Language files: Materials for an introduction to language and linguistics. 10th edn. (review)

Language files (LF) was originally developed as a supplement to undergraduate linguistic courses at The Ohio State University. This community effort of teachers pooling their resources —to improve classes and ease their workloads—forms the foundation for this book. The book has since been through nine revisions and twenty-five editors,¹ with the first compilers of the material publishing their efforts between 1977 and 1979, and this latest edition published in 2007.

The chapters in LF can be grouped into three divisions, although they are not grouped in any manner by the editors: the general descriptions of language (Chs. 1–7), the ways language interacts with other systems (Chs. 8–12), and the use of language study within other fields (Chs. 13–16). In the first set of chapters, LF takes students through the traditional levels of the mental grammar.

In Ch. 1, students read about the abstract qualities of language (e.g. distinctiveness, arbitrariness), what humans know or do not know in a language, and modality, especially the contrasts between signed languages and spoken languages. In Ch. 2, the primary focus is on speech sounds, although following from the modality discussion, LF does highlight that phonetics is the 'study of the minimal units that make up language' (38) and accordingly the phonetics of signed languages gets its own file (File 2.7). Ch. 2 details articulatory phonetics through English sounds, sounds of other languages, and suprasegmental features. Acoustic phonetics gets its own file (File 2.6), although auditory phonetics does not. Ch. 3 works through phonemic organization, the phonological rules for rendering allophones, languages' phonotactic constraints, and implicational tendencies. For morphology, Ch. 4 begins with the nature of the lexicon, moves through kinds of morphological processes, introduces types of morphology, presents an argument for the hierarchical structure of words, and then provides methods of dissectional morphological analysis.

For syntax (Ch. 5), the basic ideas have been expanded from the 9th edition to include phrase structure, word order, lexical categories, agreement, and hierarchical structure. The remainder of the chapter handles how syntax expresses meaning, the nature of lexical categories (divided into opened and closed), phrase structure rules, constituency tests, and word-order typology. Ch. 6 sets up the ideas of lexical and compositional semantics, working through ideas of reference, word relations, truth conditions, and syntactic influences on phrasal meaning. In Ch. 7, pragmatics is presented as language in conversations, dealing with the effects of context, rules of conversation, Gricean maxims, inferring from context, the nature of speech acts, and the workings of presupposition.

Ch. 8 moves from the different parts of the language system itself to language interactions with other systems as well as the development of language. The different theories of language acquisition are presented, the levels of the mental grammar are toured during their construction in first language acquisition, the features of child-directed speech are highlighted, and the variation of bilingual acquisition is discussed. Ch. 9 tackles language and the brain, including the realms of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. From these areas, LF presents physical features of the brain, qualities of aphasia, and models of speech production and perception. In File 9.5, the lexicon is further dissected and viewed from perspectives such as the cohort model. Lastly, Ch. 9 presents sentence processing and psycholinguistics experimentation.

In Ch. 10, the levels of organization are presented for language variation, including languages, dialects, idiolects, and registers.² From the social realms of language variation, LF turns to the different levels of variation in the mental grammar. Dialectological factors in the US are next, with the last content file in the chapter introducing sociolinguistic factors affecting language variation. Contact between languages is the focus of Ch. 11, including borrowings, pidgins, creoles, multilingual societies, and language death. The venerable study of language change is introduced and exercised in Ch. 12. Family relations set the stage for...