Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics

Citation

Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University. (2022). Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics (13th ed.). Ohio State University Press.

Chapter Summary

The thirteenth edition runs to 784 large-format pages with about 520 illustrations. Its seventeen chapters are divided into short, numbered "files": each chapter opens with an overview file (File X.0, usually titled "What Is …?") and closes with a Practice file of exercises and further reading. The back matter holds answers to the example exercises, a glossary, a selected bibliography, language and subject indexes, and IPA and American English sound charts. The department's website adds sound files, a page of links for every chapter and an errata list; an answer key is available to instructors only.

Chapter 1: Introduction

The opening chapter asks what language is and what speakers know when they know one, separating that knowledge from "other (non-essential) aspects" of knowing a language. It then sets out the design features of language and the difference between spoken and signed modalities. The release notes for this edition say the design-features file now explains arbitrary and nonarbitrary aspects of language more clearly.

Chapters 2–3: Phonetics; Phonology

Phonetics covers how speech sounds are written down, the articulation of English consonants and vowels, sounds of other languages, suprasegmental features, acoustic phonetics and the phonetics of signed languages. Phonology moves from phonotactic constraints and foreign accents to phonemes and allophones, phonological rules and implicational laws, and ends with a file on how to solve phonology problems. For this edition the treatment of complementary and overlapping distribution was expanded and an exercise on a tone language was added.

Chapters 4–5: Morphology; Syntax

Morphology treats words and the lexicon, morphological processes, morphological types of languages, the hierarchical structure of derived words and morphological analysis. It is the most heavily revised chapter of this edition: the notion of the lexeme and a section on allomorphy (including suppletion) were added, along with new sections on templatic morphology, suprasegmental morphology and morphological metathesis. Syntax runs from basic ideas and syntactic properties through constituency and categories to constructing a grammar; new sections cover syntactic non-constituents and nongenerative rule systems.

Chapters 6–7: Semantics; Pragmatics

Semantics separates lexical semantics, the meanings of words, from compositional semantics, which gets two files: the meanings of sentences and how meanings are put together. Pragmatics treats language in context, rules of conversation, drawing conclusions, speech acts and presupposition.

Chapters 8–9: Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics

The acquisition chapter covers theories of acquisition, the child's acquisition of sounds, then of morphology, syntax and word meaning, how adults talk to young children, and bilingual acquisition. Psycholinguistics covers language and the brain, language disorders, speech production and perception, lexical access, sentence processing and experimental methods.

Chapters 10–13: Language Variation; Language and Culture; Language Contact; Language Change

Four chapters place language in society and history. Variation covers language varieties, variation at each level of structure, regional and social factors, and language and identity. Language and Culture covers linguistic anthropology, language and thought, language and power, politeness and ethnography. Language Contact covers borrowings into English, pidgins, creoles (a file rewritten for this edition), societal multilingualism, language endangerment and death, and case studies. Language Change covers language relatedness, change in sound, morphology, syntax and meaning, and internal and comparative reconstruction.

Chapters 14–15: Animal Communication; Writing Systems

Animal communication compares communication with language, surveys communication in the wild and asks whether animals can be taught language. The writing chapter covers writing and culture, types of writing systems and how writing systems developed over time.

Chapters 16–17: Language and Computers; Practical Applications

The computational chapter covers speech synthesis, automatic speech recognition, communicating with computers and machine translation, and the publisher notes new material on deep learning and artificial neural networks alongside corpus linguistics and other areas of the field. The last chapter answers "What can you do with linguistics?" with files on language education, speech-language pathology and audiology, forensic linguistics, language in advertising, codes and code-breaking, and being a linguist.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–3: Language, Phonetics and Phonology

• Design features of language: properties such as arbitrariness that the book uses to characterize human language and compare it with other communication systems.
• Language modality: the channel through which a language is produced and perceived, spoken or signed.
• Phonemes and allophones: the contrastive sound units of a language and their predictable variants, found through complementary and overlapping distribution.
• Phonotactic constraints: restrictions on how sounds combine, used to explain foreign accents.

Chapters 4–7: Structure and Meaning

• Lexeme and allomorphy: a word in the abstract and the different forms a morpheme can take.
• Morphological types of languages: the classification of languages by how they build words.
• Syntactic constituency: groups of words that behave as units, tested against non-constituents.
• Compositional semantics: how the meaning of a sentence is built from the meanings of its parts.
• Speech acts and presupposition: what utterances do, and what they take for granted.

Chapters 8–17: Language in Mind, Society and Use

• Lexical access: how speakers and hearers retrieve words from the mental lexicon.
• Language varieties: the regional and social forms of a language and their link to identity.
• Pidgins and creoles: contact languages and the social settings in which they arise.
• Comparative reconstruction: recovering features of an ancestor language by comparing its descendants.
• Computational linguistics: speech synthesis and recognition, machine translation and corpus methods.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Modular design. The book is built from self-contained files, so an instructor can assign File 3.2 without 3.4, or the variation chapter without the acquisition chapter. The press and the department present this flexibility as the book's distinguishing feature, and it suits courses that sample only some areas.
• Breadth. Beyond the core areas it gives full chapters to psycholinguistics, language contact, animal communication, writing systems, computational linguistics and careers.
• Built-in practice and method. Every chapter ends with a Practice file, answers to example exercises are printed in an appendix, and the phonology and morphology chapters each include a file on analysis method ("How to Solve Phonology Problems", "Morphological Analysis"). The sound files online support the phonetics chapter.
• Sign languages throughout. Signed languages are treated in the introduction (modality) and have their own phonetics file, rather than being confined to a single section.
• Actively maintained. The department publishes detailed release notes and an errata page, and the thirteenth edition revised several files, including correcting a paragraph in File 8.1 that had misreported experimental results.

Limitations

• Size and fragmentation. At 784 pages the book cannot be read cover to cover in one term, and the file format can make chapters feel like collections of short units rather than a continuous argument. Students need the instructor's selection.
• American English base. The sound charts at the back cover American English, and the phonetics chapter begins with English consonants and vowels before turning to the world's languages; students working on other varieties of English will need to adapt the examples.
• Answers partly restricted. Only example exercises are answered in the book; the full answer key is restricted to instructors, so self-study learners cannot check most Practice files.

Where It Fits in the Course

In this introductory linguistics list, Language Files is the broadest and most exercise-heavy of the general introductions. George Yule's The Study of Language covers a similar range in much shorter chapters and is the easier first read; Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams's An Introduction to Language and O'Grady and colleagues' Contemporary Linguistics are full-length survey textbooks that suit courses wanting continuous chapters rather than modular files. Language Files works well as the main text where a course spends time on problem-solving, or as a source of extra exercises alongside any of these.

For students going further, Radford and colleagues' Linguistics: An Introduction and the theory-driven Linguistics: An Introduction to Linguistic Theory show how hypotheses are stated and tested in the core areas, and Ray Jackendoff's Foundations of Language is a synthesis of the field for readers who already know the basics.

How to Use This Book

The book assumes no previous linguistics and suits a first course for majors or non-majors. A practical plan for a one-term course:

• Core: Chapter 1, then Chapters 2–7 in order (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics). Within each, read the overview file first and work at least part of the Practice file. Read "How to Solve Phonology Problems" and "Morphological Analysis" carefully before attempting problem sets.
• Choose by course focus: Chapters 8–9 for a cognitive emphasis; Chapters 10–13 for language in society and history; Chapters 14–17 for wider topics and career interests. Chapter 13 draws on the treatment of allomorphy in Chapter 4, so read Chapter 4 first.
• Alongside the text: listen to the sound files while working through the phonetics chapter and practise transcription with the IPA charts at the back. Check the errata page before relying on an exercise. Use the answers to example exercises as worked models, and compare other answers with classmates or the instructor.