The Handbook of Linguistics
Edited by: Mark Aronoff And Janie Rees-Miller
eISBN: 9781405102520
Print publication date: 2002

Aronoff, Mark And Janie Rees-Miller (Eds). The Handbook of
Linguistics. Blackwell Publishing, 2002. Blackwell Reference Online.
30 November 2007
<http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/book?id=g9781405102520_9781405102520>
Linguistics
10.1111/b.9781405102520.2002.x
Subject
DOI:
The Handbook of Linguistics
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Presupposing no prior knowledge of linguistics, The Handbook of
Linguistics is the ideal resource for people who want to learn about
the subject and its subdisciplines.
Written by globally recognized leading figures, this Handbook
provides a comprehensive and accessible account of the field of
linguistics. It begins with a general overview that considers the
origins of language, frames the discipline within its historical
context, and looks at how linguists acquire new data. It then turns to
the traditional subdisciplines of linguistics.
This authoritative Handbook provides a broad yet detailed picture of
what is known about language today
.

Preface

For over a century, linguists have been trying to explain linguistics to other people who they believe
should be interested in their subject matter. After all, everyone speaks at least one language and most
people have fairly strong views about their own language. The most distinguished scholars in every
generation have written general books about language and linguistics targeted at educated laypeople
and at scholars in adjacent disciplines, and some of these books have become classics, at least among
linguists. The first great American linguist, William Dwight Whitney, published The Life and Growth of
Language: An Outline of Linguistic Science, in 1875. In the dozen years between 1921 and 1933, the
three best known English-speaking linguists in the world (Edward Sapir in 1921, Otto Jespersen in
1922, and Leonard Bloomfield in 1933) all wrote books under the title Language. All were very
successful and continued to be reprinted for many years. In our own time, Noam Chomsky, certainly
the most famous of theoretical linguists, has tried to make his ideas on language more accessible in
such less technical books as Language and Mind (1968) and Reflections on Language (1975). And
more recently, Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (1995) stayed on the best-seller list for many
months
.
Despite these efforts, linguistics has not made many inroads into educated public discourse. Although
linguists in the last hundred years have uncovered a great deal about human language and how it is
acquired and used, the advances and discoveries are still mostly unknown outside a small group of
practitioners. Many reasons have been given for this gap between academic and public thinking about
language, the most commonly cited reasons being: that people have strong and sometimes erroneous
views about language and have little interest in being disabused of their false beliefs; or that people
are too close to language to be able to see that it has interesting and complex properties. Whatever
the reason, the gap remains and is getting larger the more we learn about language
.
The Handbook of Linguistics is a general introductory volume designed to address this gap in
knowledge about language. Presupposing no prior knowledge of linguistics, it is intended for people
who would like to know what linguistics and its subdisciplines are about. The book was designed to
be as nontechnical as possible, while at the same time serving as a repository for what is known about
language as we enter the twenty-first century
.
If The Handbook of Linguistics is to be regarded as authoritative, this will be in large part because of
the identity of the authors of the chapters. We have recruited globally recognized leading figures to
write each of the chapters. While the culture of academia is such that academic authors find it
tremendously difficult to write anything for anyone other than their colleagues, our central editorial
goal has been to avoid this pitfall. Our emphasis on the reader's perspective sets The Handbook of
Linguistics apart from other similar projects
.
The place of the field of linguistics in academia has been debated since its inception. When we look at
universities, we may find a linguistics department in either the social sciences or the humanities.
When we look at the American government agencies that fund university research, we find that the
National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes
of Health all routinely award grants for research in linguistics. So where does linguistics belong? The
answer is not in where linguistics is placed administratively, but rather in how linguists think. Here the
answer is quite clear: linguists by and large view themselves as scientists and they view their field as a
science, the scientific study of language. This has been true since the nineteenth century, when Max
Mueller could entitle a book published in 1869 The Science of Language and the first chapter of that
book “The science of language one of the physical sciences
.”
The fact that linguistics is today defined as the scientific study of language carries with it the implicit
claim that a science of language is possible, and this alone takes many by surprise. For surely, they
say, language, like all human activity, is beyond the scope of true science. Linguists believe that their
field is a science because they share the goals of scientific inquiry, which is objective (or more
properly intersubjectively accessible) understanding. Once we accept that general view of science as a
kind of inquiry, then it should be possible to have a science of anything, so long as it is possible to
achieve intersubjectively accessible understanding of that thing. There are, of course, those who deny
the possibility of such scientific understanding of anything, but we will not broach that topic here
.
We now know that the possibility of scientific understanding depends largely on the complexity and
regularity of the object of study. Physics has been so successful because the physical world is,
relatively speaking, highly regular and not terribly complex. Human sciences, by contrast, have been
much less successful and much slower to produce results, largely because human behavior is so
complex and not nearly so regular as is the physical or even the biological world. Language, though,
contrasts with other aspects of human behavior precisely in its regularity, what has been called its
rule-governed nature. It is precisely this property of language and language-related behavior that has
allowed for fairly great progress in our understanding of this delimited area of human behavior.
Furthermore, the fact that language is the defining property of humans, that it is shared across all
human communities and is manifested in no other species, means that by learning about language we
will inevitably also learn about human nature
.
Each chapter in this book is designed to describe to the general reader the state of our knowledge at
the beginning of the twenty-first century of one aspect of human language. The authors of each
chapter have devoted most of their adult lives to the study of this one aspect of language. Together,
we believe, these chapters provide a broad yet detailed picture of what is known about language as
we move into the new millennium. The chapters are each meant to be free-standing. A reader who is
interested in how children acquire language, for example, should be able to turn to chapter 19 and
read it profitably without having to turn first to other chapters for assistance. But the physical nature
of a book entails that there be an order of presentation. We begin with general overview chapters that
consider the origins of language as species-specific behavior and describe the raw material with
which linguists work (languages of the world and writing systems), frame the discipline within its
historical context, and look at how linguists acquire new data from previously undescribed languages
(field linguistics). The book then turns to the traditional subdisciplines of linguistics. Here we have
followed most linguistics books in starting from the bottom, grounding language first in the physical
world of sound (phonetics) and moving up through the organization of sound in language
(phonology), to the combination of sounds into words (morphology), and the combination of words
into sentences (syntax). Meaning (semantics) usually comes next, on the grounds that it operates on
words and sentences. These areas are traditionally said to form the core of linguistics, because they
deal with the most formally structured aspects of language. Within the last few decades, however,
linguists have come to realize that we cannot understand the most formally structured aspects of
language without also understanding the way language is used to convey information (pragmatics) in
conversation (discourse) and in literature, and the way language interacts with other aspects of
society (sociolinguistics
).
Fifty years ago, many of our chapters would have been absent from a book of this sort for the simple
but dramatic reason that these fields of inquiry did not exist: language acquisition, multilingualism,
sign language, neurolinguistics, computational linguistics, and all of the areas of applied linguistics to
which we have devoted separate chapters (the one area of applied linguistics that did exist fifty years
ago was language teaching
).
The chapters are of a uniform length, approximately 10,000 words each, or about 25 printed pages.the reader. Applied linguistics is divided into several distinct areas that would be of interest to
students and others who want to know what practical applications linguistics has. Because each of the
applied linguistics chapters covers a more specialized area, these chapters are somewhat shorter than
the rest (approximately 4,000 words each, or about 10 printed pages
).
We have tried not to emphasize ideology, but rather to divide things up by empirical criteria having to
do with the sorts of phenomena that a given field of inquiry covers. We have thought long and hard
about whether some of the major areas, especially syntax and phonology, should be broken down
further, with a chapter each on distinct theoretical approaches. Our final decision was not to
subdivide by theoretical approaches, based on a bel ief that the reader's perspective is paramount in
books like this: readers of a companion do not want to know what the latest controversy is about or
who disagrees with whom or who said what when. Rather, they want to have a reasonable idea of what
linguistics or some subarea of linguistics can tell them. The authors have been able to do so without
going into the latest controversies, though these controversies may occupy the linguists’ everyday
lives. The one area to which we have devoted more than one chapter is syntax, but this reflects the
dominance of syntactic research in linguistics over the last half century
.
We do not see this handbook as an introductory textbook, which would, for example, have questions
or exercises at the end of each chapter. There are already enough introductory linguistics texts. We
see it rather as an authoritative volume on what linguists know about language at the start of the
twenty-first century. Each chapter covers the central questions and goals of a particular subdiscipline,
what is generally accepted as known in that area, and how it relates to other areas
.
When we embarked on this editorial enterprise, we expected to enjoy the interaction with many of our
most distinguished colleagues that the preparation of this book would entail, which is so much easier
now in the age of electronic correspondence. What we did not realize was how much we would learn
from these colleagues about language and linguistics, simply from reading their work and discussing
it with them. We thank all of the authors for this wonderful opportunity and we hope that the readers,
too, will share in the same great pleasure.


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