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Accessibility Statement
About the Authors
Acknowledgements
A Note to Instructors
1.1 What even is language?
1.2 What grammars are and aren't
1.3 Studying language scientifically
1.4 Doing harm with language science
1.5 Doing good with language science
1.6 Exercise your linguistics skills
2.1 Language and Identity
2.2 Language and Offense
2.3 Derogation, toxicity, and power imbalances
2.4 The Power of Names
2.5 Pronouns, Language Change, and the Grammar Police
2.6 Linguistic Law Enforcement
2.8 Legally Enshrined Harms
2.9 Exercise your linguistics skills
3.1 Modality
3.2 Speech articulators
3.3 Describing consonants: Place and phonation
3.4 Describing consonants: Manner
3.5 Describing vowels
3.6 The International Phonetic Alphabet
3.7 Signed language articulators
3.8 Describing signs
3.9 Signed language notation
3.10 Syllables
3.11 Stress
3.12 Tone and intonation
4.1 Phonemes and allophones
4.2 Phonotactics and natural classes
4.3 Contrastive distribution and minimal pairs
4.4 Complementary distribution
4.5 Phonemic analysis
4.6 Another example of phonemic analysis
4.7 Phonological rules
4.8 Phonological derivations
4.9 Types of phonological rules
4.10 Signed language phonology
5.1 What is morphology?
5.2 Roots, bases, and affixes
5.3 Morphology beyond affixes
5.4 Allomorphy
5.5 Lexical categories
5.6 Derivational morphology
5.7 Inflection
5.8 Compounding
5.9 Structural ambiguity in morphology
5.10 How to draw morphological trees
5.11 How to solve morphology problems
6.1 Syntactic knowledge and grammaticality judgements
6.2 Word order
6.3 Structure within the sentence: Phrases, Heads, and Selection
6.4 Identifying phrases: Constituency tests
6.5 Functional categories
6.6 Clausal embedding
6.7 Main clause Yes-No questions
6.8 Main clause content questions
6.9 Embedded content questions
6.10 Arguments and thematic roles
6.11 Changing argument structure: Causatives and passives
6.12 Interim summary
6.13 From constituency to tree diagrams
6.14 Trees: Introduction
6.15 Trees: Sentences as TPs
6.16 Trees: Modifiers as adjuncts
6.17 Trees: Structural ambiguity
6.18 Trees: Embedded clauses
6.19 Trees: Movement
6.20 Trees: Movement beyond questions
6.21 Trees: Summary
7.1 Linguistic meaning
7.2 Compositionality: Why not just syntax?
7.3 What does this sentence "mean"? Entailments vs. implicatures
7.4 The mental lexicon
7.5 The nature of lexical meaning
7.6 Events and thematic roles
7.7 Countability
7.8 Individual- vs. stage-level predicates
7.9 Degrees
7.10 Why not the dictionary?
7.11 Denotation
7.12 Introduction to set theory
7.13 Negative polarity items
7.14 Summary
7.15 Exercise your linguistics skills
8.1 At-issue vs. non-at-issue meaning
8.2 Cross-cultural differences in discourse
8.3 Semantics and pragmatics in the legal domain
8.4 Conversational implicatures
8.5 The Cooperative Principle
8.6 How inferences arise, and neurodiversity in inference making
8.7 Violating vs. flouting a maxim
8.8 More about the Cooperative Principle
8.9 Illocutionary meaning
8.10 Thinking about illocutionary meaning compositionally
8.11 What is a context?
8.12 Assertion
8.13 Question
8.14 Analyzing meaning dynamically
8.15 Summary (and further questions to consider)
8.16 Exercise your linguistics skills
9.1 Preserving Mohawk
David Kanatawakhon-Maracle
9.2 Learning Mohawk
9.3 Mohawk culture and language
9.4 Creating materials for teaching Mohawk
9.5 Speaking Mohawk and reconciliation
9.6 One view on the future of Indigenous languages
9.7 Reclaiming Michif
Chantale Cenerini and Martin Kohlberger
9.8 Reclaiming Hul’q’umi’num’
Rae Anne Claxton
9.9 Growing up speaking Nishnaabemwin
Mary Ann Corbiere
9.10 Learning Nishnaabemwin at University
9.11 Resources for teaching and learning Nishnaabemwin
10.1 What is variationist sociolinguistics?
10.2 Language varies
10.3 Language changes
10.4 Language conveys more than semantic meaning
10.5 Variationist methods and concepts
10.6 Sociolinguistic correlations: Place
10.7 Sociolinguistic correlations: Social status
10.8 Sociolinguistic correlations: Gender
10.9 Sociolinguistic correlations: Ethnicity
10.10 Three waves of sociolinguistics
10.11 Summary
10.12 Exercise Your Linguistics Skills
11.1 Tiny, powerful language learners
11.2 When does language learning start?
11.3 Phonemic contrast
11.4 Early language production
11.5 The Language environment and the so-called word gap
11.6 Understanding word combinations
11.7 Syntax in early utterances
11.8. Developing word meanings
11.9 Growing up bilingual (or multilingual!)
11.10 Language milestones in the first two years
11.11 Exercise your linguistics skills
13.1 The mind makes language
13.2 Evidence for phonemes as mental categories
13.3 Evidence for Language-Specific Phonology
13.4 Evidence for ‘top-down’ effects of word knowledge on perception
Check Yourself Questions
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Essentials of Linguistics, 2nd edition by Catherine Anderson; Bronwyn Bjorkman; Derek Denis; Julianne Doner; Margaret Grant; Nathan Sanders; and Ai Taniguchi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.