Chapter 15 looks at the brain’s anatomy in terms of the areas important for language. It shows that, typically, the left hemisphere is widely responsible for language competence and performance. Readers learn about common methods and technologies used to study the brain, including lesion studies and autopsies, dichotic listening and split-brain studies, neuroimaging, and studies measuring the brain’s electric and magnetic fields. These methods have provided an incredible advantage to better understanding brain and language. This is especially apparent regarding language impairments that result from acquired brain damage or injury (either instantaneous or progressive). Some impairments discussed in the chapter include forms of aphasia: non-fluent, fluent, and primary progressive along with language disturbances primarily related to reading (e.g., alexia) and writing (e.g., agraphia) abilities. Finally, the chapter discusses how neurolinguistics informs what we know about the mental lexicon—words, their sounds, and meanings—along with morphology and syntax. Research using state-of-the-art technologies has informed us about which language functions rely on which brain structures.

Everyone has their own views and ideas about politics. But individuals do not exist in isolation. If this were the case, it would make no sense to talk about ‘the working class’, ‘minority groups’ and ‘youth cultures’, or to make generalisations about ‘left-wing intellectuals’ or ‘business interests’. At a more general level, citizens of the same country usually share similar assumptions and views about politics, which makes the Canadians different from the Croatians, the Spanish different from the South Africans and the Israelis different from the Irish. Political scientists label these shared patterns of beliefs and attitudes the ‘political culture’. The first part of the chapter discusses the political values and attitudes of individuals and groups, and examines how we can understand and explain political cultures.

Elections determine who is to take control of government. No other form of political participation has such clear consequences and few have more important ones. For these reasons elections are treated as a distinct and very important topic that raises a great many questions: How are democratic elections best organised? What is the best voting system? Should we worry about declining turnout? Who votes for which party or candidate and why? How and why have voting patterns changed in recent decades and what are the possible consequences for democracy? Studies of voters and elections tell us a lot about how ordinary citizens relate to politics, what they think is important and how they make up their minds about parties, governments and political issues.

Governments make policy and pass laws, but they are not and cannot be involved in the vast amount of routine implementation and daily administration of policy. For this they rely on government ministries and the army of state bureaucrats who work in them. Like armies, the bureaucracy ranges from a small handful of very top officials down to office workers who carry out the routine work. The jobs of the highest officials – sometimes called ‘mandarins’ – are little different from those of the chief executive officers (CEOs) of multinational corporations in the private sector, while many of the lower ranks are known as ‘street-level bureaucrats’ because they come into everyday contact with the general public.

This introduction does three things. First, it explains why we should bother to study comparative politics at all. Why is it important to know how various political systems work? Second, it considers the strengths and weaknesses of the comparative approach to political science. It argues that, in spite of its problems, comparative politics adds something of great importance to our ability to understand what goes on in the political world. Moreover, it is of practical importance for policy making in the real world because it helps us reject false explanations of political phenomena and broadens our understanding of what is possible by examining how things are done in other countries. And third, it provides some signposts to guide you through the general themes that reoccur throughout the book to make it easier and more interesting for you to understand and absorb its contents.

Many things are clear without comparisons. You could learn quite a lot about democracy just by studying present-day India without any sort of comparisons. For example, you could establish that India is a democracy and that its democratisation has gone through several phases without comparing it with another country. Similarly, you could learn a lot about democratic innovations and breakdowns by comparing India now with India forty or fifty years ago. So why make everything even more complicated by comparing India with other countries? What can be gained from cross-national comparisons?

Government is organised on different geographical levels in this way because no single centre could possibly do everything itself. It must be divided, not only into different branches at the national level (executive, legislative, judiciary) but also into territorial units of local administration and policy making at the subnational level. Nor can countries manage their affairs entirely on their own; even the largest and most powerful must deal with other countries to solve international problems of security, diplomacy, the environment and trade.

Chapter 4 focuses on morphology, the study of how words are formed. It explains how words, in spite of the fact that we often think of them as a single unit, can be made up of one or more smaller units referred to as morphemes. It examines different types of morphemes: roots, bases, and affixes. It shows how morphemes can be subdivided into different classes according to their properties: whether they are free, stand-alone morphemes, or bound morphemes (affixes), that must be attached to another morpheme; whether they are suffixes, prefixes, or infixes. The concept of allomorphy, important because it represents an interface between phonology and morphology, is presented and practiced. The chapter shows how different languages can build words in different ways, and how in some languages, a word can translate as a whole sentence in English. Readers will learn that morphemes are put together in words following rules, that is, words have structure. Extensive practice is given on how to represent the structure of words using tree diagrams. Various processes for creating or adapting words are also presented. Finally, an appendix details step-by-step how to build morphological trees.

Chapter 3 first summarizes the differences between phonetics (Chapter 2), which looks at human speech sounds in general, and phonology, which examines how a subset of possible sounds is used and distributed in specific languages. It introduces the concept of the phonological unit, the phoneme, and how phonemes can be identified by minimal pairs, that is, comparing words that differ by only one sound yet have distinct meanings. It also explains the difference between phonemes and allophones that are typically the result of sound processes, as seen in Chapter 2, but may also be in free variation. We then explain how phonemes can be reduced to a limited set of distinctive features that allow us to organize them into natural classes to which phonological rules may be applied. We see how these rules can be represented easily to capture important generalizations about phonology. The chapter also examines the structure of syllables and explains how different languages may syllabify words and phrases in different ways, while at the same time obeying universal principles. The chapter ends with a section on how to discover the sound system of a language.

Governments are there to get things done. At the highest level, the most important things are to formulate public policies and frame the laws of the land, and at the heart of the policy and lawmaking process lie the two main branches of government – the executive and the legislative assembly. This means that the study of the relations between executive and legislative branches is a topic that lies at the core of comparative politics.

Chapter 7 first considers some general issues regarding the classification of languages, such as the contrast between language and dialect. The chapter then explores how languages can be grouped into families based on their historical relationships and what types of evidence are needed to prove such family relationships among languages. It looks at how ancestral languages such as Proto-Indo-European can be reconstructed on the basis of their present-day descendants. In subsequent sections, typological classifications are discussed. Since languages vary in many different ways on several levels—by the sounds they employ, word-structure patterns, word orders, and the ways certain meanings are expressed—numerous typological classifications can be devised. Throughout the chapter, three such classifications are examined, one based on morphological structures, another based on the syntactic factors such as word order, and one based on semantic properties of the languages being classified. Readers will explore how language classifications can change over time and how the two types of classifications—familial and typological—correspond.

Few of us have much influence in politics as individuals on our own; we have to combine with others to have any impact. And that is exactly what people do in democracies. Using their rights of assembly and free association, they organise themselves into a huge number and variety of voluntary organisations – professional and business organisations, trade unions, charities, social clubs, environmental groups, veteran associations, churches, women’s groups, welfare organisations, community associations, youth clubs, consumer groups and arts, science, leisure and sports clubs. People have also developed an additional weapon in the struggle for political power, namely social movements, which are not the same as pressure groups but have a lot in common with them.

Chapter 6 focuses on meaning and the interpretation of language. It contrasts the meaning of words, which we have stored in our mental lexicon and which we refer to as lexical meaning, with grammatical meaning, such as tense and aspect, gender, and number. There is also pragmatic meaning which depends on our knowledge of the world and contextual information. The difference between denotation, connotation, and reference are explored and basic concepts such a synonymy, antonymy, homonymy, etc. are introduced. Prototype theory is analyzed with appropriate examples. The chapter links to syntax by examining subcategorization, including transitive and intransitive verbs, and also thematic roles and their relation to syntactic structure. It presents the difference between sentences, propositions, and utterances, explaining in depth the importance of truth conditions. The chapter presents important concepts of entailment, contradiction, presupposition, and implicature and concludes with a brief discussion on theoretical frameworks such as cognitive and formal approaches to semantics.