书籍介绍

Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, AN INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE, Tenth Edition, is appropriate for a variety of fields--including education, languages, psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, English, and teaching English as a Second Language (TESL)--at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. This completely updated edition retains the clear descriptions, humor, and seamless pedagogy that have made the book a perennial best-seller, while adding new information and exercises that render each topic fresh, engaging, and current.

Victoria Fromkin was Professor of Linguistics and a member of the faculty of the University of California, Department of Linguistics from 1966 until her death in 2000. She served as its chair from 1972-1976. Dr Fromkin published more than one hundred books, monographs and papers on topics concerned with phonetics, phonology, tone languages, African languages, speech errors, pro...

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精彩摘录

"In truth, human languages are without exception fully expressive, complete, and logical, as much as they were two hundred or two thousand years ago."
"Other hypotheses suggested ... that language originated from song as an expressive rather than a communicative need."
"There are no “primitive” languages—all languages are equally complex and equally capable of expressing any idea. The vocabulary of any lan- guage can be expanded to include new words for new concepts."
"It appears that the “un-Rule” is most productive for adjectives that are derived from verbs, such as unenlightened, unsimplified, uncharacterized, unauthorized, undistinguished, and so on. It also appears that most acceptable un- words have polysyllabic bases, and while we have unfit, uncool, unread"
"The plural of geek, when it was a new word in English, was geeks, not *geeken, although we are advised that some geeks wanted the plural of fax to be *faxen, like oxen, when fax entered the language as a shortened form of facsimile."
"peddle was derived from peddler on the mistaken assumption that the -er was the agentive suffix. Such words are called back-formations. The verbs hawk, stoke, swindle, and edit all came into the language as back-formations—of hawker, stoker, swindler, and editor. Pea was derived from a singular word"
"Dr. Seuss uses the rules of compounding when he explains “when tweetle beetles battle with paddles in a puddle, they call it a tweetle beetle puddle paddle battle.”"
"Amsel Greene collected errors made by her students in vocabulary-building classes and published them in a book called Pullet Surprises.4 The title is taken from a sentence written by one of her high school students: “In 1957 Eugene O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise.” What is most interesting about these"