Books in the Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics series

Recent textbooks in historical linguistics concentrate more on the theory of language change than on methods of linguistic reconstruction. This book redresses the balance, providing a general guide to methods and theories of linguistic of languages. It describes both traditional and newer, less well established techniques.

This textbook introduces and explains the fundamental issues, major research questions, and current approaches in the study of grammaticalization. Each chapter offers guidance on further reading, and concludes with study questions to encourage further discussion; there is also a glossary of key terminology in the field.

This book is an introduction to the relationship between the morphosyntactic properties of sentences and their associated illocutionary forces or force potentials. It draws on insights from linguistics, philosophy, and sociology, and may be used as a textbook for undergraduate or graduate courses in semantics, pragmatics, and morphosyntax.

This book offers an introduction to the many facets of multilingualism in a changing world, bringing in approaches from linguistics, sociology, history, political philosophy, and psychology. It provides the basic tools to analyse different kinds of multilingualism, and suggests questions and problems for discussion at the end of each chapter.

This book provides an introduction to the study of words, and how we use words to create meaning. It offers an accessible description of the main properties of words and the organizational principles of the lexicon, based on theoretical accounts and extensive empirical data.

An introduction to the history of languages, from distant past to distant future, looking at how languages arise, change, and die, and showing how the histories of peoples and languages are closely connected. It mixes chapters on general processes with accounts of specific languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Greek, Latin, and English.

This book provides an introduction to compositional semantics and to the syntax/semantics interface, adopting a Direct Compositionality view while (where appropriate) also presenting a competing view based on Logical Form and comparing the two.

This is the first textbook on Functional Discourse Grammar, a recently developed theory of language structure which analyses utterances at the pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic and phonological level. It focuses principally on English and provides extensive exercises for students to use and evaluate the theory.

This book introduces the analysis of natural language within the broader question of how language works - of how people use languages to configure words and morphemes in order to express meanings. Its step-by-step account covers every aspect of syntax and includes exercises and suggestions for further reading throughout.

This text provides an introduction to the field of cognitive linguistics. It explores the far-reaching implications of Eleanor Rosch's seminal work on categorization and prototype theory, extending the application of prototype theory from lexical semantics to morphology, syntax and phonology.

Cognitive Grammar offers an alternative to mainstream linguistic theories. This book introduces the theory in clear, non-technical language, relates it to current debates about the nature of linguistic knowledge, and applies it to in-depth analyses of a range of topics in semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology.

This textbook provides a critical introduction to major research topics and current approaches in linguistic typology. It draws on a wide range of cross-linguistic data to describe what linguistic typology has revealed about language in general and about the rich variety of ways in which meaning and expression are achieved in the world's languages.

Geert Booij's popular textbook has been revised and updated. It covers every aspect of morphological theory and the analysis of words, examines the relation between morphology and other modules of grammar, and is the only introductory text to explore the role of morphology in language processing and change.

A lively introduction to methods for articulating the meanings of words and sentences, and revealing connections between language and culture. It shows that the study of meaning can be rigorous, insightful, and exciting.

A comprehensive introduction to the ways in which meaning is conveyed in language. Alan Cruse covers semantic matters, but also deals with topics that are usually considered to fall under pragmatics. A major aim is to highlight the richness and subtlety of meaning phenomena, rather than to expound any particular theory.

This title is an introduction to general phonetics which explores the entire range of human sounds, systematically covering all types of modification of speech, articulation, and prosodic features. The entire range of phonetic categories is introduced in 124 "experiments".

A comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the most widely-taught theory of syntax. Concentrating on Principles and Parameters Theory, the book places particular emphasis on conceptual and methodological foundations. It connects earlier versions of the theory to Chomsky's recent proposals for a `minimalist' syntactic theory.

Shows how grammar helps people communicate and looks at the ways grammar and meaning interrelate. This book starts from the notion that a speaker codes a meaning into grammatical forms which the listener is then able to recover. It uncovers a rationale for the varying grammatical properties of different words and explains many facts about English.