The Principles and Parameters Theory (PPT) outlined at the end of section 22 has interesting implications for the development of a theory of language acquisition, and in particular raises the question of what it is that children have to learn about the syntax of their native language? Clearly, a major part of the task of acquiring a first language involves lexical learning (i.e. learning words and their idiosyncratic properties, see section 13). However, the question we shall focus on here is what structural learning is involved in first language acquisition – i.e. what children have to learn about the structure of sentences in the language they are acquiring. (Note that we shall be concerned here only with how children acquire their native languages, not with the very different question of how children or adults acquire foreign languages.)

Within the PPT model, certain aspects of sentence structure are assumed to be determined by UG principles (i.e. principles of Universal Grammar) and hence are invariant across languages. If we further assume that principles of UG are part of the child's innately endowed language faculty, it follows that universal aspects of sentence structure will not have to be learned (see the Introduction, pp. 7–8). For example, if clauses are universally CP+TP+VP structures and this is part of the child's innate linguistic competence at birth, it will not have to be learned.

With the exception of the Sign Languages used by the deaf, and written languages, the languages with which most of us are familiar rely on the medium of sound. Sign Languages are extremely interesting, exhibiting all the complexities of spoken languages, but their serious study requires the introduction of a considerable amount of specialised terminology for which we do not have space in an introductory book of this kind. As for written languages, they too have many fascinating features, but they are regarded as secondary to spoken languages for a number of reasons. For instance, children are explicitly taught to read and write sometime after they acquire a spoken language, and many cultures have never employed writing systems. Thus, a focus on sounds is entirely appropriate, and this part of the book is devoted to discussion of the way in which the sound systems of languages are organised and the role of such systems in the acquisition and processing of languages. We will also consider the ways in which sound systems differ from one dialect or variety of a given language to another and the changes that we can identify in the sound system of a given language over time.

Before we can discuss any aspect of the sound system of a language, we need a systematic way of describing and transcribing speech sounds, and in section 2 we introduce a standard transcription system, while explaining how the more important speech sounds are produced.

A substantial proportion of the terminology we need in order to embark on the study of syntax has already been introduced, particularly in section 9. However, there are some additional notions which are important for us to understand, so in this section we shall introduce these, integrating them with ideas with which we are already familiar.

Categories and functions

It is traditionally said that sentences are structured out of words, phrases and clauses, each of which belongs to a specific grammatical category and serves a specific grammatical function within the sentence containing it. The lexical and functional categories from section 9 are examples of grammatical categories, and as our discussion proceeds, we shall see how phrases and clauses can be categorised. The smallest type of sentence which we can produce is one containing a single clause, such as (221):

1. (221) John smokes

This comprises the noun John, which is traditionally claimed to function as the subject of the clause (in that it denotes the person performing the act of smoking), and the verb smokes, which functions as the predicate of the clause (in that it describes the act being performed). Consider next the slightly longer clause in (222):

1. (222) John smokes cigars

Here we have the subject John, the predicate smokes and a third item, cigars, which is the complement (cigars refers to the entities on which the act of smoking is being performed).

In section 14, we discussed how words are accessed and retrieved from the mental lexicon. In this section, we shall look into the processing of sentences, focusing on sentence comprehension. Notice firstly that there is a fundamental difference between lexical and syntactic processing: the lexemes in a language, being finite in number, are stored in the mental lexicon. Sentences, however, typically are not stored (if they were, then we would be unable to produce any new sentences, i.e. sentences that we have never heard or read before). Indeed, sentence repetition and sentence recognition experiments have shown that normally syntactic structures are extremely transient: memory for syntax is unreliable only half a minute after a sentence has been heard or read (was the second sentence in this paragraph Focusing on sentence comprehension, in this section, we shall look into the processing of sentences or In this section, we shall look into the processing of sentences, focusing on sentence comprehension?). Hence, whereas word recognition can be described as a retrieval process with the goal of finding an entry in the mental lexicon, sentence processing does not involve accessing and retrieving entries from a mental repository.

If the representations of sentences are not retrieved from a memory store, this means that they are constructed on-line (in a step-by-step fashion) in accordance with syntactic principles or rules.

A natural first step in a scientific approach to words is to seek to establish the different types of words which appear in languages. It's easy to see that native speakers can divide words into different types (even if they can't actually tell you how they do this), and, moreover, we can see that speakers can use their knowledge of what the different word types are when they are confronted with a completely new word. Suppose, for instance, that you hear the sentence in (87):

1. (87) A plingle has arrived

Of course, you don't know what plingle means, but you can immediately infer that plingle is the sort of expression which occurs in the constructions the plingle, two plingles, every plingle which has ever existed, etc. In short, (87) enables you to assign plingle to a particular class of words, and once you know what class of words it belongs to, you know a great deal about its potential for occurrence within the language. It is reasonable, then, to suppose that the word class to which a word belongs is specified in that word's lexical entry. The immediate task facing us in this section is that of developing criteria for assigning words to classes.

Lexical categories

A familiar distinction is that between nouns (N) and verbs (V), and there are several ways in which we can justify this for English.

In our main introduction, we observed that language varies across both time and space. If we compare the English spoken in the cities of Perth, Pittsburgh, Port Elizabeth and Plymouth, we can point not only to differences between these four cities, but also to historical differences which distinguish these varieties today from those spoken in these locations 150 years ago. This important study of historical and geographical variation has been a preoccupation of linguists for well over a century now, and continues to be a strong focus of research in dialectology and historical linguistics. It is only in recent times, however, that linguists have begun to investigate linguistic variation within communities. The French spoken in Marseilles may be different from that spoken in Montreal, but what about the use of language within these cities? Does everyone in Montreal speak an identical variety of French? Clearly not, we might suppose, but it was not until the 1960s that linguists began to take this view seriously and study variation within villages, towns and cities.

In this section we will examine phonological variation – the variability in language that affects those features which have been introduced in the previous section: sounds, syllables, stress and intonation. Because of the nature of existing research, our discussion will be concerned exclusively with sounds.

The overall structure of the book is unaltered from the first edition. Our justification for this is set out in the note for course organisers from the first edition that immediately follows this preface. We have, however, made a number of significant modifications.

As far as changes in content are concerned, we have introduced a whole new section on sentence use (section 27), including introduction and discussion of core areas of pragmatics and conversational analysis. Additionally, section 23 on sentence meaning has been modified so that it is not exclusively concerned with quantified expressions in Logical Form and now contains a short discussion of thematic roles with linked exercises. Finally, individual authors have taken the opportunity to update the sections for which they have been primarily responsible, when this seemed appropriate. Thus, all sections in part III (sentences) have been updated to reflect the change in the theoretical approach we favour here, whereby Tense replaces Inflection as a clausal head. There have been numerous other small changes in these sections to reflect recent theoretical developments. New sociolinguistic material in section 3 introduces communities of practice, and section 5 now contains a short introduction to Optimality Theory, an increasingly popular approach to the understanding of phonological structure. We have, of course, also attempted to correct errors that appeared in the first edition.

Turning to the exercises that follow each section, in many cases, these are a complete replacement for those appearing in the first edition.

An adult native speaker of English with a normal speech rate produces more than 150 words per minute – on average, more than one word every half second. Indeed, under time pressure, for example, when you are calling your friend in New Zealand from a public telephone in Britain or the United States, a native speaker can produce one word every 200 ms, which is less than a quarter of a second, and your friend can still understand what you are saying. The lexicon of an average native speaker of English contains about 30,000 words. This means that in fluent speech you have to choose continuously from these 30,000 alternatives, not just once, but two to five times per second, and there is no clear limit on how long you can indulge in this process. Furthermore, your friend is recognising your words at the same rate at the other end of the telephone line. If you wanted to, and had enough money, you could make the telephone companies happy by talking to your New Zealand friend for hours, with a decision rate of one word every 200–400 ms. Incredibly, despite the high speed of lexical processing, errors in the production and comprehension of words are very rare. Research has revealed that in a corpus of 200,000 words, getting on for twice the length of this book, only 86 lexical errors were found, i.e., fewer than 1 in every 2,000 words.

The study of syntactic errors in language-disordered patients is an area in which linguists, psychologists and speech therapists have collaborated extensively. Recent syntactic theories have been applied to neurolinguistic data and have led to a better understanding of patients' linguistic problems; in turn, theoretical linguists have gained a new source of data from syntactic errors to test their theories.

Generative linguists in particular have shown interest in syntactic disorders. Recall that many generative linguists (particularly Noam Chomsky and his followers) claim that humans possess a language-specific cognitive system (embodying principles of Universal Grammar) that underlies the production and comprehension of sentences. Syntactic principles are said to be unique to language, and autonomous of non-linguistic cognitive systems such as vision, hearing, reasoning, or memory (see the introduction, p. 11). This view of syntax makes two interesting predictions about language disorders. Firstly, we would expect to find cases of language disorders in which knowledge of syntax is impaired while other cognitive systems remain unaffected: if the syntactic system is indeed autonomous, then it should be possible for it to be selectively impaired, for example as a result of brain lesions or genetic deficits. The second prediction is that syntactic disorders should involve impairments of both language production and language comprehension. If the linguistic view is correct, and there is indeed only one underlying system of syntactic principles which is crucially involved in both sentence production and sentence comprehension, then an impairment of the underlying system should manifest itself not only in sentence production but also in sentence comprehension and in grammaticality judgement tasks.

The major perspective we adopt in this book regards a language as a cognitive system which is part of any normal human being's mental or psychological structure. An alternative to which we shall also give some attention emphasises the social nature of language, for instance studying the relationships between social structure and different dialects or varieties of a language.

The cognitive view has been greatly influenced over the past five decades by the ideas of the American linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky. The central proposal which guides Chomsky's approach to the study of language is that when we assert that Tom is a speaker of English, we are ascribing to Tom a certain mental structure. This structure is somehow represented in Tom's brain, so we are also implicitly saying that Tom's brain is in a certain state. If Clare is also a speaker of English, it is reasonable to suppose that Clare's linguistic cognitive system is similar to Tom's. By contrast, Jacques, a speaker of French, has a cognitive system which is different in important respects from those of Tom and Clare, and different again to that of Guo, a speaker of Chinese. This proposal raises four fundamental research questions:

1. (1) What is the nature of the cognitive system which we identify with knowing a language?

2. (2) How do we acquire such a system?

3. (3) How is this system used in our production and comprehension of speech?

4. (4) How is this system represented in the brain?

How many sounds are there in English? This seems like a reasonable enough question, but in fact it is difficult to answer, for several reasons. A major problem is that the spelling system of English (its orthography) is irregular and doesn't represent sounds in a completely consistent way. Sometimes one sound can be spelled in several ways as with the first sound of Kathy (or is it Cathy?), but worse, we find that some sounds just aren't given their own symbol at all. There is a difference between the first sounds of shock and sock, but the first of these sounds is represented by two symbols s and h, each of which corresponds to a sound that is different to the first sound of shock. Moreover, although most speakers of English will distinguish the middle sounds in put ‘to place’ and putt ‘to strike a golf ball while it is on the green’, this distinction is never made in the writing system.

We also need to be careful about what we mean by ‘English’, as pronunciation differs from one dialect to another. In the North of England, for instance, both put and putt are often pronounced like put, and dialects in the United States differ as to which (if any) of the sounds in bold face in the words merry, marry and Mary they distinguish. These are systematic differences and not just caprice on the part of speakers, an issue that will be discussed in more detail in section 3.

In our introduction (pp. 2–3), we drew a fundamental distinction between competence and performance, identifying the latter with the perception and production of speech and other forms of language, and suggesting that its study falls in the domain of psycholinguistics. We have now seen ample illustration of what this study involves and the insights that it can provide. In the introduction to part III of the book (section 17), we briefly alluded to conversations and other extended sorts of text, and a moment's thought should be sufficient to persuade us that here we meet a rather different, more familiar, notion of performance that we all indulge in on a daily basis without being subject to the psycholinguist's experimental investigations. We all use language in a wide range of communicative contexts, and it would be remiss of us not to include discussion of some of the issues that arise if we adopt this broader perspective in an introductory book of this nature. In what follows, we introduce some of the core ideas in pragmatics, and we begin by looking at one rather obvious way in which context plays an important role in understanding aspects of language.

Context and pronouns

In sections 12 and 23, we introduced some of the key notions of meaning or semantics, including that of the truth conditions for a sentence: a sentence such as every sheep snores is true if and only if for every one of the sheep under consideration it is true that it snores, otherwise the sentence is false.

As we arrive at the end of the book, it is perhaps appropriate to take stock of what we have achieved with respect to the issues raised in our main introduction.

It will be recalled that there (p. 4) we offered an initial sketch of a grammar as a system containing at least four components: a lexicon, a syntactic component, a component dealing with phonetic form (PF) and a component deriving the semantic (logical) form of a sentence (LF). The way these various components fit together is illustrated in (441) (p. 345), and we have provided extensive discussion of each of these components in the preceding sections. Thus, the syntactic component, with its core operations of merger and overt movement (along with agreement, etc.) and its reliance on a variety of empty categories has been described in detail in sections 18–22; LF and its employment of covert movement has been the topic of section 23; the structure of the lexicon and the nature of lexical entries was our theme throughout much of part II; and PF, as a system linking levels of phonological representation via phonological processes has been illustrated in part I, particularly section 5.

It would be misleading to suggest that we have presented a complete and final picture of the organisation of linguistic knowledge in the course of these discussions, and there are a number of factors which justify modesty in this connection.

Linguistic change is a process which pervades all human languages. The extent of this change can be so radical that the intelligibility of former states of the language can be jeopardised. The language of Shakespeare causes some problems for the early twenty-first-century reader, but these are not insurmountable. However, if we go further back to the writings of Chaucer, we are faced with a much more alien, less easily recognised form of English. If we observe language change on a much smaller timescale, say that of the average life span of a human being, comprehension difficulties such as those confronting the reader of Chaucer do not arise. Languages actually change quite slowly, and hence the ability to communicate successfully with all generations of speakers of our own language variety is maintained. In this section, we will look at how the sounds of languages can change over time, both from a diachronic and synchronic perspective. Diachronic research on sound change has enabled us to chart changes that have taken place in earlier historical periods, while synchronic approaches allow us to observe language changes in progress today. In addition, we will examine sound change from the perspective of one of the principal problems of language change, namely the transition problem – what is the route by which sounds change?

Consonant change

In section 2, we saw that consonants can be largely classified according to a simple three-term description:

1. (a) voicing: do the vocal cords vibrate?

2. (b) place of articulation: where is the flow of air obstructed?

3. […]