Mikhail Bakhtin was right. Humans could not use the languages they know without also learning the genres which govern so much of our social life. These genres frequently consist of rules prescribing the order in which we must say things and formulaic phraseology which prescribes what can and should be said. Native speakers know only a small fraction of the formulaic genres in a speech community. This relativizes the concept of a native speaker in all situations. Koenraad Kuiper illustrates these views with an array of fascinating case studies of engagement notice writers, horse race...

At some point in our past, human beings evolved the incredibly complex natural language systems which we all take for granted but without which we would not be able to communicate in the ways we do with each other, have civilizations, be able to contemplate the future and to change it. In the last hundred years we have begun to understand how these communication systems work. We know much about how we make speech sounds, organise them into words, the words into sentences and how the words and sentences we produce mean what they do. The subject within whose confines these discoveries have been...

Have you ever noticed something unusual about vocabulary or pronunciation and wanted to know more? Have you ever wondered how the building blocks of language fit together? Do you want to understand the different ways speakers of English communicate with each other?

Back for its fourth edition, An Introduction to English Language is essential reading for students of English language and linguistics. Combining accessibility with depth, it is a textbook that assumes no prior knowledge and will serve as an ideal companion for anybody approaching this subject for the first time.

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