Chapter 1: The Nature of Language and Linguistic Inquiry

Textbook pp. 1–11

People use language every day, often without thinking about its patterns. This chapter introduces ways to investigate those patterns through observation, questions, and evidence.

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Five core topics

1.1 What Counts as Language — Distinguish a language system from other forms of communication, including the patterns used in spoken and signed languages.

1.2 Describing Patterns and Setting Conventions — Compare descriptions of how people use language with conventions that recommend particular forms for a setting.

1.3 Mental Grammar and Actual Use — Distinguish internal language knowledge from the choices, pauses, and other conditions involved in actual use.

1.4 Building an Explanation From Evidence — Use observations to form a testable explanation and recognize when evidence requires a claim to change.

1.5 The Branches Work Together — Connect the study of sounds, words, sentences, meaning, and social use when investigating a language question.

Chapter 2: Articulatory Phonetics: Speech Sound Production

Textbook pp. 12–22

Spelling does not tell us everything about a speech sound. This chapter follows how the body produces sounds and shows how symbols and acoustic displays help us describe them.

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Five core topics

2.1 Following the Air — Follow the movement of air and the actions of the vocal folds, tongue, lips, and other speech organs.

2.2 Describing Consonants — Classify consonants by voicing, place of articulation, and manner of articulation.

2.3 Describing Vowels — Describe vowels through tongue height, tongue backness, and lip rounding while keeping the supplied pronunciation in view.

2.4 Transcription and the Visual Modality — Use phonetic symbols to represent selected sound details and recognize the different resources used to describe signed language.

2.5 Seeing Sound — Read waveforms and spectrograms as evidence about the physical speech signal, distinguishing measurements from perception.

Chapter 3: Phonology: Sound Systems and Mental Patterns

Textbook pp. 23–32

Two sounds can distinguish words in one language but behave as variants in another. This chapter explains how to investigate contrasts, sound patterns, syllables, and pronunciation beyond individual sounds.

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Five core topics

3.1 Contrast and Variation — Distinguish individual speech sounds from phonemes and use word contrasts as evidence.

3.2 Examining Distribution — Compare the environments where sounds occur to investigate contrast, complementary distribution, and variation.

3.3 Patterns, Rules, and Natural Classes — Interpret sound rules and group sounds by the shared properties relevant to a pattern.

3.4 Syllables and Possible Sequences — Identify syllable parts and examine the sound combinations allowed in a particular language.

3.5 Patterns Above the Segment — Distinguish stress, tone, and intonation while examining how prominence and pitch contribute to language patterns.

Chapter 4: Morphology: Word Structure and Building Blocks

Textbook pp. 33–42

A word can contain smaller parts that contribute meaning or grammatical information. This chapter shows how to identify those parts and compare the ways languages build words.

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Five core topics

4.1 Finding Structure Inside Words — Identify recurring units of meaning or grammatical function and distinguish them from syllables.

4.2 New Vocabulary and Grammatical Forms — Compare derivation, which creates vocabulary units, with inflection, which creates their grammatical forms.

4.3 One Function, Different Forms — Use plural and other patterns to examine how one morpheme can have different forms.

4.4 How Vocabulary Grows — Compare compounding and other word-formation processes using evidence beyond written spacing.

4.5 Comparing Morphological Patterns — Compare how languages distribute grammatical information within words without treating broad types as fixed labels for every form.

Chapter 5: Syntax: Word Classes and Phrase Structure

Textbook pp. 43–52

Words form groups inside a sentence, and those groups help determine its meaning. This chapter uses grammatical evidence, simple diagrams, and contrasting interpretations to make sentence structure visible.

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Five core topics

5.1 Classes Depend on Grammatical Behavior — Use grammatical position and word forms as evidence for word classes rather than relying on meaning alone.

5.2 Words That Act Together — Apply constituency tests to find words that function as a unit within a larger structure.

5.3 Heads and Their Dependents — Distinguish a phrase’s head, selected complements, and additional modifiers through their grammatical relationships.

5.4 Representing Hierarchy — Read simple phrase-structure trees and rules to see which units combine and which contain others.

5.5 One Sequence, Two Structures — Compare different grammatical groupings to explain how the same sequence can support different meanings.

Chapter 6: Syntax II: Clauses, Relations, and Sentence Patterns

Textbook pp. 53–63

The same event can be expressed through different sentence patterns. This chapter examines participants, clauses, questions, passives, and the clues languages use to show grammatical relationships.

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Five core topics

6.1 Relations Are Not Roles — Distinguish grammatical relations such as subject and object from participants’ roles in an event.

6.2 Arguments, Adjuncts, and Valency — Identify a predicate’s selected participants and distinguish them from additional information about the event.

6.3 Clauses Inside Clauses — Locate coordinated and embedded clauses and examine how they fit into a larger sentence.

6.4 Questions and Passives — Analyze how English questions and passives change clause structure while preserving relevant relationships.

6.5 Comparing Word Order and Case — Compare word order and case marking as evidence for grammatical relationships across languages.

Chapter 7: Semantics: Lexical and Sentence Meaning

Textbook pp. 64–74

Understanding meaning involves words, their relationships, and the structures that combine them. This chapter helps you examine what expressions mean and test what follows from a claim.

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Five core topics

7.1 Different Questions About Meaning — Distinguish an expression’s sense, the things it can apply to, and what it refers to in a particular use.

7.2 Relations Between Word Meanings — Compare similarity, opposition, inclusion, and other relationships among word meanings.

7.3 Features, Categories, and Prototypes — Use features and prototypes to examine categories while recognizing the limits of each approach.

7.4 Combining Meanings — Explain how words and their grammatical grouping jointly contribute to the meaning of an expression.

7.5 What Follows From a Claim? — Test entailment, contradiction, and presupposition while stating the meanings and assumptions held constant.

Chapter 8: Pragmatics: Language Use, Context, and Communication

Textbook pp. 75–84

A speaker can communicate more than the words alone say. This chapter explores how context, shared knowledge, social relationships, and careful inference help listeners understand a message.

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Five core topics

8.1 Context Is Part of the Evidence — Use the situation, preceding discourse, and shared knowledge as evidence for interpreting an utterance.

8.2 Doing Things With Words — Identify actions performed through language, such as requests or promises, and distinguish them from their effects.

8.3 Inferring More Than Is Said — Separate literal content from conversational inferences and test whether an inference can be cancelled.

8.4 Face, Relationships, and Politeness — Examine how speakers manage social standing and imposition without assuming that one form is polite in every setting.

8.5 A Practical Method for Pragmatic Analysis — Build an interpretation from the exact expression and context, then consider alternative explanations.

Chapter 9: Discourse Analysis and Textual Structure

Textbook pp. 85–95

A text or conversation is more than a sequence of separate sentences. This chapter examines the links, information patterns, and interactional choices that help people follow connected language.

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Five core topics

9.1 From Sentences to Discourse — Examine connected spoken, written, signed, or multimodal language and distinguish textual links from overall coherence.

9.2 Tracking Cohesive Links — Trace reference, substitution, ellipsis, connectors, and vocabulary links across a text.

9.3 Organizing Information for Readers — Follow how familiar and new information develop a text’s purpose and help readers understand its progression.

9.4 Organizing Conversation — Analyze turns, paired actions, and repair through the surrounding interaction rather than isolated utterances.

9.5 Genre, Purpose, and Evidence — Connect recurring text and interaction patterns with communicative purposes, audiences, and suitable evidence.

Chapter 10: Sociolinguistics: Language Variation and Identity

Textbook pp. 96–106

People vary their language across communities, relationships, and situations. This chapter explores those patterns and shows how to study them without treating social judgments as measures of linguistic worth.

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Five core topics

10.1 Variation Is Part of a Language — Distinguish accent, dialect, register, and style while recognizing patterned variation within and across speakers.

10.2 Communities, Repertoires, and Identity — Explore how overlapping communities and linguistic resources contribute to identity and participation.

10.3 Measuring a Linguistic Variable — Define a variable, classify its occurrences, and calculate rates using the relevant comparison set.

10.4 Prestige, Ideology, and Social Evaluation — Examine judgments about language varieties as social evaluations rather than direct measures of linguistic complexity.

10.5 Multilingual Choices and Research Practice — Investigate multilingual language choices with attention to context, community use, consent, and respectful research.

Chapter 11: Historical Linguistics: Language Change and Reconstruction

Textbook pp. 107–117

Languages change, and traces of earlier patterns can remain in present-day forms. This chapter introduces the evidence used to compare languages, propose earlier forms, and investigate their histories.

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Five core topics

11.1 Change Across Time — Compare descriptions at one point in time with evidence of changes in sounds, grammar, vocabulary, and meaning.

11.2 Establishing Historical Relatedness — Look for systematic correspondences and shared history before treating similar words as evidence of common ancestry.

11.3 Reconstructing a Small Pattern — Use a small dataset to propose an earlier form and explain the sound changes that account for the observed pattern.

11.4 Trees, Waves, and Limits — Compare branching descent with the spread of features across communities and recognize what each model leaves out.

11.5 English, Writing, and Historical Records — Connect broad periods of English with language change while considering the limits of spelling and surviving records.

Chapter 12: Language Contact, Pidgins, Creoles, and Endangerment

Textbook pp. 118–128

Contact between language communities can have many different outcomes. This chapter explores contact varieties, changing patterns of language use, and community decisions about maintenance and revitalization.

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Five core topics

12.1 Contact Has Several Possible Outcomes — Distinguish borrowing, code-switching, convergence, new contact varieties, and shift without assuming a single required sequence.

12.2 Pidgins and Expanding Functions — Examine how a shared contact variety can develop and expand its uses without treating limited functions as an absence of grammar.

12.3 Creoles and Their Histories — Explore the varied histories of creoles as full languages and avoid assuming that all developed through the same route.

12.4 Shift, Maintenance, and Vitality — Assess who uses a language, where it is used, and how it is transmitted across generations.

12.5 Documentation, Revitalization, and Community Authority — Distinguish recording language practices from strengthening everyday use, with communities directing goals and access decisions.

Chapter 13: Psycholinguistics: Processing and the Mental Lexicon

Textbook pp. 129–139

Knowing a language and using it in real time raise different questions. This chapter examines how people recognize words, build interpretations, produce utterances, and study these processes through experiments.

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Five core topics

13.1 Knowledge and Processing — Distinguish knowledge about language from the processes involved in accessing and combining it during a task.

13.2 Recognizing Words in Context — Examine how frequency, earlier exposure, context, and knowledge of other languages can affect word recognition.

13.3 Building Sentence Structure Over Time — Follow how a sentence interpretation develops and may need revision when later words change the available analysis.

13.4 Planning and Producing an Utterance — Distinguish message planning, linguistic formulation, articulation, and monitoring while recognizing that these activities can overlap.

13.5 Turning a Processing Question Into a Study — Choose measures and comparisons that address a processing question while considering controls and alternative explanations.

Chapter 14: Neurolinguistics: Language and the Brain

Textbook pp. 140–150

Language depends on interacting brain systems, and different research methods reveal different parts of that activity. This chapter introduces the evidence while keeping its limits and individual differences in view.

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Five core topics

14.1 Anatomy as a Starting Point — Learn basic brain landmarks and connections without assuming that an anatomical boundary defines one complete function.

14.2 Lateralization and Connected Processing — Examine differences in hemispheric contributions while recognizing that language depends on interacting systems.

14.3 Language Difficulties as Evidence — Consider how acquired language difficulties inform research while recognizing that classroom examples cannot establish a diagnosis.

14.4 Methods Measure Different Things — Compare evidence from lesions, electrical activity, and imaging by asking what each method measures and what it cannot show.

14.5 Plasticity, Learning, and Responsible Interpretation — Examine learning, adaptation, and recovery with attention to individual differences and the limits of the evidence.

Chapter 15: First and Second Language Acquisition

Textbook pp. 151–162

People develop language knowledge through varied experiences and settings. This chapter compares early and additional-language development and examines explanations involving learning, age, input, and interaction.

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Five core topics

15.1 What Counts as Acquisition? — Distinguish initial and additional-language development while recognizing early multilingualism and varied learning settings.

15.2 Broad Patterns in Early Development — Explore broad patterns in early perception, communication, words, and grammar without treating ages as a rigid timetable.

15.3 Explaining How Patterns Are Learned — Compare explanations of acquisition and ask how each accounts for input, learning, and productive generalization.

15.4 Age, Experience, and Additional Languages — Evaluate age-related claims alongside exposure, prior language access, schooling, and the particular outcome being measured.

15.5 Interlanguage, Transfer, and Learning Opportunities — Examine a learner’s developing system and possible influences from prior languages, input, interaction, and feedback.

About the textbook

Foundations of Linguistics: For EFL University Students

Project Director: Prof. Munassir Alhamami · First Edition | Version 1

Alhamami, M. (2026). Foundations of linguistics: For EFL university students (First Edition, Version 1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23151099

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Original textbook material is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), unless a different condition is stated. Items credited to other sources retain their own terms.

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ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and NotebookLM assisted in developing the textbook. Responsibility for the final editorial decisions and released version rests with the Project Director.

The chapter names and topic headings reproduce the textbook’s wording. The introductions and topic explanations are supplementary study support.