Books in the Cambridge Approaches to Linguistics series

This book is about investigating the way people use language in speech and writing. It introduces the corpus-based approach to the study of language, based on analysis of large databases of real language examples, and illustrates interesting findings about language and the different ways that people speak and write.

How and why do languages change? Where does the evidence of language change come from? How do languages begin and end? This introduction to language change explores these and other questions, considering changes through time. This updated edition remains non-technical and accessible to readers with no previous knowledge of linguistics.

How do our brains enable us to speak creatively and process language? This accessible book examines the linguistic and neuro-anatomical underpinnings of language and considers how language skills can systematically break down in individuals with different types of brain damage.

Some children can hear and can speak, yet have trouble understanding or producing utterances. Shula Chiat explores the stumbling blocks which lie behind their struggle. She focuses on individual children, the extensive examples which illustrate their difficulties, and the step-by-step search for the source of those difficulties.

In this clear and reliable introduction to the field of sociolinguistics, Downes discusses the relationships between language variation and large-scale social factors. This thoroughly revised edition includes an analysis of language standardisation, language conflict and planning.

Adults tend to take language for granted - until they have to learn a new one. Then they realize how difficult it is to get the pronunciation right, to acquire the meaning of thousands of new words, and to learn how those words are put together to form sentences. Children, however, have mastered language before they can tie their shoes. In this engaging and accessible book, William O'Grady explains how this happens, discussing how children learn to produce and distinguish among sounds, their acquisition of words and meanings, and their mastery of the rules for building sentences. How Children Learn Language provides readers with a highly readable overview not only of the language acquisition process itself, but also of the ingenious experiments and techniques that researchers use to investigate his mysterious phenomenon. It will be of great interest to anyone - parent or student - wishing to find out how children acquire language.

Human language is a weird communication system: it has more in common with birdsong than with the calls of other primates. In this wide-ranging and accessible overview, first published in 2000, Jean Aitchison explores the reasons why language is so strange, outlines recent theories about its origin, and discusses possible paths of evolution.