AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!! Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Amazon, and The Washington Post A Wired Must-Read Book of Summer “Gretchen McCulloch is the internet’s favorite linguist, and this book is essential reading. Reading her work is like suddenly being able to see the matrix.” —Jonny Sun, author of everyone's a aliebn when ur a aliebn too Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are. Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities spread new slang and jargon with dizzying speed. What's more, social media is a vast laboratory of unedited, unfiltered words where we can watch language evolve in real time. Even the most absurd-looking slang has genuine patterns behind it. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch explores the deep forces that shape human language and influence the way we communicate with one another. She explains how your first social internet experience influences whether you prefer "LOL" or "lol," why ~sparkly tildes~ succeeded where centuries of proposals for irony punctuation had failed, what emoji have in common with physical gestures, and how the artfully disarrayed language of animal memes like lolcats and doggo made them more likely to spread.

For the past forty years, linguistics has been dominated by the idea that language is categorical and linguistic competence discrete. It has become increasingly clear, however, that many levels of representation, from phonemes to sentence structure, show probabilistic properties, as does the language faculty. Probabilistic linguistics conceptualizes categories as distributions and views knowledge of language not as a minimal set of categorical constraints but as a set of gradient rules that may be characterized by a statistical distribution. Whereas categorical approaches focus on the endpoints of distributions of linguistic phenomena, probabilistic approaches focus on the gradient middle ground. Probabilistic linguistics integrates all the progress made by linguistics thus far with a probabilistic perspective. This book presents a comprehensive introduction to probabilistic approaches to linguistic inquiry. It covers the application of probabilistic techniques to phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics. It also includes a tutorial on elementary probability theory and probabilistic grammars.

Understanding Language Testing presents an introduction to language tests and the process of test development that starts at the very beginning. Assuming no knowledge of the field, the book promotes a practical understanding of language testing using examples from a variety of languages. While grounded on solid theoretical principles, the book focuses on fostering a true understanding of the various uses of language tests and the process of test development, scoring test performance, analyzing and interpreting test results, and above all, using tests as ethically and fairly as possible so that test takers are given every opportunity to do their best, to learn as much as possible, and feel positive about their language learning. Each chapter includes a summary, suggestions for further reading, and exercises. As such this is the ideal book for both beginning students of linguistics and language education, or anyone in a related discipline looking for a first introduction to language testing.

Offers an introduction to linguistic typology that covers various linguistic domains from phonology and morphology over parts-of-speech, the NP and the VP, to simple and complex clauses, pragmatics and language change. This title also includes a discussion on methodological issues in typology.

This introductory textbook provides readers with a foundation in methods for analysing and understanding language from various theoretical perspectives within linguistics and language studies. Its novel approach introduces systemic functional linguistics, text and discourse analysis, and formal approaches to linguistics. It demonstrates applications of these approaches to reveal how we use language in society, how our brains process language, and how we learn language. Topics include phonetics, phonology, conversation analysis, morphology, semantics, functional and formal syntax, text linguistics, genre analysis, evaluative lexis in text, multimodal representations of meaning, language change and variation, animals and language, the brain and language, and first and second language development/acquisition. The main language focused on is English, while other languages are also drawn on to illustrate the principles, models and theories. Learning outcomes, exercises (with answer key), ideas for project work, and questions for reflection are provided throughout. A final chapter gathers explanations of various fields of practice within linguistics, written by linguists from around the world, including David Crystal (Clinical Linguistics), Frances Christie (Educational Linguistics), and Malcolm Coulthard (Forensic Linguistics). An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies offers an array of analytical tools for undergraduate students of language, communication, and education, and provides an overview of the field for those interested in further study in linguistics and applied language studies. Readers will come away with a heightened sensitivity to and appreciation of their own and other's use of language for creating meaning and for interaction.

This new edition of Understanding Morphology has been fully revised in line with the latest research. It now includes 'big picture' questions to highlight central themes in morphology, as well as research exercises for each chapter. Understanding Morphology presents an introduction to the study of word structure that starts at the very beginning. Assuming no knowledge of the field of morphology on the part of the reader, the book presents a broad range of morphological phenomena from a wide variety of languages. Starting with the core areas of inflection and derivation, the book presents the interfaces between morphology and syntax and between morphology and phonology. The synchronic study of word structure is covered, as are the phenomena of diachronic change, such as analogy and grammaticalization. Theories are presented clearly in accessible language with the main purpose of shedding light on the data, rather than as a goal in themselves. The authors consistently draw on the best research available, thus utilizing and discussing both functionalist and generative theoretical approaches. Each chapter includes a summary, suggestions for further reading, and exercises. As such this is the ideal book for both beginning students of linguistics, or anyone in a related discipline looking for a first introduction to morphology.

Explores contemporary US television dialogue - the on-screen language that viewers worldwide encounter as they watch popular television series.