An Introduction to Language Files
Since its inception thirty years ago, the Language Files has grown from a collection of materials designed simply as a supplement for undergraduate courses into a full-fledged introductory textbook. The scope of the text makes it suitable for use in a wide range of courses, while its unique organization into instructor-friendly files allows for tremendous flexibility in course design.
The Language Files was originally the idea of Arnold Zwicky, who was among its first authors. Since the first edition, many editors have contributed to the development of the Language Files; the current edition is the result of this cumulative effort.
Changes in the Current Edition
In honor of the publication of this 10th edition, we have incorporated a number of major changes. These are outlined below and divided in the following way: first, we introduce new tools for using the book; second, we give an overview of the global contentful changes; finally, we present a list of specific changes by chapter.
New Tools for Using the Book
Continuing a trend from the 9th edition, we have increased the use of an outline numbering system, ensuring that it is used consistently in each chapter. For example, in Chapter 8, the first file is File 8.1, and within that file, distinct topics are divided into sections labeled as 8.1.1, 8.1.2, and so on. This system is now used uniformly in every file and chapter. All text within a file is contained within one of these numbered sections. In this way, instructors can choose to assign very specific topics with ease, increasing the book’s modularity. Students will also be aided in taking organized and hierarchical notes.
Also in an attempt to increase the modularity of the book, and following the editors of the 9th edition, we have added a number of cross references throughout the book, indicating where information can be found about related topics.
Each chapter has a new file at the beginning (numbered, for example, 8.0) that provides a brief introduction to the topic covered in the chapter. Unlike the introductory files in the 9th edition, the introductory files in this edition are designed to introduce each topic in broad terms; significant concepts and more complex ideas are introduced in later files in the chapter.
Following each chapter’s introduction is an annotated table of contents for that chapter, providing a brief outline of the contents that can be found in each file of that chapter. This allows instructors to have a guide as to which files will be most applicable to their curricula, and it allows students to gain a bird’s-eye view of the topic that they are about to study.
The exercises for each chapter (which previously appeared file by file) have been compiled into a single file at the end of the chapter (titled Practice). Exercises are still organized by the file that they refer to. We hope that by placing all of the exercises for a chapter together, we will aid both instructors in choosing exercises to assign and students in finding the exercises that they have been assigned.
In addition to this consolidation of the practice exercises, we have expanded the number of exercises: there are now exercises available about every file in each chapter.
There are three kinds of exercise in the Practice files. “Exercises” give students an opportunity to practice applying concepts from the chapter in relatively straightforward ways by answering basic questions, examining data, generating novel sentences that meet certain criteria, and so on. “Discussion Questions” ask for further consideration of some particular issue. They may be used to spark in-class discussions or may be assigned to students to discuss in small groups or to write short-essay-type responses. “Activities” require that students engage in further work by undertaking more involved linguistic analysis, collecting their own linguistic data, using materials available on the Internet, and so on.
A selected bibliography has been added to the back of the book.
Vocabulary items in the glossary are now marked with the file(s) in which they are first introduced.
The IPA chart has been updated to the 2005 edition.
We have put several reference tools on the inside front and back covers of the textbook, so as to make it easier for students to locate certain often-used materials. On the inside front cover is a list of symbols used in the text. On the inside back cover is a copy of the official IPA chart. On the page facing the inside back cover, we have added copies of the charts for American English consonants and vowels, and on the reverse side of this page, we have listed IPA symbols for the sounds of American English and example words containing those sounds.
Global Contentful Changes
Material about signed languages, which previously appeared in its own chapter, has now been incorporated where relevant throughout the book. File 1.5, Language Modality, introduces signed languages in comparison with spoken languages.
The chapter on animal communication has moved to the second half of the book (Chapter 14). In this way, we are able to focus on the structure of human language first and later show animal communication systems in contrast with this structure. Furthermore, animal communication is now adjacent to other chapters that also pertain to how language relates to other fields of study.
The chapter on psycholinguistics has been split into the two chapters, Language Acquisition (Chapter 8) and Language Storage and Processing (Chapter 9).
Each chapter begins with a comic that gives some insight into the subfield of linguistics covered in that chapter. It is the hope of the editors that these comics will spark discussion in classrooms and demonstrate to our students that linguistic concepts do arise in daily life. Questions in each practice file refer to the comic and ask students to draw on the linguistic content of the chapter in order to analyze it.
The 9th edition saw a shift to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in the phonetics and phonology chapters; in the 10th edition, the use of the IPA has been extended consistently to the rest of the book.
A new chapter (Chapter 16, Practical Applications) helps to answer a question with which most linguistics instructors quickly become familiar: What can you do with a degree in linguistics? It provides overviews of six practical ways that a linguistics education can be applied. Of course, students should note that there are many more than these six!
In cases too numerous to mention individually, discussions of various topics have been clarified, expanded upon, and—where appropriate—condensed. We have also added more examples and illustrations of concepts.
Additionally, the following changes affect particular chapters.
Chapter 1: Introduction
File 1.1 (Introducing the Study of Language) combines the old files Why Study Language and Pre-Course Objectives into a single introductory file.
The pre-course survey has been changed into separate lists of “surprising but true” facts about language and “common misconceptions” about language, which could be combined into a “survey” for students to examine initial thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes about language.
File 1.2 (What You Know When You Know a Language) now covers the basic concepts involved in knowing a language, including a discussion of the distinction between competence and performance; a description of the general communication chain, and a discussion of how each aspect of linguistic study fits into this chain (serving as an overview to the contents of the book); a discussion of mental grammar; and the introduction of descriptive rules. This file is designed to stand on its own, separate from File 1.3.
File 1.3 (What You Don’t (Necessarily) Know When You Know a Language) is the corollary to File 1.2. It includes discussion of two popular misconceptions about what it means to know a language, namely, writing and prescriptive grammar. By creating this as a separate file rather than integrating these concepts in with actual features of language, we hope to highlight their status as things that are commonly misconstrued as part of linguistic study.
File 1.4 (Design Features of Language) contains the discussion of the design features of language that in previous editions appeared in the chapter on Animal Communication. These have been extracted and expanded so as to be presented as actual features of human languages instead of simply differences between human and animal communication. Note that the chapter on Animal Communication (now Chapter 14) also contains the file Communication and Language, which revisits the design features with respect to animal communication systems.
File 1.5 (Language Modality) contains a discussion of language modality, focusing on the differences between signed and spoken languages. Much of this file used to appear in the old chapter on Visual Languages. We introduce the concepts here, however, in order to establish the differences up front and allow us to integrate the discussion of signed languages in the rest of the text.
Chapter 2: Phonetics
The old file on experimental methods in phonetics has been deleted; sections on how to investigate particular phenomena are now integrated into the chapter where they are relevant to the discussion.(There is also a new general file on experimental techniques in Chapter 9 (File 9.7).)
The use of IPA symbols has been brought more in line with the usage described for various languages in the Journal of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
File 2.5 (Suprasegmental Features) has been updated to reflect more recent thinking on suprasegmentals.
File 2.6 (Acoustic Phonetics) has been shortened so that it covers both general acoustics and acoustic phonetics in a single file; it does not repeat as much content from articulatory phonetics.
File 2.7 (The Phonetics of Signed Languages) has been added.
In File 2.8 (Practice), new exercises take advantage of easily available phonetics analysis software.
Chapter 3: Phonology
Data throughout the chapter have been updated to be more accurate and to use the IPA more consistently.
File 3.1 (The Value of Sounds: Phonemes and Allophones) has been updated to include a discussion of the importance of alternations in phonological analysis.
Information about the relevant language families has been added to the data analysis questions.
File 3.5 (How to Solve Phonology Problems) now immediately precedes File 3.6 (Practice).
Chapter 4: Morphology
This chapter has seen minor reorganization: there is a new file division between morphological processes and morphological typology.
File 4.2 (Morphological Processes) contains a discussion of simultaneous affixation in signed languages.
File 4.4 (The Hierarchical Structure of Derived Words) now appears after the introduction of affixation in File 4.2 (Morphological Processes).
Chapter 5: Syntax
As in the 9th edition, the file Basic Ideas of Syntax provides a general overview of syntax that can serve as a unit unto itself in isolation from the rest of the chapter; in the 10th edition, this file introduces more aspects of syntax, including lexical categories and agreement.
Lexical categories are now discussed in their own file (File 5.3) rather than appearing as a section of the file about phrases; in this way students can easily refer to information about lexical categories when it becomes relevant in other disciplines (such as morphology and language change).
While the chapter about syntax in the 9th edition was rich with examples, the 10th edition has added a significant amount of prose both explicating these examples and fitting syntax into a wider context.
Chapter 6: Semantics
Although the content of this chapter is by and large quite similar to that of the 9th edition, there has been a general restructuring of the chapter to further highlight the distinction between lexical and compositional semantics. Content from the file in previous editions titled Theories of Meaning has been divided and moved according to the lexical/compositional split. There are now two files about lexical semantics and two about compositional semantics.
Reference and sense are introduced relative to one another; these two ideas are contrasted throughout the chapter.
Explanations of set theory have been expanded and clarified.
The discussion of antonymy (in File 6.3, Lexical Semantics: Word Relations) has been revised.
Entailment is now introduced in the discussion of compositional semantics (whereas in previous editions it was introduced in the chapter about pragmatics).
Chapter 7: Pragmatics
The chapter has been restructured to highlight the centrality of Gricean maxims in most introductory studies of pragmatics.
File 7.1 (Language in Context) is entirely new material, introducing ways in which context affects language use.
File 7.3 (Drawing Conclusions) includes a new discussion about the nature of implicature and draws an explicit connection between conversational implicature and the Gricean maxims.
File 7.4 (Speech Acts) has been restructured such that it now emphasizes felicity and the use of speech acts relative to context.
File 7.5 (Presupposition) is a new file introducing presupposition as an element for pragmatic investigation.
Information about entailment has moved to Chapter 6 (Semantics); information about discourse analysis has moved to Chapter 10 (Language Variation).
Chapter 8: Language Acquisition
This chapter includes the files on language acquisition that were previously part of the chapter entitled Psycholinguistics.
File 8.1 (Theories of Language Acquisition) includes an expanded discussion of the critical period hypotheses. Connectionist Theories and Social Interaction Theory are added to the theories of language acquisition discussed in the file.
File 8.2 (First-Language Acquisition: The Acquisition of Speech Sounds and Phonology) includes an expanded discussion of how infants perceive speech.
The previous file entitled Milestones in Motor and Language Development has been split up and incorporated into File 8.2 (First-Language Acquisition: The Acquisition of Speech Sounds and Phonology) and File 8.3 (First-Language Acquisition: The Acquisition of Morphology, Syntax, and Word Meaning) as a subsection at the end of each file.
File 8.5 (Bilingual Language Acquisition) is a new file introducing bilingual first- and second-language acquisition.
Chapter 9: Language Storage and Processing
This chapter includes the files Language and the Brain and Language Processing (including production and perception errors) that were previously part of the chapter entitled Psycholinguistics.
The previous file Language and the Brain has been split into two files: File 9.1 (Language and the Brain) and File 9.2 (Aphasia).
File 9.3 (Speech Production) includes the sections on production errors from the previous file Errors in Speech Production and Perception. Sections on models of speech production and slips of the hands have also been added to the file.
File 9.4 (Speech Perception) is a new file discussing a number of phenomena related to how humans perceive speech sounds.
File 9.5 (Lexical Processing) includes the sections on word recognition and lexical ambiguity from the previous file Adult Language Processing. A section on how words are stored in the mental lexicon has been added to the file.
File 9.6 (Sentence Processing) includes information on syntactic parsing from the previous file Adult Language Processing. Discussions about structural ambiguity, late closure, and the effects of intonation on disambiguation have been added.
File 9.7 (Experimental Methods in Psycholinguistics) is a new file introducing some common experimental techniques used in psycholinguistic research.
Chapter 10: Language Variation
This chapter has been restructured so that each file is on a more equal footing: one describes language varieties, one looks at variation at different levels of linguistic structure, and two give reasons for language variation (regional and social). The focus of the chapter is solely on language variation; other topics relevant to sociolinguistics, such as language and identity and language and power, have been moved to Chapter 13 (Language and Culture).
File 10.1 (Language Varieties) now includes all the information on different types of language varieties that had been scattered throughout previous versions of the chapter.
File 10.2 (Variation at Different Levels of Linguistic Structure) has been expanded and now includes more examples and discussion.
File 10.3 (Factors Influencing Variation: Regional and Geographic Factors) has been expanded to include an in-depth case study of American English dialects, looking at particular features of six major U.S. dialect areas.
File 10.4 (Factors Influencing Variation: Social Factors) now combines the discussion of all the social factors influencing dialect variation into one section, so that they can be more easily compared. Each section has been updated to include more-recent studies. The section on ethnic variation now includes Chicano and Lumbee English in addition to African-American English.
The case studies that used to appear as a separate file have now been integrated into the text. Labov’s study on /r/-lessness in department stores now appears in Section 10.4.2; his study of Martha’s Vineyard now appears in File 13.1 (Language and Identity).
File 10.5 (Practice) now includes exercises that involve analyzing collected data from variationist studies with respect to the factors discussed in the chapter.
Chapter 11: Language Change
File 11.1 (Language Contact) now includes a short section introducing intertwined (bilingual mixed) languages.
File 11.2 (Borrowings into English) now appears before the files on pidgins and creoles. This file’s outline format was changed to a more text-like format. Information about external events that led to lexical borrowing into English has been added (taken from material that used to appear in the Language Change chapter).
File 11.5 (Societal Multilingualism) is a new file introducing societal multilingualism, code-switching, and diglossia.
File 11.6 (Language Endangerment and Language Death) is a new file introducing issues related to language endangerment and language death.
Chapter 12: Language Change
The IPA has been incorporated into the chapter.
File 12.2 (Language Relatedness) now presents a more comprehensive look at language relatedness in addition to presenting the family tree and wave models. The wave model diagram has been updated.
The discussion in File 12.3 (Sound Change) on conditioned versus unconditioned sound change has been clarified.
File 12.7 (Reconstruction: Internal Reconstruction vs. Comparative Reconstruction) now encompasses both internal and comparative reconstruction (parts of old Files 12.4 and 12.9) and appears directly before File 12.8 (Practice).
A flowchart, similar to those that appear in the phonology and morphology chapters, has been added to the discussion of solving comparative reconstruction problems in File 12.7.
The comparative reconstruction exercises are now part of File 12.8.
The file on milestones in the internal and external history of English has been removed. Much of the discussion of particular events that have influenced English historically now appears in Chapter 11 on Language Contact. The information on internal reconstruction appears in File 12.7.
Chapter 13: Language and Culture
This chapter is an expanded version of the old chapter Language in a Wider Context.
File 13.1 (Language and Identity) has been added as a discussion of how language can be used as a marker and an element of identity. In addition, it includes information on how identity can be studied, and it contains the case study of Martha’s Vineyard that used to appear in the Language Variation chapter.
File 13.2 (Language and Power) has been added. It includes elements of the discussion of language and power that used to appear in the files on Gender Variation and An Official Language for the United States.
File 13.3 (Language and Thought) consolidates and updates the previous files on the Whorf Hypothesis and Color Terms, and it explores modern conceptions of the principle of linguistic relativity.
File 13.4 (Writing Systems) now includes discussion of the role of writing in developing culture. It also has been reorganized to make the distinction between meaning-based versus sound-based writing systems clearer. Some terminology has been updated to better reflect current thought on writing systems.
Chapter 14: Animal Communication
The chapter has been restructured in order to clarify the distinction between natural animal communication systems and attempts to teach animals to use human language.
File 14.1 (Communication and Language) now covers the design features only with respect to animal communication systems. A general introduction of design features is now found in Chapter 1. Examples from a variety of animals have been added.
File 14.2 (Animal Communication in the Wild) contains content from the previous file The Birds and the Bees. Primate communication in the wild has been added to the file. The section on bird communication has been expanded.
File 14.3 (Can Animals Be Taught Language?) contains material from the previous file Primate Studies.
Chapter 15: Language and Computers
File 15.1 (Speech Synthesis) has been updated and now includes a discussion of concatenative synthesis.
File 15.2 (Automatic Speech Recognition) is a new file covering the noisy channel model and components of automatic speech recognition systems as well as applications and issues in automatic speech recognition.
Chapter 16: Practical Applications
This is a new chapter that contains material explaining how a background in linguistics can be applied to language education, speech-language pathology, audiology, law, advertising, code-breaking, and the further study of linguistics.