Also in the series Jean Aitchison: The seeds of speech: Language origin and evolution Charles Barber: The English language: A historical introduction Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad and Randi Reppen: Corpus linguistics William Downes: Language and society. The series will give readers an understanding of the multifaceted nature of language, and its central position in human affairs, as well as equipping those who wish to find out more about linguistics with a basis from which to read some of the more technical literature in textbooks and journals. Secondly, it aims to provide links between branches of linguistics that are traditionally separate.
First, it hopes to outline the ‘state of play’ in key areas of the subject, concentrating on what is happening now, rather than on surveying the past. Cambridge Approaches to Linguistics is an attempt to solve this problem by presenting current findings in a lucid and nontechnical way. But when newcomers try to discover more about the subject, a major problem faces them – the technical and often narrow nature of much writing about linguistics. Its findings are now of interest to psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists, teachers, speech therapists and numerous others who have realized that language is of crucial importance in their life and work. The 1996 BBC Reith lectures (Cambridge, 1997).Ĭambridge Approaches to Linguistics General editor: Jean Aitchison, Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication, University of Oxford In the past twenty-five years, linguistics – the systematic study of language – has expanded dramatically.
She is the author of The articulate mammal: An introduction to psycholinguistics (4th edition, 1998), Words in the mind: An introduction to the mental lexicon (2nd edition, 1994), Linguistics (5th edition, 1999: also published as Linguistics: An introduction, 2nd edition, 1999), The seeds of speech: Language origin and evolution (Cambridge, 1996) and The language web: The power and problem of words. jean aitchison is the Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford. The work remains non-technical in style and accessible to readers with no previous knowledge of linguistics. Sections on new methods of reconstruction and ongoing chain shifts in Britain and America have also been added as well as over 150 new references. For this substantially revised third edition, Jean Aitchison has included two new chapters, one on change of meaning, the other on grammaticalization. It does this within the framework of one central question – is language change a symptom of progress or decay? It concludes that language is neither progressing nor decaying, but that an understanding of the factors surrounding change is essential for anyone concerned about language alteration. It considers both changes which occurred long ago, and those currently in progress. It discusses where our evidence about language change comes from, how and why changes happen, and how languages begin and end. This book gives a lucid and up-to-date overview of language change.
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