions for Further Reading

Relevant Journals and Societies

Emerging Trends and Research Questions

Note

References

Chapter 23: Linguistic Anthropology and Ethnolinguistics

1 Introduction

2 An Ethnographic Approach to Language

3 Language Socialization

4 Language Ideologies

5 Language Contact

6 Verbal Art and Performance

7 Conclusion

Relevant Journals and Societies

Emerging Trends and Research Questions

Notes

References

Chapter 24: Sociolinguistic Theory: Systematic Study of the Social Uses of Language

1 Concept and Percept

2 The Science of Parole

3 Social Correlates

4 Theory and the Accidents of History

Suggestions for Further Reading

References

Chapter 25: Language Variation: Sociolinguistic Variationist Analysis

1 Introduction

2 The Range of Language Variation

3 Dividing the Landscape of Language Variation

4 The Locus of Language Variation

5 Rules and Constraints on Variation

6 Quantitative Analysis

7 Lexicon

8 Morphology

9 Syntax

10 Phonology

11 Phonetics

12 Community Outreach

13 Conclusion

Suggestions for Further Reading

Relevant Journals

Emerging trends and research questions

Notes

References

Chapter 26: Multilingualism

1 Introduction

2 Origins of Multilingualism: Causes and Consequences

3 Individual vs. Societal Multilingualism

4 Language Choice in Multilingual Communities

5 Language Shift and Death

6 The Changing Face of Multilingualism in the Modern World

7 Conclusions

References

Chapter 27: Second Language Acquisition: One Person with Two Languages

1 Overall Issues

2 Early Days: Links and Questions

3 What Is the Sequence of L2 Acquisition?

4 What Are the Similarities between L2 Learning and L1 Acquisition?

5 Does Age Affect L2 Learning?

6 Do L2 Learners Attain the Same Level of Language as Native Speakers?

7 How Important Is Transfer to L2 Learning?

8 What is the Relationship between Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition?

9 What is the Role of Language Input?

10 What Strategies and Processes Do L2 Learners Use?

11 How are the Two Languages Related in the Mind?

Conclusion

References

Part VI: Applications of Linguistics

Chapter 28: Second Language Pedagogy: Where Theory Meets Practice

1 Methodologies1

2 Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)

3 The Postmethods Era

4 The Relationship between Theory and Practice

5 English as Lingua Franca: A Challenge

6 What Does the Future Hold?

Note

References

Chapter 29: Educational Linguistics

1 Applied Linguistics and Theories of Language

2 Social Languages

3 Equity

4 Language out of School

5 Linguistic Microanalysis

6 Conclusion

References

Chapter 30: Linguistics and Reading

1 Bottom-Up and Top-Down Processing in Reading

2 Word Recognition

3 Learning to Read

4 Learning to Spell

5 Dyslexia

6 The Effects of Literacy

7 Conclusions and Future Directions

Suggestions for Further Reading

Relevant Journals and Societies

Note

References

Chapter 31: Language and Law

1 Civil Cases

2 Criminal Cases

3 Research on the Language of Law

4 The Future of Linguistics and the Law

Suggestions for Further Reading

Relevant Journals and Societies

References

Chapter 32: Translation

1 Introduction

2 Translation: A Communicative Device

3 Modes of Interpreting: Consecutive and Simultaneous

4 Translation Principles

5 False Friends

6 Translating by Factors

7 Machine Translation and Computer-Assisted Translation

Relevant Journals

Notes

References

Chapter 33: Language Planning and Policy

1 Introduction

2 Central Concepts and Questions

3 Key Areas of Active Scholarship and Debate

4 How LPP Relates to Other Areas/Subdisciplines

Suggestions for Further Reading

Relevant Journals

Emerging Trends and Research Questions

Note

References

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

Table 3.1

Table 3.2

Table 4.1

Table 8.1

Table 11.1

Table 11.2

Table 11.3

Table 11.4

Table 11.5

Table 16.1

Table 24.1

Table 26.1

Table 33.1

Table 33.2

Table 33.3

List of Illustrations

Figure 3.1

Figure 3.2

Figure 6.1

Figure 6.2

Figure 6.3

Figure 9.1

Figure 9.2

Figure 9.3

Figure 9.4

Figure 9.5a

Figure 9.5b

Figure 11.1

Figure 11.2

Figure 12.1

Figure 12.2

Figure 12.3

Figure 12.4

Figure 12.5

Figure 12.6

Figure 16.1

Figure 18.1

Figure 18.2

Figure 18.3

Figure 18.4

Figure 18.5

Figure 18.6

Figure 18.7

Figure 20.1

Figure 20.2

Figure 20.3

Figure 20.4

Figure 20.5

Figure 20.6

Figure 20.7

Figure 20.8

Figure 20.9

Figure 20.10

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics

This outstanding multi-volume series covers all the major subdisciplines within linguistics today and, when complete, will offer a comprehensive survey of linguistics as a whole.

The Handbook of Child LanguageEdited by Paul Fletcher and Brian MacWhinney

The Handbook of Phonological Theory, Second EditionEdited by John A. Goldsmith, Jason Riggle, and Alan C. L. Yu

The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic TheoryEdited by Shalom Lappin

The Handbook of SociolinguisticsEdited by Florian Coulmas

The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences, Second EditionEdited by William J. Hardcastle and John Laver

The Handbook of MorphologyEdited by Andrew Spencer and Arnold Zwicky

The Handbook of Japanese LinguisticsEdited by Natsuko Tsujimura

The Handbook of Linguistics, First EditionEdited by Mark Aronoff and Janie Rees-Miller

The Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic TheoryEdited by Mark Baltin and Chris Collins

The Handbook of Discourse AnalysisEdited by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton

The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, Second EditionEdited by J. K. Chambers and Natalie Schilling

The Handbook of Historical LinguisticsEdited by Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda

The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality, Second EditionEdited by Susan Ehrlich, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Janet Holmes

The Handbook of Second Language AcquisitionEdited by Catherine J. Doughty and Michael H. Long

The Handbook of Bilingualism and Multilingualism, Second EditionEdited by Tej K. Bhatia and William C. Ritchie

The Handbook of PragmaticsEdited by Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward

The Handbook of Applied LinguisticsEdited by Alan Davies and Catherine Elder

The Handbook of Speech PerceptionEdited by David B. Pisoni and Robert E. Remez

The Handbook of the History of EnglishEdited by Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los

The Handbook of English LinguisticsEdited by Bas Aarts and April McMahon

The Handbook of World EnglishesEdited by Braj B. Kachru; Yamuna Kachru, and Cecil L. Nelson

The Handbook of Educational LinguisticsEdited by Bernard Spolsky and Francis M. Hult

The Handbook of Clinical LinguisticsEdited by Martin J. Ball, Michael R. Perkins, Nicole Müller, and Sara Howard

The Handbook of Pidgin and Creole StudiesEdited by Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler

The Handbook of Language TeachingEdited by Michael H. Long and Catherine J. Doughty

The Handbook of Language ContactEdited by Raymond Hickey

The Handbook of Language and Speech DisordersEdited by Jack S. Damico, Nicole Müller, and Martin J. Ball

The Handbook of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language ProcessingEdited by Alexander Clark, Chris Fox, and Shalom Lappin

The Handbook of Language and GlobalizationEdited by Nikolas Coupland

The Handbook of Hispanic SociolinguisticsEdited by Manuel Díaz-Campos

The Handbook of Language SocializationEdited by Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, and Bambi B. Schieffelin

The Handbook of Intercultural Discourse and CommunicationEdited by Christina Bratt Paulston, Scott F. Kiesling, and Elizabeth S. Rangel

The Handbook of Historical SociolinguisticsEdited by Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy and Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre

The Handbook of Hispanic LinguisticsEdited by José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea, and Erin O'Rourke

The Handbook of Conversation AnalysisEdited by Jack Sidnell and Tanya Stivers

The Handbook of English for Specific PurposesEdited by Brian Paltridge and Sue Starfield

The Handbook of Spanish Second Language AcquisitionEdited by Kimberly L. Geeslin

The Handbook of Chinese LinguisticsEdited by C.-T. James Huang, Y.-H. Audrey Li, and Andrew Simpson

The Handbook of Language EmergenceEdited by Brian MacWhinney and William O'Grady

The Handbook of Korean LinguisticsEdited by Lucien Brown and Jaehoon Yeon

The Handbook of Speech ProductionEdited Melissa A. Redford

The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, Second EditionEdited by Shalom Lappin and Chris Fox

The Handbook of Classroom Discourse and InteractionEdited by Numa Markee

The Handbook of Narrative AnalysisEdited by Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou

The Handbook of English PronounciationEdited by Marnie Reed and John M. Levis

The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Second EditionEdited by Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton, and Deborah Schiffrin

The Handbook of Bilingual and Multilingual EducationEdited by Wayne E. Wright, Sovicheth Boun, and Ofelia García

The Handbook of Portuguese LinguisticsEdited by W. Leo Wetzels, João Costa, and Sergio Menuzzi

The Handbook of DialectologyEdited by Charles Boberg, John Nerbonne, and Dominic Watt

The Handbook of Linguistics, Second EditionEdited by Mark Aronoff and Janie Rees-Miller

The Handbook of Linguistics

Second Edition

Edited by

Mark Aronoff and Janie Rees-Miller

This second edition first published 2017© 2017 John Wiley & Sons LtdEdition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (1e, 2001)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Aronoff, Mark, editor. | Rees-Miller, Janie, editor.Title: The handbook of linguistics / Mark Aronoff, Janie Rees-Miller.Description: Second edition. | Hoboken : Wiley-Blackwell, 2017. | Series: Blackwell handbooks in linguistics | Includes index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016042791 | ISBN 9781405186766 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119072300 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Linguistics–Handbooks, manuals, etc. | BISAC: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General.Classification: LCC P121 .H324 2017 | DDC 410–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016042791

Cover image: Mick Tarel/Gettyimages

List of Contributors

Mark C. BakerRutgers University

Steven P. BlackGeorgia State University

Lyle CampbellUniversity of Hawai'i

David CaplanHarvard University

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthyUniversity of Canterbury

J. K. ChambersUniversity of Toronto

Kiel ChristiansonUniversity of Illinois

Abigail C. CohnCornell University

Bernard ComrieUniversity of California Santa Barbara

Vivian CookNewcastle University

William CroftUniversity of New Mexico

D. A. CruseUniversity of Manchester

Peter T. DanielsIndependent Scholar

Nigel FabbUniversity of Strathclyde

Elizabeth A. FalconiGeorgia State University

James Paul GeeArizona State University

Christoph GutknechtUniversity of Hamburg

Kirk HazenWest Virginia University

Agnes Weiyun HeStony Brook University

Brian D. JosephThe Ohio State University

Ruth KempsonKing's College London

Kendall A. KingUniversity of Minnesota

Shalom LappinUniversity of Gothenburg

John LaverQueen Margaret University, Edinburgh

Diane Lillo-MartinUniversity of Connecticut

Brian MacWhinneyCarnegie Mellon University

Pamela MunroUniversity of California Los Angeles

Janie Rees-MillerMarietta College

Suzanne RomaineUniversity of Oxford

Wendy SandlerUniversity of Haifa

Roger W. ShuyGeorgetown University

Andrew SpencerUniversity of Essex

Kathryn D. StemperUniversity of Minnesota

Rebecca TreimanWashington University in Saint Louis

Robert D. Van Valin, Jr.University at Buffalo

Thomas WasowStanford University

Preface to the Second Edition

The second edition of The Handbook of Linguistics has been designed to offer an overview of the field of linguistics in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It has now been over two decades since we began work on the first edition of The Handbook of Linguistics, and although our general goals and topics remain much the same as in the first edition, the second edition has been updated to reflect new developments in linguistics since the dawning of the second millennium. New to this edition are chapters devoted to topics not covered in detail in the first edition: psycholinguistics, linguistic anthropology and ethnolinguistics, and second language pedagogy. Other topics that were covered in the first edition have completely new chapters. Specifically, the single chapter devoted to sociolinguistics in the first edition has now been replaced with two new chapters in the second edition, one on sociolinguistic theory and the second on language variation. The topic of language planning has a completely new chapter. Of the remaining chapters, most have been thoroughly revised and updated to incorporate new developments in the field and to refresh any ephemeral examples or references. In a few cases, chapters that have stood the test of time have remained unrevised from the first edition. These are the chapters on languages of the world, history of linguistics, phonetics, the lexicon, and formal semantics.

As in the first edition, the purpose of the Handbook is to provide an introduction to the various subfields of linguistics for the educated reader who does not necessarily have a background in linguistics. It is also a useful resource for linguists who may need to teach or to reference subfields outside their specific specializations. In each chapter, we seek to present a broad introduction to the central questions of the subfield and to illustrate how linguists go about answering these questions. Generalizations are supported with enough detail to provide depth, but we have tried to eschew the kind of minutia that would not be meaningful to the general reader or would not stand the test of time.

The order of topics remains much the same as in the first edition. We begin with the starting points for the study of linguistics: the origins of language, the raw material of language study (languages of the world, their typology and universal characteristics, and writing systems), and how language data is gathered from native speakers (field linguistics). The second section of the book considers theoretical bases, beginning with various approaches to the scientific study of language in the history of linguistics. Two chapters are given over to current theoretical perspectives: generative grammar and functional linguistics. We then proceed to the core fields of linguistics, those formal, structural aspects of language that would be covered in almost any general introductory course in linguistics: phonetics, phonology, morphology, the lexicon, syntax, semantics, and historical linguistics. Chapters in the next section – on neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, natural sign languages, and first language acquisition – all help to illuminate the relationship between language and the human mind. Our section on language use goes beyond the structural aspects of language to consider how language is used to communicate meaning within various social contexts, in the subfields of pragmatics, discourse analysis, linguistics and literature, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistic theory and language variation. The theme of languages in contact is addressed in chapters on multilingualism and second language acquisition. The book ends with chapters concerned with applications of linguistics: second language pedagogy, educational linguistics, linguistics and reading, forensic linguistics, translation, and language planning.

One of the strengths of the first edition of the Handbook was that the contributors were internationally recognized scholars in their fields. The same holds true for the second edition: the majority of the authors are senior scholars who contributed to the first edition, while some new chapters have been authored by younger scholars who have emerged as leaders in the field more recently. Our journey to the second edition has not been without detours and bumps in the road, and we are grateful to our contributors and our editors at Wiley Blackwell for their patience and forbearance. We owe a special debt to Agnes He, without whose encouragement, advice, and support this second edition would never have seen the light of day.

Mark Aronoff

Janie Rees-Miller

Preface to the First Edition

For over a century, linguists have been trying to explain linguistics to other people whom they believe should be interested in their subject matter. After all, everyone speaks at least one language and most people have fairly strong views about their own language. The most distinguished scholars in every generation have written general books about language and linguistics targeted at educated laypeople and at scholars in adjacent disciplines, and some of these books have become classics, at least among linguists. The first great American linguist, William Dwight Whitney, published The Life and Growth of Language: An Outline of Linguistic Science, in 1875. In the dozen years between 1921 and 1933, the three best known English-speaking linguists in the world (Edward Sapir in 1921, Otto Jespersen in 1922, and Leonard Bloomfield in 1933) all wrote books under the title Language. All these books were very successful and continued to be reprinted for many years. In our own time, Noam Chomsky, certainly the most famous of theoretical linguists, has tried to make his ideas on language more accessible in such less technical books as Language and Mind (1968) and Reflections on Language (1975). And more recently, Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (1995) stayed on the best-seller list for many months.

Despite these efforts, linguistics has not made many inroads into educated public discourse. Although linguists in the last hundred years have uncovered a great deal about human language and how it is acquired and used, the advances and discoveries are still mostly unknown outside a small group of practitioners. Many reasons have been given for this gap between academic and public thinking about language, the most commonly cited being: that people have strong and sometimes erroneous views about language and have little interest in being disabused of their false beliefs; or that people are too close to language to be able to see that it has interesting and complex properties. Whatever the reason, the gap remains and is getting larger the more we learn about language.

The Handbook of Linguistics is a general introductory volume designed to address this gap in knowledge about language. Presupposing no prior knowledge of linguistics, it is intended for people who would like to know what linguistics and its subdisciplines are about. The book was designed to be as nontechnical as possible, while at the same time serving as a repository for what is known about language as we enter the twenty-first century.

If The Handbook of Linguistics is to be regarded as authoritative, this will be in large part because of the identity of the authors of the chapters. We have recruited globally recognized leading figures to write each of the chapters. While the culture of academia is such that academic authors find it tremendously difficult to write anything for anyone other than their colleagues, our central editorial goal has been to avoid this pitfall. Our emphasis on the reader's perspective sets The Handbook of Linguistics apart from other similar projects.

The place of the field of linguistics in academia has been debated since its inception. When we look at universities, we may find a linguistics department in either the social sciences or the humanities. When we look at the American government agencies that fund university research, we find that the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health all routinely award grants for research in linguistics. So where does linguistics belong? The answer is not in where linguistics is placed administratively, but rather in how linguists think. Here the answer is quite clear: linguists by and large view themselves as scientists and they view their field as a science, the scientific study of language. This has been true since the nineteenth century, when Max Mueller could entitle a book published in 1869 The Science of Language and the first chapter of that book “The science of language: one of the physical sciences.”

The fact that linguistics is today defined as the scientific study of language carries with it the implicit claim that a science of language is possible, and this alone takes many by surprise. For surely, they say, language, like all human activity, is beyond the scope of true science. Linguists believe that their field is a science because they share the goals of scientific inquiry, which is objective (or more properly intersubjectively accessible) understanding. Once we accept that general view of science as a kind of inquiry, then it should be possible to have a science of anything, so long as it is possible to achieve intersubjectively accessible understanding of that thing. There are, of course, those who deny the possibility of such scientific understanding of anything, but we will not broach that topic here.

We now know that the possibility of scientific understanding depends largely on the complexity and regularity of the object of study. Physics has been so successful because the physical world is, relatively speaking, highly regular and not terribly complex. Human sciences, by contrast, have been much less successful and much slower to produce results, largely because human behavior is so complex and not nearly so regular as is the physical or even the biological world. Language, though, contrasts with other aspects of human behavior precisely in its regularity, what has been called its rule-governed nature. It is precisely this property of language and language-related behavior that has allowed for fairly great progress in our understanding of this delimited area of human behavior. Furthermore, the fact that language is the defining property of humans, that it is shared across all human communities and is manifested in no other species, means that by learning about language we will inevitably also learn about human nature.

Each chapter in this book is designed to describe to the general reader the state of our knowledge at the beginning of the twenty-first century of one aspect of human language. The authors of each chapter have devoted most of their adult lives to the study of this one aspect of language. Together, we believe, these chapters provide a broad yet detailed picture of what is known about language as we move into the new millennium. The chapters are each meant to be freestanding. A reader who is interested in how children acquire language, for example, should be able to turn to Chapter 19 and read it profitably without having to turn first to other chapters for assistance. But the physical nature of a book entails that there be an order of presentation. We begin with general overview chapters that consider the origins of language as species-specific behavior and describe the raw material with which linguists work (languages of the world and writing systems), frame the discipline within its historical context, and look at how linguists acquire new data from previously undescribed languages (field linguistics). The book then turns to the traditional subdisciplines of linguistics. Here we have followed most linguistics books in starting from the bottom, grounding language first in the physical world of sound (phonetics) and moving up through the organization of sound in language (phonology), to the combination of sounds into words (morphology), and the combination of words into sentences (syntax). Meaning (semantics) usually comes next, on the grounds that it operates on words and sentences. These areas are traditionally said to form the core of linguistics, because they deal with the most formally structured aspects of language. Within the last few decades, however, linguists have come to realize that we cannot understand the most formally structured aspects of language without also understanding the way language is used to convey information (pragmatics) in conversation (discourse) and in literature, and the way language interacts with other aspects of society (sociolinguistics).

Fifty years ago, many of our chapters would have been absent from a book of this sort for the simple but dramatic reason that these fields of inquiry did not exist: language acquisition, multilingualism, sign language, neurolinguistics, computational linguistics, and all of the areas of applied linguistics to which we have devoted separate chapters (the one area of applied linguistics that did exist fifty years ago was language teaching).

The chapters are of a uniform length, approximately 10,000 words each, or about 25 printed pages. This length is substantial enough for a major essay, while being short enough so as not to overwhelm the reader. Applied linguistics is divided into several distinct areas that would be of interest to students and others who want to know what practical applications linguistics has. Because each of the applied linguistics chapters covers a more specialized area, these chapters are somewhat shorter than the rest (approximately 4,000 words each, or about 10 printed pages).

We have tried not to emphasize ideology, but rather to divide things up by empirical criteria having to do with the sorts of phenomena that a given field of inquiry covers. We have thought long and hard about whether some of the major areas, especially syntax and phonology, should be broken down further, with a chapter each on distinct theoretical approaches. Our final decision was not to subdivide by theoretical approaches, based on a belief that the reader's perspective is paramount in books like this: readers of a companion do not want to know what the latest controversy is about or who disagrees with whom or who said what when. Rather, they want to have a reasonable idea of what linguistics or some subarea of linguistics can tell them. The authors have been able to do so without going into the latest controversies, though these controversies may occupy the linguists' everyday lives. The one area to which we have devoted more than one chapter is syntax, but this reflects the dominance of syntactic research in linguistics over the last half century.

We do not see this handbook as an introductory textbook, which would, for example, have questions or exercises at the end of each chapter. There are already enough introductory linguistics texts. We see it rather as an authoritative volume on what linguists know about language at the start of the twenty-first century. Each chapter covers the central questions and goals of a particular subdiscipline, what is generally accepted as known in that area, and how it relates to other areas.

When we embarked on this editorial enterprise, we expected to enjoy the interaction with many of our most distinguished colleagues that the preparation of this book would entail, which is so much easier now in the age of electronic correspondence. What we did not realize was how much we would learn from these colleagues about language and linguistics, simply from reading their work and discussing it with them. We thank all of the authors for this wonderful opportunity and we hope that the readers, too, will share in the same great pleasure.

Mark Aronoff

Janie Rees-Miller

List of Abbreviations

1

first person

3

third person

ABS

absolutive

ACC

accusative

ASP

aspect

AUX

auxiliary

CLF

classifier

CONN

connective

COP

copula

DAT

dative

EMPH

emphatic

ERG

ergative

F

feminine

FUT

future

GEN

genitive

IND

indicative

M

masculine

NFUT

nonfuture

NOM

nominative

NPST

nonpast

NR

nominalizer

OBJ

object

P/N

person/number

PL

plural

PREP

prepositional

PST

past

SG

singular

SUBJ

subject

Part IStarting Points

1Origins of Language

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy

1 Introduction

Among the inhabitants of some African forests about eight million years ago were ape-like creatures including the common ancestors of chimpanzees and humans. Visualizing these creatures is easy enough; one imagines something resembling a modern gorilla, living substantially in trees and walking on all four limbs when on the ground, and with a vocal communication system limited to perhaps 20 or thirty 30 calls, like a chimpanzee's. But what about our ancestors two million years ago? By that stage they were a separate species from the ancestors of chimpanzees, but were not yet Homo sapiens. How did these creatures live, and in particular what sort of language did they have? Visualizing these more recent ancestors is harder. One feels that they must have been more like us, and in particular that their vocal communication system must have been more sophisticated than that of their ancestors six million years before. But how much more sophisticated? Which characteristics of modern human language did this communication system now possess, and which did it still lack?

There is something eerie and yet fascinating about these intermediate ancestors. This fascination underlies innumerable science fiction stories as well as the perennial interest in rumors that such creatures may still exist, in some remote Himalayan valley perhaps, or as descendants of the tiny nonsapiens humans who may have lived as recently as 15,000 years ago on the island of Flores in Indonesia (Knight 2005; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis). To many nonlinguists, therefore, it seems self-evident that research on the linguistic abilities of such intermediate ancestors (that is, research on the origins and evolution of human language) should be a high priority in linguistics. Yet it is not. As a research topic, language evolution is only now beginning to regain respectability, after more than a century of neglect. In the remainder of this section I will say something about the reasons for this neglect before turning in Sections 2 to 5 to the evidence recently brought to bear by anthropologists, geneticists, primatologists, and neurobiologists, who have for decades been more adventurous than linguists in this area. Then in Section 6 I will discuss the kinds of contribution which some linguists also are now beginning to offer.

Many religions provide an account of the origin of language. According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, God gave to Adam in the Garden of Eden dominion over all the animals, and Adam's first exercise of this dominion consisted in naming them. The fact that there are now many languages rather than just one is explained in the story of the Tower of Babel: linguistic diversity is a punishment for human arrogance. So long as that sort of account was generally accepted, the origin of language was not a puzzle. But when secular explanations for natural phenomena began to be sought to supplement or replace religious ones, it was inevitable that a secular explanation would be sought for the origin of language too.

The fact that the origin of language must predate recorded history did not inhibit eighteenth-century thinkers such as Rousseau, Condillac, and Herder, who were confident that simply by applying one's mind to the situation in which languageless humans would find themselves one could arrive at worthwhile conclusions about how language must have arisen. Unfortunately there was no consensus among these conclusions, and in the nineteenth century they came to seem increasingly feeble and speculative by contrast with the far-reaching yet convincing results attainable in historical and comparative linguistics (see Chapter 15). At its foundation in 1866, therefore, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned the presentation of any papers concerning the origin of language. Many linguists still support this ban, in the sense that they believe that any inquiry into the origin of language must inevitably be so speculative as to be worthless.

Since the 1960s, the theory of grammar has come to be dominated by the ideas of Noam Chomsky. For Chomsky, the central question of linguistics is the nature of the innate biological endowment which enables humans to acquire a language so rapidly and efficiently in the first years of life (see Chapter 19). From this viewpoint, it seems natural to regard the origin of language as a matter of evolutionary biology: how did this innate linguistic endowment evolve in humans, and what are its counterparts (if any) in other primates? But Chomsky for a long time discouraged interest in language evolution, and even suggested that language is so different from most other animal characteristics that it may be more a product of physical or chemical processes than of biological ones (1988: 167, 1991: 50). The paradoxical result is that, while Chomskyan linguists endeavored to explain characteristics of individual languages by reference to an innate linguistic endowment (or Universal Grammar), they were generally reluctant to pursue this inquiry one stage further, to the issue of how and why this innate endowment has acquired the particular characteristics that it has. Exceptions (e.g., Newmeyer 1991; Pinker and Bloom 1990; Pinker 1994) were relatively sparse.

In 2002, this situation changed dramatically with the publication of an article jointly written by Chomsky and the animal behavior experts Marc Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002). Since then, linguists associated with Chomsky have been willing to discuss language evolution in the context of a general “biolinguistic” exploration of biological bases for the language capacity (see e.g., Jenkins 2004). Their approach is, however, highly controversial (see e.g., Pinker and Jackendoff 2005).

2 Evidence from Anthropology and Archeology

Anthropology is concerned not only with human culture but also with humans as organisms in a biological sense, including their evolutionary development. (On human evolution in general, see, e.g., Stringer and Andrews (2005).) Language is both a cultural phenomenon and also the most salient distinguishing characteristic of modern Homo sapiens as a species. The question of how and why humans acquired language therefore interests both cultural and biological anthropologists. So what light can anthropology shed on these questions?

The earliest direct evidence of written language is no more than about 5,000 years old (see Chapter 5). It is therefore much too recent to shed any light on the origin of spoken language, and we must resort to indirect evidence. Unfortunately the available evidence is doubly indirect. The vocal apparatus (tongue, lips, and larynx) of early humans would tell us much if we could examine it directly; but, being soft tissue, it does not survive, and for information about it we have to rely on what we can glean from bones, particularly skulls. Alongside such evidence we have tools and other artefacts, as well as traces of human habitation such as discarded animal bones; but, again, what is available to us is skewed by the fact that stone survives better than bone and much better than materials such as wood or hide. In view of this, the only relatively firm dates which anthropology can provide are two terminuses, one after which we can be sure that language in its fully modern form did exist and one before which we can be sure that it did not. For the long period in between, the anthropological evidence is tantalizing but frustratingly equivocal; there are no uncontroversial counterparts in the fossil record for specific stages in linguistic evolution.

We can be reasonably confident that modern-style spoken language evolved only once. This is not logically necessary. It is conceivable that something with the communicative and cognitive functions of language, and using speech as its medium, could have evolved independently more than once, just as the eye has evolved independently more than once in the animal kingdom. However, if that had happened we would expect to find evidence of it today. We would expect to find two or more different kinds of language, differing in structure in such a way that people biologically disposed to learn one kind would never be able to acquire another kind natively. These would be differences as fundamental as those between the eyes of octopuses, mammals, and insects. Yet no such evidence exists. For all their diversity, all existing languages display certain fundamental common properties of grammar, meaning, and sound. For this reason Chomsky feel justified in claiming that, to a visitor from another planet, it might seem that there really is only one human language. Moreover, a child who is removed from her parents' speech community at a young age can acquire natively any language whatsoever, irrespective of what her parents speak. There is no evidence that any child is born with a biological bias in favor of one language or type of language. This means that language of a fully modern kind must have evolved before any contemporary human group became geographically separated from the rest of the human race (separated, that is, until the invention of modern means of transport). The first such clearcut separation seems to have occurred with the earliest settlement of Australia by Homo sapiens. Archeological evidence suggests that that event took place at least 40,000 years and perhaps as long as 60,000 or more years ago. We can therefore take this as a firm terminus ante quem for the evolution of a form of language which is fully modern in a biological sense.

As for a terminus post quem, it is clear that spoken language with more or less modern articulatory and acoustic characteristics presupposes something like a modern vocal tract. But how are we to interpret “more or less” and “something like”? One thing is clear: the acoustic properties of many human speech sounds, particularly vowels, depend on the characteristically human L-shaped vocal tract, with an oral cavity at right angles to the pharynx (see Chapter 9) and with the larynx relatively low in the neck. This shape is characteristically human because in nearly all other mammals, and even in human babies during the first few months of life, the larynx is high enough for the epiglottis to engage with the soft palate so as to form a self-contained airway from the nose to the lungs, smoothly curved rather than L-shaped, and quite separate from the tube which leads from the mouth to the stomach. Having these two distinct tubes enables nearly all other mammals, as well as newborn human babies, to breathe while swallowing. The adult human pharynx, on the other hand, through which both air and food must pass, contributes importantly to the acoustic characteristics of speech sounds. So when did this L-shaped vocal tract develop?

Lieberman (1984; cf. Lieberman and Crelin 1971) has claimed that even in Neanderthals, who did not become extinct until about 35,000 years ago, the larynx was positioned so high in the neck as to prevent the production of the full modern range of vowel sounds. He suggests that this linguistic disadvantage may have been a factor in the Neanderthals' demise. But his argument rests on an interpretation of fossil cranial anatomy which has generally been rejected by anthropologists (Trinkaus and Shipman 1993; Aiello and Dean 1990). An alternative view is that the L-shaped vocal tract is a byproduct of bipedalism, which favored a reorientation of the head in relation to the spine and hence a shortening of the base of the skull, so that the larynx had to be squeezed downward into the neck (DuBrul 1958; Aiello 1996b). The question then arises: when did our ancestors become bipedal? The general consensus among anthropologists is: very early. Evidence includes fossil footprints at Laetoli in Tanzania, from about 3.5 million years ago, and the skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis nicknamed “Lucy,” dating from over three million years ago. So, if bipedalism was an important factor contributing to the lowering of the larynx, the L-shaped vocal tract probably emerged relatively early too.

This conflicts with an opinion widespread among language origin researchers, namely that the lowering of the larynx (with its concomitant increased risk of choking) was a consequence of the evolution of more sophisticated language, not a precursor of it. This “brain-first” view was inevitably popular so long as Piltdown Man, with its human-like skull and ape-like jaw, was believed to be genuine. More recent evidence, showing how small australopithecine and early human skulls were, seems to count against the “brain-first” view. On the other hand, in yet more recent work, Fitch (2002) and others have shown that the lowered larynx is not so unusual among nonhuman mammals as was once thought. This in turn suggests that, whatever the reasons are why language is uniquely human, the vocal apparatus may not after all be centrally important.

Mention of skulls raises the possibility of drawing conclusions about language from hominid brains. (I use the term “hominid” to mean “(belonging to) a creature of the genus Australopithecus or the genus Homo.”) Brain size tells us nothing specific. But what of brain structure? If it could be shown that an area of the modern human brain uniquely associated with language was present in the brains of hominids at a particular date, it would seem reasonable to conclude that those hominids possessed language. But this line of reasoning encounters three problems. Firstly, since brains themselves do not fossilize, determining their structure depends on the interpretation of ridges and grooves on the inside of skulls, or rather of their counterparts on “endocasts” made from skulls. The region generally regarded as most closely associated with grammar and with speech articulation in modern humans is Broca's area; but identifying an area corresponding to Broca's area in hominid fossils has turned out to be highly controversial (Falk 1992). Secondly, no area of the human brain, even Broca's area, seems to be associated with language and nothing else. Thirdly, Broca's area seems to have little or nothing to do with vocalization in monkeys, so even if it can be established that a counterpart of Broca's area exists in a certain hominid, its function in that hominid may not be linguistic. We will discuss Broca's area again in Section 5. For the time being, though, the details of “brain-language coevolution,” as Deacon (1997) calls it, remain frustratingly indeterminate.

Some scholars have connected language with the evolution of “handedness,” which is much more strongly developed in humans than in other animals (Bradshaw and Rogers 1992; Corballis 2002). In most people the right hand is the dominant hand, controlled from the left side of the brain where the language areas are usually located. It is tempting to see this shared location as more than mere coincidence. If so, linguistic conclusions might perhaps be drawn from ingenious tests that have been carried out on fossil stone tools, to determine whether the people who made them were or were not predominantly right-handed. However, the correlation between language and handedness is far from strong: left-handedness neither entails nor is entailed by right-brain dominance for language. Also, even if evidence of a strong preponderance of right-handers in some group of hominids is taken as firm evidence of linguistic capacity, it furnishes no details about the nature of that linguistic capacity.