19.2772, Review: General Linguistics: Bieswanger & Becker (2008)

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Date: 11-Sep-2008
From: Dinha Gorgis < gorgis_3 at yahoo.co.uk >
Subject: Introduction to English Linguistics

 

	
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From: Dinha Gorgis [gorgis_3 at yahoo.co.uk]
Subject: Introduction to English Linguistics

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AUTHORS: Bieswanger, Markus; Becker, Annette
TITLE: Introduction to English Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Narr
YEAR: 2008 

Dinha T. Gorgis, Jadara University, Irbid, Jordan

REVIEWER'S NOTE
The book, presented in a user-friendly English and intended for beginners in
English linguistics, is a second edition which welcomes ''comments and
suggestions for future editions'' (Preface ix). The review that follows, based on
over a three-decade personal teaching experience, will accordingly observe what
newcomers to a linguistics course need to know before they intend to major in
linguistics. Although the authors believe that the textbook does not require any
previous knowledge [of the field], it is my contention that some knowledge of
basic English grammar is necessary, particularly where English is taught as a
foreign/second language.

SUMMARY
Bieswanger and Becker divide their book into nine chapters, each of which ends
with an annotated bibliography save the last, named ''Appendix'', which includes
key answers to exercises suggested in chapters 2-8. Chapter 1 (pp. 1-9) is a
brief introduction that starts with the definition of linguistics, its main
branches, and some central concepts used in the field. Perhaps because Ferdinand
de Saussure is often called the father of modern (structural) linguistics in
many parts of the world, particularly Europe, the authors introduce his
dichotomies to the exclusion of paradigmatic vs. syntagmatic relations, a
distinction illustrated (p. 112) without acknowledgement. However, a brief
mention of 'functionalism' (as an extension of Saussurian structuralism) and
'formalism' (i.e. generativism) is made in a couple of paragraphs.

Chapter 2 (pp. 11-38) is a brief history of English.  In this overview, four
periods are distinguished, viz. OE (c 450-c1150), ME (c1150-c1500), Early Modern
English (c1500-c1700), and Modern English (c1700- present). At the outset of the
chapter, the authors justify their inclusion of the language history in an
introductory book on grounds that history ''can provide explanation for many
features and irregularities of contemporary English''(p. 12). Prior to talking
about OE dialects and their origins, some mention is made about the Celts
(aboriginals) and the Romans (invaders) of the British Isles. Latin, in
particular, is said to have influenced ''Germanic dialects before the Germanic
tribes left the Continent for Britain'' (p. 15). Obviously, this influence became
more extensive with the arrival of Roman Christian missionaries from the end of
the sixth c. A.D. English, a Germanic language and member of the Indo-European
family, is attested to have had its first written form in Roman script almost a
century later. So ME era may be said to have started with the Norman Conquest
which had a great impact on the development of English. French influence is
crystal clear because ''most administrative and religious material was written in
French or Latin'' (p. 21). OE and ME are best associated with Beowulf, a heroic
poem, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a collection of 24 stories. What's
important for a student of linguistics to know is that English had been
gradually losing its inflections and becoming a more analytical language.

Undoubtedly, Early Modern English is remarkable, simply because the introduction
of printing to England facilitated the spread of the visible word; King James
Bible and Shakespeare's monumental works are but two examples worth mentioning.
The impact during the Renaissance had been enormous. English extended its
vocabulary borrowing to a multitude of languages. Spelling became more regular
and grammar well established. The vowel system, however, had undergone
considerable changes since the 14th c. This change is known to linguists as the
Great Vowel Shift, where long vowels of ME were either raised or diphthongized
and short vowels rounded and/or centralized (cf. pp. 27-28).

Unlike ME or Early Modern English, Modern English is not associated with any
historical landmark. ''The year 1700 is usually set as the beginning of the
Modern English period ... [which] can be called the period of lost inflection''
(pp. 28-29). Without going into further details, one may conclude that English,
once developing within the territories of the British Isles and beyond, due to
colonization  and language contact, is today a global language which will very
likely ''permit different changes to happen'' (p. 30) as long as it is used by
over two billion speakers (cf. Crystal 2003).

Chapter 3: Phonetics and Phonology (pp. 39-73) starts with a definition of
phonetics, its three branches (articulatory, acoustic and auditory), and their
relations to phonology. Like many introductory textbooks on English
pronunciation, phonetics and phonology or language/linguistics, e.g. Roach
(2000), Gimson (2001),
O 'Connor (1980), Fromkin et al. (2006), among many others, Bieswanger and
Becker focus on articulatory phonetics because of its practical applications to
the teaching and learning of pronunciation. So for both descriptive and
pedagogical purposes they utilize the traditional drawings (adapted from O'Grady
et al. 2004) to show parts of the speech apparatus and their workings. Also
following the tradition, the authors provide a description and classification of
consonants in terms of voicing (also called fortis vs. lenis contrast), place
and manner of articulation. Likewise, a three-part articulatory description is
provided for the vowels, viz. height of the tongue, part of the tongue involved
in the production, and shape of the lips, i.e. whether rounded or unrounded.
Received Pronunciation (RP) and General American (GenAm) vowels are identified
with reference to Daniel Jones's Cardinal vowel chart (p. 49) as well as the IPA
vowel chart (p.55). RP is accordingly shown to have 12 pure (simple) vowels
whereas GenAm 11, understandably lacking a short, rounded and mid-low vowel as
in 'pot'. (Unfortunately, the corresponding GenAm vowel given in the chart (p.
56) is the same as the low RP vowel /a:/ (cf. pp. 55; 60), which is not the case
as a matter of fact.) However, eight diphthongs, divided into two groups, viz.
closing (both fronting, backing) and centering, are suggested for  RP (p.58).
GenAm lacks the three centering diphthongs because it is described as rhotic,
i.e. an r-pronouncing variety, which also differs in the pronunciation of [ou].

The domain of phonology, the study of sound patterns, is divided into segmental
and suprasegmental. Segmental phonology is concerned with consonants, vowels and
diphthongs as phonemes, which stand in opposition (or contrast) and signal a
difference in meaning when occurring in minimal pairs. In contradistinction to
phones, phonemes are abstract phonological units which are limited in number.
The phoneme is a family of sounds, each of which is called an allophone. These
allophones are said to be in complementary distribution. For example, where a
dark [l] in RP occurs, a clear one does not. Nevertheless, variants (members) of
the same phoneme may be in free variation, in which case meaning does not change
as a result of substituting one allophone for another. This, however, could be
variety or language-specific. 
Such variants (actual speech sounds) are the output of phonological rules which
operate on phonemic forms (mental entities) as their input (cf. p. 63). The
phonemes, already described by adopting a three-part articulatory method and
established via the minimal pair technique, may also be described and
differentiated from each other by utilizing distinctive features and hence the
formation of a natural class of sounds.

Suprasegmental phonology is taken by the authors to include not only prosody,
viz. stress, rhythm, tone and intonation, but also syllable structure and
phonotactics, including consonant clusters (cf. pp. 64-66). English, as a
stress-timed language, differs from syllable-timed languages in that its
sentence stress ''depends to a large part on the rhythm, i.e. on the distribution
of stressed syllables in a sentence or an utterance'' (p. 67). This is best
observed in connected speech where certain sounds get reduced and receive weak
stress. In connected speech, certain sounds undergo assimilation, mainly of the
regressive type in English, or elision.

Morphology, the topic of chapter 4, studies the internal structure of words
which are said to be ''stored in our mental lexicon as lexical entries, or
lexemes'' (p. 77) along with information about their grammatical properties. New
content words are created by applying abstract rules which form part of the
speakers' linguistic competence, i.e. the internalized linguistic knowledge, but
linguists ''differ in their views as to whether the rules [including stress] are
stored together with individual lexemes or separately'' (p. 78). Words, however,
either belong to the open (lexical) class, and are often called content words,
or to the closed (grammatical) class, and are often called function words. Like
the phoneme in phonology, the morpheme is a unit of linguistic analysis in
morphology. Whereas the phoneme is meaningless, but differentiates meaning, the
morpheme is said to constitute the smallest meaningful unit, which may be either
free, e.g. {book}, or bound, e.g. the plural {s} in books. Bound morphemes are
termed affixes, most common of which are the prefixes and suffixes. English has
both inflectional and derivational suffixes. While the former are quite limited
in number in present-day English and do not change the grammatical category of
words when attached to the base morpheme, as in {book}+{s}, the latter are
numerous, highly productive, able to change the grammatical category each time
one suffix is added to the base, e.g. {friend} (N) + {ly}= friendly (Adj),
{quick} (Adj) + {ly} = quickly (Adv), {link} (V) + {age} = linkage (N), etc.,
and hence enriching the lexicon by time. Like the phoneme, the morpheme has
members (variants) called allomorphs, most of which are phonologically
conditioned. For example, the plural {s} is realized differently in different
contexts and hence variability in pronunciation. Compounding is another major
productive area of word formation in English, but other processes, e.g.
blending, clipping, back formation, the extensive use of acronyms and the like,
all add up rapidly and constantly to the language vocabulary stock.

Chapter 5 (pp. 99-135) is about syntax, ''the branch of linguistics that seeks to
describe the rules which enable us to recognize and generate an unlimited number
of [well-formed phrases, clauses and sentences]... from a limited set of means''
(p. 100). So right from the beginning, the authors introduce the beginner to
Chomsky's 'competence' vs. 'performance' dichotomy, his
principles-and-parameters framework and the minimalist program with casual
reference to English, French and Italian. Before introducing X-bar theory and
its application, an attempt is made to introduce syntactic (grammatical)
categories and their distribution in terms of phrasal constituent tests and
branching trees, including bracketing, and the unacknowledged (originally)
Saussurian 'paradigmatic' vs. 'syntagmatic' relations. The major part of the
chapter is illustrative of the X-bar schema which accounts for phrases and their
heads, including non-branching phrases. Noun phrases are expanded by attaching
an adjective phrase as an adjunct phrase and hence the use of so-called left-
and right-adjunction. The merge operation, involving combinations of
constituents which have binary branches, ''may be repeated over and over again to
form phrases and sentences'' (p. 119). This operation, called 'recursivity',
'recursiveness', or 'recursion' in the pertinent literature, ''may also be
applied to phrases created on the basis of the coordinated schema'' (p. 122). The
same operation is said to work for sentences once interpreted as phrases with
heads. The head in this case is a functional category called 'inflection' ( I ).
As such, the traditional binary branching of S into NP and VP is dispensed with.
Apart from declarative structures, the so-called 'transformations' are obtained
via 'the move operation' in accordance with the X-bar schema. This operation
''transforms existing syntactic structures by moving elements into new positions''
(p. 125). The chapter concludes with a section on thematic roles, e.g. agent,
theme, experiencer, goal, etc. (See Saeed 2003, chapter 6, for a better
identification). These roles specify the meaning relations between predicates
and arguments, whose combination is called 'argument structure' (cf. p. 128).
Predicates in English require at least one argument which may be overt
(explicit) or covert (implicit/understood). The preposition within a
prepositional phrase is claimed to assign a thematic role to the complement noun
phrase (cf. p. 130) although falling outside the argument structure. Perhaps the
authors do not wish the beginner to confuse between theta roles (which are
syntactic structures reflecting positions in the argument structure) and
semantic relations (which are semantic descriptions) and hence the
syntactic-semantic interface.
Chapter 6 (pp. 137-160) is devoted to semantics, the study of linguistic meaning
and meaning relations among expressions we call words, phrases and sentences.
Because linguists do not know much about how ''meaning is represented in the
human mind ... many questions regarding meaning are still unanswered'' (p. 146).
The authors, however, attempt to introduce beginners to the complex issues of
meaning within the domains of lexical and sentential semantics. The former
covers an overview of common concepts such as synonymy, antonymy & some of its
basic types, homophony & homography, polysemy and lexical ambiguity.
Additionally, three pairs of terms, viz. connotation ~ denotation, sense ~
reference and intension ~ extension are seen to be of paramount importance in
(structural) semantic analysis (cf. p. 146). Lexical semanticists have also been
engaged in exploring lexical fields on the assumption that words can also form a
network of semantic relations and hence their use of the terms 'hyponymy' and
'hypernomy' to establish vocabulary hierarchies. But since the 80's, cognitive
semantics has been involved in accounting for meaning in terms of
conceptualization and categorization on the assumption that language forms ''part
of our cognitive ability through which we organize and classify all aspects of
our experience'' (p. 149) and hence the use of  'prototype' as a working
hypothesis. The second half of semantics displays meaning relations among
sentences, the most important of which are paraphrase, entailment and contradiction.
Meaning is further explored in chapter 7 (pp. 161-180) from a pragmatic
perspective. Pragmatics can simply be defined as the study of meaning in social
context. Such a straightforward and simple definition sets apart this field of
inquiry into the nature of meaning from semantics though they sometimes share
similar interests and concerns. To approach meaning in interaction, the authors
relate language to culture and focus on cross-cultural communication which
requires pragmatic competence, interpreted as ''the ability to use language
appropriately within social contexts'' (p. 163). Deixis is one of the central
issues in pragmatics because misuse of deictic expressions may lead to meaning
loss and hence communication breakdown. Five basic types of deixis, which
speakers use in contexts of situation, may be accompanied by non-verbal signals,
in which case the deictic centre is easily identified in face-to-face
interactions. These types are commonly known as person, place, time, discourse
and social deixis. But successful communication may be hindered without
observing Grice's 'Cooperative Principle' which subsumes four maxims, viz.
quantity, quality, relation (or relevance) and manner. However, if ''one or more
of these maxims are not being observed [i.e. violated] .... this gives rise to
conversational implicatures'' (p. 169). In this case, communicators go beyond
what is being said and make use of their knowledge repertoire(s) in search for
inferences. Also central to pragmatic research is the heated topic of 'speech
acts'. Utterances are generally categorized into five speech act classes, viz.
representatives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations. In order
for a speech act within any class to be performed successfully by a speaker,
felicity conditions must be met. These are: preparatory, sincerity and essential
conditions. Speech act theorists distinguish between direct speech acts,
corresponding to the traditional sentence types, and indirect speech acts which
deviate from the normal form-function sentence type. Towards the end of the
chapter, appeal is made to Conversation Analysis in order to support the claims
made by pragmaticists, including 'politeness' as an additional maxim. (See, e,g.
Leech 1983).
Chapter 8 (pp. 181-205) extends the topic of language-use to sociolinguistics, a
field of inquiry that relates language to society with focus on the study of
''the effects of extralinguistic factors on the linguistic choices we make'' (p.
182) and hence the description  and explanation of linguistic variation. In
order to avoid the problems associated with the delimitation of language and
dialect, in particular, the term 'variety' is used neutrally. In so doing, four
types of varieties are distinguished: standard, regional, social and functional
varieties. The 'standard' is a superposed variety which is usually used in
print, education and administration. Pronunciation varieties of the 'standard'
are accents, viewed by linguists as neither superior nor inferior to each other.
Functional varieties include styles and registers, terms between which clear
boundaries cannot be drawn. Generally, however, styles may refer to degrees of
formality in sending verbal messages. Official letters and documents, for
example, are normally written in formal style, almost always characterized by a
careful choice of syntactic structures and vocabulary. Registers may also be
formal, but after all they constitute 'jargons' because they exhibit specialized
sets of vocabulary used only by particular groups in certain situations (cf. p.
188). Regional varieties, whose evolvement is largely determined by geographical
considerations, have been the object of study by dialectologists since the
middle of the 19th c. Their efforts have also extended to the examination of
certain aspects of social variation. Sociolinguists have been working on
differences in pronunciation, for example, drawing isoglosses on maps and
eventually coming up with linguistic atlases, e.g. Labov 2006. Social varieties,
also called 'sociolects', are identified on the basis of socio-economic status
(or class), ethnicity, gender and age, among others. Gender is given special
attention and space towards the close of the chapter. Fig. 8.7 (pp. 201-202)
offers an interesting view of some of the most important guidelines on
non-sexist usage in English.  

EVALUATION
The observation I made at the outset of this review seems valid for a number of
cases. For example, a ''finite verb'' (p. 123) in English cannot be understood
without being juxtaposed to the non-finite, unless the authors take it for
granted that their German students already know the distinction. Comparison with
German, and some other three languages, is justified for the sake of
clarification, but this strategy presupposes some basic knowledge of the
grammars of those and other languages. Perhaps Latin or Semitic languages would
be better examples to contrast with the highly inflected OE, though this all
depends where the book is taught and by whom, in which case the instructor is
indispensable. 

Some instructors may feel that the brief history of English, though useful, is
altogether irrelevant and can be dispensed with for the following reasons: (1)
very little is utilized in the subsequent chapters; the authors' justification
for its utility is not brought down to earth; (2) many universities offer a
separate course, often at a more advanced stage. The drawbacks of this chapter
are crystal clear; for why are linguistic concepts, e.g. morphology, inflection,
case, syntax, etc., introduced to a beginner prior to their explanation in the
following chapters? Does the beginner primarily know how to pronounce historical
vowels, specify their values and locate them on a vowel chart so that an
understanding of the Great Vowel Shift (p. 28) is in place? If a ''phantom''
letter is not introduced earlier, how can the authors ask the beginner to give
examples and figure out 'ghoti' (p. 72) without referring them to historical
facts? This, to me, is putting the cart before the horse. Just imagine a
beginning student being presented with 23 sources in the bibliography to a brief
history. Do we expect instructors to recommend further reading and ask their
''beginning'' students to write projects and/or give seminars by consulting
standard books, e.g. Baugh & Cable (2002) or Fennell (2001), which relate
history to 'sociolinguistics', a term only explained in the last chapter? All in
all, the authors' choice of references in every single bibliography is
unfortunate for at least two reasons: (1) Many references, especially those
introduced after the first few pages of the book, are too advanced for a
beginning student, e.g. Chomsky (1957), also documented later (p. 134), though
marking ''the foundation of generative linguistics'' (p. 9), or Harris's (2003)
highly argumentative book on Saussure and his interpreters. Even in later
chapters, a source book like Chomsky's (1995) should not be recommended; rather,
one may suggest Radford (2004) or Carnie (2007) as interesting introductions to
generative syntax. Alternatives are available. Therefore, I suggest comparable
introductory textbooks, which are equally easily accessible and written in ''
user-friendly English'', e.g. Aitchison (1995). Fromkin, et al. (2006), already
documented in the bibliography to chapter one, is a reasonable suggestion, but
not Fromkin (2003), which covers core areas of linguistics from a generative
perspective. Labov's contribution to the field of sociolinguistics is
acknowledged (cf. p. 193) but, unlike others, none of his works, e.g. Labov
(1966; 1972; and especially 2006) are documented. Strangely, we find Cruse
(2003) on meaning in semantics and pragmatics (introduced later), but not his
_Lexical Semantics_ (1986) which is highly relevant to lexical relations
presented in the chapter on 'semantics'. 

For many linguists, 'phonetics' is a science on its own, with a long-standing
history, not a branch of linguistics although Ladefoged (2001) has a chapter
named ''Linguistic Phonetics''. Its introduction as part of the linguistic
enterprise, often in conjunction with phonology, is more often than not
pedagogically oriented. Perhaps we are still fascinated by Kenneth Pike's famous
statement: ''Phonetics provides raw material; phonology cooks it.'' Fair enough,
but what is unfair in the book is the total negligence of American structural
linguistics since Bloomfield, at least. Nor is the field of linguistics
justified to be a science like other sciences (cf. Crystal 1971; Robins 1989,
among others). Surprisingly enough, the authors never mention anything about the
acquisition of English in relation to Universal Grammar while we feel they are
advocates of the generative trend led by Chomsky. I suggest that a short chapter
on psycholinguistics, comparable to their 'sociolinguistics', be included in a
future edition.

To my thinking, a number of specific points require explanation and/or
reconsideration:

1. The term ''sibilant'' (p. 52), associated with ''fricatives'' and previously
mentioned (cf. p.45), is left unexplained. 
2. Since GenAm is frequently referred to and contrasted with RP (no longer used,
but often replaced by Southern British English) in chapter 3, I suggest that
Yavas (2006) be referred to and documented.
3. Consonants clusters are very briefly noted along with constraints imposed on
them despite their importance in teaching English as a second/foreign language.
I guess beginners would be glad to read about consonant distribution, clustering
and constraints on their combination in Gimson (2001), fortunately mentioned in
the bibliography but without referring to it in the text. And instead of
mentioning Roach (2001), also not referred to therein, the authors could have
listed Roach (2000) which has an interesting chapter on syllable and the role of
consonant clusters in determining syllable boundary. 
4. In the absence of supporting evidence and documentation, as is the case
elsewhere, recent studies are said to suggest that vowels are reduced to [i] and
[u] (cf. p. 68) without saying that these sounds are often called 'archiphonemes'.
5. Partial and total (or complete) types of assimilation (pp. 69-70) are
contrasted without offering examples.
6. The authors admit that ''circumfixes'' (p. 84) do not exist in English.
Although German examples are provided by displaying the three morphemes: prefix
+ base + suffix, glossed as pairs, viz. say ~ said, ask ~ asked, or as single
words, viz. ''given'', a non-German beginner would not be able to figure out the
meaning of each of the three morphemes.
7. I suggest that curly braces be used for enclosing morphemes and their
allomorphs rather than square brackets (cf. p. 85) which are commonly used to
enclose phonetic material in contradistinction to slashes used for phonemes. At
the time 'zero-allomorph' is mentioned (p. 88), we find nothing about
'replacive' or 'alternating' allomorphs, though infixes are said to exist only
in swear words (cf. p. 84, but see Palmer 1971).
8. The term ''lexeme'' is not made clear. One wonders whether it is an entry in
our mental lexicon (p. 77), i.e. void of any affix, or is ''formed by adding an
affix to an existing word'' (p. 88). Would Arabic (mental) lexicon, for instance,
contain only consonantal skeletons as entries, or what?
9. If words are traditionally taken to be ''combined into phrases'' (p. 107), how
would the authors be able to convince the beginner that ''Anna'' and ''sang'' (p.
110) are NP and VP, respectively? This, of course, extends to pronouns, AP, e.g.
''big'' (pp. 116f.) and ADVP, e.g. ''soundly'' (p. 126). Perhaps the authors take it
for granted that it is the instructor's job to further explain this, among other
things, in terms of non-branching phrases within X-bar theory.

Last, but not least, the publisher is to be acknowledged with admiration for
both the typesetting and error-free text although the index requires a second
look. And whatever I have said above, though worth considering in future
editions, does not necessarily apply to all settings. Beginners, after all,
would find the book enjoyable. 

REFERENCES
Aitchison, J. 1995. _Linguistics: An introduction_. 4th edn. London: Hodder and
Stoughton.  

Baugh, Albert C. &  Thomas Cable. 2002. _A history of the English language_. 5th
edn. London: Routledge. 

Carnie, Andrew. 2007. _Syntax: A generative introduction_. 2nd edn. Oxford:
Blackwell. 

Chomsky, Noam. 1957. _Syntactic structures_. The Hague: Mouton. 

Chomsky, Noam. 1995. _The minimalist program_. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

Cruse, Alan. 1986. _Lexical semantics_.  Cambridge: CUP.

Cruse, Alan. 2004. _Meaning in language: An introduction to semantics and
pragmatics_. Oxford: OUP.  

Crystal, David. 2003. _English as a global language_. 2nd edn. London: Penguin.

Crystal, David. 1971. _Linguistics_. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 

Gimson, Alfred C. 2001. _Gimson's pronunciation of English_. 6th edn. Revised by
Alan Cruttenden. London: Arnold. 

Fennell, Barbara. 2001. _A history of English: A sociolinguistic approach_.
Oxford: Blackwell. 

Fromkin, Victoria A. et al. 2006. _An introduction to language_.  8th edn.
Boston: Heinle. 

Fromkin, Victoria A. (ed.). 2001. _Linguistics: An introduction to linguistic
theory_. Maiden, MA: Blackwell. 

Harris, Roy. 2003. _Saussure and his interpreters_. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press. 

Labov, William; Sharon Ash; and Charles Boberg. 2006. _Atlas of North American
English: Phonetics, phonology and sound change_. Berlin/New York: Mouton de
Gruyter. 

Labov, William. 1972.  _Sociolinguistic patterns_. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press. 

Labov, William. 1966. _The social stratification of English in New York  City_.
Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Ladefoged, Peter. 2001. _A course in phonetics_. 4th edn. New York: Harcourt
Brace, Jovanovich.

Leech, Geoffrey N. 1983. _Principles of pragmatics_. London: Longman. 

O'Connor, J.D. 1980. _Better English pronunciation_. 2nd edn. Cambridge: CUP.

O'Grady, William et al. (eds.). 2004. _Contemporary linguistics: An
introduction_. 5th edn. Boston: St. Martin's. 

Palmer, Frank. 1971. _Grammar_. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Radford, Andrew. 2004. _English syntax: An introduction_. Cambridge: CUP. 

Roach, Peter. 2000. _English phonetics and phonology: A practical course_. 3rd
edn. Cambridge: CUP. 

Roach, Peter. 2001. _Phonetics_. Oxford: OUP. 

Robins, R. H. 1989. _General linguistics: An introductory survey_. 4th edn.
London: Longman. 

Saeed, John I. 2003. _Semantics_. Maldon, MA: Blackwell.  

Yavas, Mehmet. 2006. _Applied English phonology_. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Dinha T. Gorgis has been teaching linguistics at a number of Arab universities
since 1975, and is currently professor of linguistics at Jadara University in
Jordan. He is editor-in-chief of Sayyab Translation Journal,  WATA Translation
and Languages Journal (online), and co-editor for Linguistik and The Translation
Journal (both online). He has reviewed a number of books for the LINGUIST List,
written three book notices for eLanguage (forthcoming), and is now working on
the translation of English anger metaphors into Arabic and Arabic collocations
into English. 

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LINGUIST List: Vol-19-2772