Aronoff M., Rees-Miller J. (eds.) The Handbook of Linguistics

Blackwell Publishing, 2000. — 843 p. — (Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics).The Handbook of Linguistics is a general introductory volume designed to address this gap in knowledge about language. Presupposing no prior knowledge and its subdisciplines are about. The book was designed to be as nontechnical as possible, while at the same time serving as a repository for what is known about language as we enter the twenty-first century.
If The Handbook of Linguistics is to be regarded as authoritative, this will be in large part because of the identity of the authors of the chapters. We have recruited globally recognized leading figures to write each of the chapters. While the culture of academia is such that academic authors find it tremendously difficult to write anything for anyone other than their colleagues, our central editorial goal has been to avoid this pitfall. Our emphasis on the reader’s perspective sets The Handbook of Linguistics apart from other similar projects.
The place of the field of linguistics in academia has been debated since its inception. When we look at universities, we may find a linguistics department in either the social sciences or the humanities. When we look at the American government agencies that fund university research, we find that the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health all routinely award grants for research in linguistics. So where does linguistics belong? The answer is not in where linguistics is placed administratively, but rather in how linguists think. Here the answer is quite clear: linguists by and large view themselves as scientists and they view their field as a science, the scientific study of language. This has been true since the nineteenth century, when Max Mueller could entitle a book published in 1869 The Science of Language and the first chapter of that book The science of language one of the physical sciences.
The fact that linguistics is today defined as the scientific study of language carries with it the implicit claim that a science of language is possible, and this alone takes many by surprise. For surely, they say, language, like all human activity, is beyond the scope of true science. Linguists believe that their field is a science because they share the goals of scientific inquiry, which is objective (or more properly intersubjectively accessible) understanding. Once we accept that general view of science as a kind of inquiry, then it should be possible to have a science of anything, so long as it is possible to achieve intersubjectively accessible understanding of that thing. There are, of course, those who deny the possibility of such scientific understanding of anything, but we will not broach that topic here.
We now know that the possibility of scientific understanding depends largely on the complexity and regularity of the object of study. Physics has been so successful because the physical world is, relatively speaking, highly regular and not terribly complex. Human sciences, by contrast, have been much less successful and much slower to produce results, largely because human behavior is so complex and not nearly so regular as is the physical or even the biological world. Language, though, contrasts with other aspects of human behavior precisely in its regularity, what has been called its rule-governed nature. It is precisely this property of language and language-related behavior that has allowed for fairly great progress in our understanding of this delimited area of human behavior. Furthermore, the fact that language is the defining property of humans, that it is shared across all human communities and is manifested in no other species, means that by learning about language we will inevitably also learn about human nature.
Each chapter in this book is designed to describe to the general reader the state of our knowledge at the beginning of the twenty-first century of one aspect of human language. The authors of each chapter have devoted most of their adult lives to the study of this one aspect of language. Together, we believe, these chapters provide a broad yet detailed picture of what is known about language as we move into the new millennium. The chapters are each meant to be free-standing. A reader who is interested in how children acquire language, for example, should be able to turn to chapter 19 and read it profitably without having to turn first to other chapters for assistance. But the physical nature of a book entails that there be an order of presentation. We begin with general overview chapters that consider the origins of language as species-specific behavior and describe the raw material with which linguists work (languages of the world and writing systems), frame the discipline within its historical context, and look at how linguists acquire new data from previously undescribed languages (field linguistics). The book then turns to the traditional subdisciplines of linguistics. Here we have followed most linguistics books in starting from the bottom, grounding language first in the physical world of sound (phonetics) and moving up through the organization of sound in language (phonology), to the combination of sounds into words (morphology), and the combination of words into sentences (syntax). Meaning (semantics) usually comes next, on the grounds that it operates on words and sentences. These areas are traditionally said to form the core of linguistics, because they deal with the most formally structured aspects of language. Within the last few decades, however, linguists have come to realize that we cannot understand the most formally structured aspects of language without also understanding the way language is used to convey information (pragmatics) in conversation (discourse) and in literature, and the way language interacts with other aspects of society (sociolinguistics).Origins of Language
Languages of the World
Writing Systems
The History of Linguistics
Historical Linguistics
Field Linguistics
Linguistic Phonetics
Phonology
Morphology
The Lexicon
Syntax
Generative Grammar
Functional Linguistics
Typology
An Introduction to Formal Semantics
Pragmatics: Language and Communication
Discourse Analysis
Linguistics and Literature
First Language Acquisition
Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition: One Person with Two Languages
Multilingualism
Natural Sign Languages
Sociolinguistics
Neurolinguistics
Computational Linguistics
Applied Linguistics
Educational Linguistics
Linguistics and Reading
Clinical Linguistics
Forensic Linguistics
Translation
Language Planning