English Linguistics – Essentials. Anglistik, Amerikanistik

Table of contents

Preface

I Linguistics at the turn of the 21st century: An overview

I.1 Central dichotomies

I.2 Three major research traditions in 20th century linguistics

2.1 Structuralism

2.2 Formalism / Generative linguistics

2.3 Functionalism

I.3 Recent developments in 20th century linguistics

3.1 Corpus linguistics

3.2 The renewed interest in historical linguistics

II Phonetics and phonology: On sounds and sound systems

II.1 Phonetics

1.1 Transcription

1.2 Speech organs

1.3 Types of sounds

II.2 Phonology

2.1 On determining the phoneme inventory: Segmental phonology

2.2 Prosody: Supra-segmental phonology

2.3 Phonological processes in connected speech

III Morphology: On the structure and formation of words

III.1 Types of morphemes

III.2 Morphophonemics:Interface between morphology and phonology

III.3 Word formation processes

3.1 Derivation

3.2 Compounding

3.3 Conversion

3.4 Shortenings

IV Grammar: The ground plan of English

IV.1 Inflectional Morphology

IV.2 Syntax: Building blocks and sentence patterns

2.1 Parts of speech

2.2 Phrases and clauses

2.3 Grammatical relations

IV.3 The English verb phrase

3.1 Verb types

3.2 Grammatical categories

V Contrastive Linguistics: English and German

V.1 Contrastive Linguistics

V.2 The most striking grammatical differences between English and German

2.1 Morphology

2.2 Word order

2.3 Form-function mappings

2.4 Further differences in the verb phrase

V.3 Phonological differences

VI Semantics: Word and sentence meaning

VI.1 Branches and boundaries of semantics

VI.2 Types and facets of meaning

VI.3 Structural semantics: Meaning structures in the vocabulary

3.1 Lexical fields

3.2 Sense relations

3.3 Lexical ambiguity: Polysemy and homonymy

VI.4 Cognitive semantics: Prototypes and metaphors

4.1 Prototypes

4.2 Metaphors

Sources and further reading

VII Pragmatics: The study of meaning in context

VII.1 Competing definitions:Perspective or component?

VII.2 Deixis

VII.3 Speech acts

3.1 Classification of illocutionary acts

3.2 Felicity conditions

3.3 Indirect speech acts

VII.4 Conversational implicatures

4.1 The original theory by Grice

4.2 Post-Gricean models

VIII Sociolinguistics: Regional and social varieties of English

VIII.1 Different types of varieties

VIII.2 British and American English: A comparison

VIII.3 Regional varieties

3.1 Traditional and modern dialectology

3.2 Syntactic variation in the British Isles

VIII.4 Social varieties

VIII.5 Feminist Linguistics

VIII.6 Sociolinguistics and language change

General reference works

Key to exercises

Index