We have seen in Chapter 4 that each democratic constitution has its own particular and special features and each combines them in a different way. This might produce a severe problem for comparative politics, for if every system were unique, then all we could do would be to describe them in bewildering and endless detail. Fortunately for students of comparative politics, this is not the case. The great majority of democracies combine their three branches of government in one of three general ways – most of them fall fairly neatly into presidential or parliamentary or semi-presidential systems. Of course, each particular democracy retains its own special features and there are a few that do not fall neatly into one of these three categories (e.g. Israel, Switzerland and the European Union), but most conform to one of the three types, and can be classified accordingly.

In an increasingly global world there are organisation that are not states that have a big impact on politics and on daily existence in general. The European Union, Microsoft, Toyota and al-Qa’ida are more significant in their ways than many states. They affect the lives of millions of people. If it is true that the power of states is in decline, then why should we try to understand the state and its actions when newer political actors appear to be so important? This chapter starts with the question of why we continue to regard states as the most important building blocks of comparative analysis, even as some journalists and political scientists claim that they are being replaced in importance in an increasingly global society.

Chapter 8 examines how languages change and what the past stages of languages may be. It distinguishes between diachronic linguistics, which looks at languages over time, and synchronic linguistics, which focuses on a particular stage. It also contrasts the concept of language as applied to a speech community (E-language) and language as the state of knowledge of an individual speaker (I-language). The chapter offers readers an understanding of changes that occur in languages' phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and lexicon, thus linking this chapter to previous ones. It explains how linear descent can be established by finding regular correspondences between the forms in one stage and a previous stage, and that the changes that occur can be attributed to imperfect transmission between one individual and the next, and the results may then spread to the community. It contrasts this with non-linear descent, in which similar forms are not due to a common ancestor. It compares present languages to their past, and explores the reasons why languages change. The chapter also examines in detail how unattested languages are reconstructed by applying methods of comparative linguistics.

At the start of the third millennium, states seem to be the big winners in the fierce conflicts and wars that scarred the twentieth century. With only a few special exceptions, every place on earth falls within the territory of a state. The number of states has increased rapidly, from about fifty to almost two hundred, since the 1950s. States still claim absolute authority and control over their own territory and residents, and conflicts between states are still one of the most serious of all problems in modern times. Moreover, modern states are not the puny ‘night-watchmen’ of the liberal era at the start of the twentieth century: they now provide an enormously wide variety of services, extract vast amounts in taxes, and pervade almost every aspect of daily life.

This chapter brings together aspects of computation (as computer software) and linguistics (as provided by the study of natural language). The chapter first shows how natural language is often ambiguous, and the underlying structure is not immediately visible. Therefore, computer software that deals with natural language as input must cope with this inherent ambiguity. Readers come to realize that, if language were not ambiguous, we could reliably prepare computer algorithms that resemble the computer programs which many of us are familiar with: a sequence of actions that produces an outcome (e.g., a sequence of words forming a sentence and compute the meaning of a sentence). But because of ambiguity, we must use a different computational paradigm. Ambiguity comes in the form of word level ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity, and semantic ambiguity. Ambiguity causes a rapid increase in the number of possible interpretations of a natural language sentence. Different methods for avoiding the problems of ambiguity are detailed, including machine learning. The chapter ends with some examples of how computational linguistics may be applied.

Although the citizens of a given state may feel that theirs is the only or the best way of doing things, there is nothing natural or God-given about having a president rather than a prime minister, a unitary rather than a federal system, or two legislative assemblies rather than one. In fact, it is probably true to say that every modern democracy (Chapter 2) has a unique set of government institutions. It is certainly true that there is no agreed formula or set of institutions that will produce a democracy; each country follows its own special path and makes its own particular arrangements.

This chapter focuses on varieties of English around the world and English as a world language. As a consequence of the expansion of English-speaking people across the globe, countless English varieties have sprung up: pidgins (such as Nigerian Pidgin English), creoles (Jamaican Creole English), new dialects (Australian English), varieties of English as second language (ESL; Indian English), and various in-between forms. World Englishes can be grouped into three concentric circles: an Inner Circle—countries where English has historical continuity (the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc.), the Outer Circle—where English is important for historical reasons and where it is spoken mostly as a second language (India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Kenya, Singapore, etc.), and the Expanding Circle—comprising those countries where English plays no historical role but where it is widely used as a foreign language. Finally, there are numerous second-language varieties that constitute products of language contact in their own right (e.g., the “New Englishes,” spoken and used as stable national forms in many countries, notably in Asia and Africa, with distinctive properties and functions).

Chapter 16 focuses on the ability for certain members of the animal kingdom to communicate. It first compares the notions of communication and language and examines the ways in which animals may signal information through visual, auditory, chemosensory, mechanoreceptive, and electromagnetic channels. It explains the type of information conveyed by animal communication including alarm, food, mating, and aggressive signals. The chapter then lists the properties that researchers have considered basic to all human languages, including not only arbitrariness of symbols, discreteness, displacement, semantics, productivity, and duality, but also grammar and recursion. The chapter then shows that many of these well-known properties are also found at least in some members of the animal kingdom, namely in the signals of prairie dogs and honeybees.

Chapter 1 presents key concepts that are not only of general interest but are useful in understanding subsequent chapters. Although many people place linguistics as foundational for the humanities, we show that it is also a science that develops theories and hypotheses that are rigorously tested. As is typical in scientific inquiry, linguistics seeks to describe and explain an object of study, in our case, language. The chapter also examines how human language differs from other systems of communication, such as animal cries or some visual images. An important component of the chapter distinguishes two main approaches to the study of language: the generativist approach according to which language is constrained by universal principles that are innate, and a more functionalist approach that considers language to be acquired solely on the basis of input. For both functionalist and generativists, input is essential to acquisition. These approaches can be seen in action throughout the book and both are equally important to the field of linguistics. The chapter ends by pointing to different fields that engage with professional linguists, from translation studies to computer science.

Chapter 10 introduces readers to pragmatics, the study of meaning in context, and discourse analysis, which addresses language use in context. Both of these subfields of linguistics focus on units or texts larger than the sentence level. The chapter illustrates speech acts and shows how they are fundamental to how we use language to communicate. It examines the role of conversational analysis and what it means for turn taking. Linking to Chapter 6 Semantics, the chapter presents Grice’s Cooperative Principle and its four maxims in depth: quantity, quality, relevance, and manner. Politeness Theory and Impoliteness Theory address how we manage our social identities and those of others through language. These approaches show how our interactions are driven by two basic needs: the need to do as we please and the need to be appreciated by others. Reade are introduced to the concepts of genre and register and their relation to extralinguistic context. Finally, concepts such as coherence and cohesion in texts are examined in detail.