My First Door to English Linguistics

This book provides a brief and reader-friendly introduction to English linguistics. After a short survey of the history of linguistics, it deals with the main levels of spoken and written language, namely with phonetics and phonology, spelling and orthography, morphology (especially inflectional morphology), syntax, lexicology and lexicography (especially semantics, word-formation, idioms, and dictionaries). It moves on to text linguistics, pragmatics, standard and varieties, highlighting especially some of the main differences between British and American English. A sketch of the history of English is also provided: Indo-European, Germanic, Old and Middle English, Early Modern and Modern English. The book concludes with a brief introduction to historical linguistics, a chapter on contrastive aspects (comparing some features of English and German), and suggestions for further reading. The appendix lists the phonetic symbols for English; it also gives a few examples of dictionary entries. "My First Door to English Linguistics" is intended for everybody interested in linguistics in general and in English linguistics in particular. It is mainly addressed to students of English who take an introductory course in linguistics; but the authors hope that it is also useful to exam candidates for a quick revision of the basic linguistic terms and concepts.