Written by a team based at one of the world's leading centres for linguistic teaching and research, the second edition of this highly successful textbook offers a unified approach to language, viewed from a range of perspectives essential for students' understanding of the subject. Using clear explanations throughout, the book is divided into three main sections: sounds, words, and sentences. In each, the foundational concepts are introduced, along with their application to the fields of child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, language disorders, and sociolinguistics, giving the book a unique yet simple structure that helps students to engage with the subject more easily than other textbooks on the market. This edition includes a completely new section on sentence use, including an introduction and discussion of core areas of pragmatics and conversational analysis; coverage of sociolinguistic topics, introducing communities of practice; a wealth of new exercise material and updated further reading.

Introduction; Part I. Sounds: 1. Introduction; 2. Sounds and suprasegmentals; 3. Sound variation; 4. Sound change; 5. Phonemes, syllables and phonological processes; 6. Child phonology; 7. Processing sounds; Part II. Words: 8. Introduction; 9. Word classes; 10. Building words; 11. Morphology across languages; 12. Word meaning; 13. Children and words; 14. Lexical processing and the mental lexicon; 15. Lexical disorders; 16. Lexical variation and change; Part III. Sentences: 17. Introduction; 18. Basic terminology; 19. Sentence structure; 20. Empty categories; 21. Movement; 22. Syntactic variation; 23. Sentence meanings and logical form; 24. Children's sentences; 25. Sentence processing; 26. Syntactic disorders; 27. Using sentences.