27.1391, Review: General Ling: McGregor (2015)

Mon Mar 21 20:59:07 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1391. Mon Mar 21 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.1391, Review: General Ling: McGregor (2015)

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Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2016 16:57:32
From: Marcin Kuczok [marcin.kuczok at us.edu.pl]
Subject: Linguistics: An Introduction

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-1424.html

AUTHOR: William B McGregor
TITLE: Linguistics: An Introduction
SUBTITLE: Answer Key
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Marcin Kuczok, University of Silesia

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

INTRODUCTION

William B. McGregor’s “Linguistics. An Introduction” constitutes an
introductory course book on linguistics. The book is the fruit of the author’s
experience in teaching linguistics at the university level in 2002. His
intention in writing this 471-page volume is to create a new textbook for
students, one that will overcome the various drawbacks McGregor found in the
already existing course books. As he remarks in the preface to his book, these
include the manner of presentation, which often lacks a clear layout of
information, pedagogic philosophy, which hardly ever focuses on understanding
linguistic facts, the range and type of information presented, which are
usually limited to English, as well as the theoretical stance of being either
atheoretical or adopting only the generative-grammar framework. The work is a
revised edition of the version originally published in 2009 by Continuum
International Publishing Group. The textbook is accompanied with the 138-page
“Answer Key”, containing the author’s answers to the questions and exercises
from the course book.

SUMMARY

The book opens with an introductory chapter, which presents the notion of
language and explains certain basic concepts related to the study of language,
including the notion of linguistics, the nature of linguistic signs and the
design features of human language. The rest of the book is divided into three
parts, each of them containing five chapters. 

The first part is titled “Language: System and Structure”, and it deals with a
number of important terms of modern linguistics that pertain to the analysis
of the various levels of the structural organization of language considered in
itself and for itself. This approach to language study in John Lyons’ classic
textbook on linguistics, titled “Language and Linguistics. An Introduction”
(1981: 36-37) is called microlinguistics. The first chapter in this part of
McGregor’s work presents human language as a system of sounds, introducing the
problems studied by phonetics and phonology: the structure of the human vocal
tract, types of phones, elements of prosody, the study of phonemes and the
issue of transcription. The second chapter, titled “Structure of Words:
Morphology” deals with the notion of the word, as well as such linguistic
terms as ‘morphemes’, ‘allomorphs’ and ‘morphs’, and distinguishes between
derivational and inflectional morphology. The next chapter of McGregor’s book
is devoted to the lexicon. The problems discussed in this chapter revolve
around the various categories of words or parts-of-speech, and around
word-formation processes, the issue of idiomaticity of languages, as well as
taboo that gives rise to euphemisms and dysphemisms. The fourth chapter in
this part of the book presents the structure of sentences, which is the
subject studied as syntax. The author introduces the notion of sentence,
explains its hierarchical structure and presents the different syntactic
units, such as clauses and phrases, pointing to their functions within a
sentence. The last chapter in this section deals with the study of meaning.
Actually, McGregor presents the basic notions of two linguistic sub-branches
that are interested in the study of meaning: semantics and pragmatics. Thus,
the readers are made familiar with the issues of sense and reference, lexical
semantic relations, problems of literal and figurative meaning, the theory of
speech acts, as well as the co-operative principle and the nature of
presuppositions.

The second part of the book, titled “Language: A Human Phenomenon” contains
five chapters that focus on what can be called the macrolinguistic approach
(Lyons 1981: 36-37), that is, on the place of human language in the wider
contexts of human life and culture. The first chapter is devoted to
sociolinguistics: it discusses the phenomenon of regional varieties of
languages, as well as the influence of socio-economic status, gender, and
other factors on language. The author deals also with the issues of bilingual
communities, language shift and endangerment. The next chapter studies the
notions of text and discourse, pointing out the differences between them and
introducing a number of basic terms related to either text or discourse
analysis: genre, coherence, cohesion and spoken interaction. The chapter
titled “Psycholinguistics: Language, the Mind and the Brain” focuses on the
relationships between language and cognition, especially on the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis, as well as on language production and comprehension at the levels
of brain structures and mental processing. The aim of the next chapter is to
present the main problems of both first and second language acquisition,
guiding the reader through the various stages of language development in a
human being from his or her early childhood to maturity. The last chapter in
the second part of the book offers a comparison between human language and the
different means of communication discovered in the animal world. The chapter
undertakes also the problems of communication between people and animals, as
well as the question of the origins of human language.

The last part of the book is titled “Language: Uniformity and Diversity” and
the five chapters included in this section concentrate on the variety and
variation in languages across the world. The first chapter in this section
concerns the use of gestures in communication and the nature of sign
languages. The author presents primary sign languages used to communicate by
deaf people and alternate sign languages that can be found in communities of
hearing people that already have a spoken language. The following chapter
focuses on writing as an alternative medium of using human language. The
author offers an overview of the various writing systems in the world, both
past and present, and then highlights selected properties of the written
language, including electronic writing that appeared only recently, with the
spread of computers and birth of the Internet. In the chapter titled “Unity
and Diversity in Language Structure” McGregor presents the issue of language
universals and linguistic typology according to phonological, morphological
and syntactic properties of languages. The next chapter aims at analyzing the
phenomenon of language change. The author presents the causes and the main
directions of language evolution throughout the ages, including structural and
semantic changes. The last chapter in this section, which is the final chapter
of the whole book, constitutes a presentation of the various language families
in today’s world.

The accompanying booklet with the subtitle “Answer Key” contains sixteen
chapters that correspond to the chapters from the textbook and provide
solutions to the exercises that are included at the end of each chapter in the
book. As McGregor writes in the preface to the “Answer Key”, some of the
questions have obvious answers, while others are more or less open-ended. The
author suggests that any working solution provided by students should be
accepted since the aim of the exercises is to teach students how to solve
linguistic problems with the use of the knowledge presented during the course.
It is worth noticing that in the appendices the author gives examples of two
oral presentations that can be used as part of an introductory course to
linguistics. One of them aims at preparing a biography of a linguist and the
other one is a model presentation of a selected language.

EVALUATION

When it comes to the contents of the book, William B. McGregor’s “Linguistics.
An Introduction” provides readers with a wide range of topics in contemporary
linguistics, from the nature of linguistics as a science to the analysis of
linguistic structures: sounds, words, and sentences, to the study of meaning,
to issues of sociolinguistics, biolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and
neurolinguistics, to language acquisition, to history of language, to the
variety of languages and language forms in the twenty-first century world. It
bears emphasizing that the presentation of each topic and sub-discipline of
linguistics encompasses the latest research results published by the most
prominent linguists from the whole world.

Another important advantage of “Linguistics. An Introduction” is the fact that
the book includes the theories and results of research into language from
various schools of linguistics. While reading the book, we come across
elements of structuralism, and generativism, as well as functional linguistics
and cognitivism. Even the proportions between the chapters devoted to the
study of language as such, and the analysis of language in contexts of other
scientific disciplines show clearly that McGregor considers language to be a
human faculty that by its nature exceeds any attempts to restrict it to
autonomous forms and structures, but which, being above all a means for
communication, permeates different aspects or areas of human life and
activity.

Although McGregor’s textbook is written in English and as such will probably
attract mostly academics and students either from the English-speaking
countries or students of the English language from other countries in the
world, the reader will quickly notice that the book contains numerous study
examples from and references to other languages, including the endangered
ones. In fact, at the end of the book we find a five-page index of all the
languages mentioned or discussed in the text. Thanks to that “Linguistics. An
Introduction” may be an interesting reading also to students of linguistics
whose interests focus on other languages, or who are willing to increase their
knowledge of the dynamically developing science of language.

However, despite all the advantages of McGregor’s book it may seem that
similar works in the field of linguistics with comparable merits already exist
and function as good source texts for students at the university level. For
instance, a similar – though not exactly the same – diversity of linguistic
problems explained on the basis of English and other languages, described in a
student-friendly language, and accompanied with exercises for students, has
been included in such widely acclaimed textbooks as George Yule’s “The Study
of Language” (2014) or O’Grady, Aronoff, Archibald and Rees-Miller’s
“Contemporary Linguistics. An Introduction” (2009). Both these publications
offer also a broad perspective on language and their theoretical stance
exceeds the formal-linguistic approach. Thus, the question is: Is there
anything about McGregor’s work that distinguishes his book, making it
different from the already existing entry-level course books on linguistics?

What deserves a special attention is the pedagogical dimension of McGregor’s
textbook. Not only does the work offer a section with diversified questions
for students after each chapter, but what is more, each of them opens with a
short outline of the contents, a table with key terms and a list of clearly
presented goals. Furthermore, after each chapter there is a summary,
presenting the most important notions and issues discussed in the chapter,
followed by a guide for further reading, including the most recent
publications on the topic, and a set of exercises, helping students to put the
newly gained knowledge into practice. Also, the publisher’s website contains a
special section with extra questions concerning the topics in the book,
available online for free to both teachers and students. Additionally, the
language of the presentation is adjusted to the needs of students: linguistic
problems are presented in an inviting, student-friendly way, thanks to which
even non-native speakers of English will easily understand the complicated
linguistic issues. What is more, the most important notions are included in
special boxes inserted into the main text of the chapters, which helps
students control their understanding of the new material. Then, at the end of
McGregor’s course book there is a glossary with concise definitions of the
most important terms for a beginning student of linguistics, followed by an
exhaustive list of references, and indices: of languages that were presented
in the book, of important names that appeared in the work, as well as of
linguistic notions discussed in the text. Finally, numerous tables, figures
and maps support the explanations in the book, making it both instructive and
pleasant reading. 

To sum up, the pedagogical merits make McGregor’s “Linguistics. An
Introduction” a special publication, and they allow the work to compete with
the similar textbooks read worldwide during university courses of linguistics.
I wholeheartedly recommend the book to both teachers and students of language.
Personally, I am going to take advantage of all the merits this textbook
offers in my classroom with students of English philology.

REFERENCES

Lyons, John. 1981. Language and Linguistics. An Introduction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

O’Grady, William & Mark Aronoff & John Archibald & Janie Rees-Miller (eds.).
2009. Contemporary Linguistics. An Introduction. 6th edn. Bedford/St.
Martin’s.

Yule, George. 2014. The Study of Language. 5th edn. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Marcin Kuczok is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of English at the
University of Silesia, Poland, where he graduated with an MA in English
Philology in 2005 and a PhD in English Linguistics in 2012. He also received
an MA in Theology from University of Opole in 2003. His academic interests
revolve around cognitive semantics, especially the theory of conceptual
metaphor and metonymy and the theory of conceptual blending, as well as their
applications to studying religious language, describing the axiological
parameter of language, and analyzing English and Polish word-formation
processes.

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