This outstanding multi-volume series covers all the major subdisciplines within linguistics today and, when complete, will offer a comprehensive survey of linguistics as a whole.

The Handbook of Child Language
Edited by Paul Fletcher and Brian MacWhinney

The Handbook of Phonological Theory, Second Edition
Edited by John A. Goldsmith, Jason Riggle, and Alan C. L. Yu

The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory
Edited by Shalom Lappin

The Handbook of Sociolinguistics
Edited by Florian Coulmas

The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences, Second Edition
Edited by William J. Hardcastle and John Laver

The Handbook of Morphology
Edited by Andrew Spencer and Arnold Zwicky

The Handbook of Japanese Linguistics
Edited by Natsuko Tsujimura

The Handbook of Linguistics, First Edition
Edited by Mark Aronoff and Janie Rees-Miller

The Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory
Edited by Mark Baltin and Chris Collins

The Handbook of Discourse Analysis
Edited by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton

The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, Second Edition
Edited by J. K. Chambers and Natalie Schilling

The Handbook of Historical Linguistics
Edited by Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda

The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality, Second Edition
Edited by Susan Ehrlich, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Janet Holmes

The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
Edited by Catherine J. Doughty and Michael H. Long

The Handbook of Bilingualism and Multilingualism, Second Edition
Edited by Tej K. Bhatia and William C. Ritchie

The Handbook of Pragmatics
Edited by Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward

The Handbook of Applied Linguistics
Edited by Alan Davies and Catherine Elder

The Handbook of Speech Perception
Edited by David B. Pisoni and Robert E. Remez

The Handbook of the History of English
Edited by Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los

The Handbook of English Linguistics
Edited by Bas Aarts and April McMahon

The Handbook of World Englishes
Edited by Braj B. Kachru; Yamuna Kachru, and Cecil L. Nelson

The Handbook of Educational Linguistics
Edited by Bernard Spolsky and Francis M. Hult

The Handbook of Clinical Linguistics
Edited by Martin J. Ball, Michael R. Perkins, Nicole Müller, and Sara Howard

The Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Studies
Edited by Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler

The Handbook of Language Teaching
Edited by Michael H. Long and Catherine J. Doughty

The Handbook of Language Contact
Edited by Raymond Hickey

The Handbook of Language and Speech Disorders
Edited by Jack S. Damico, Nicole Müller, and Martin J. Ball

The Handbook of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing
Edited by Alexander Clark, Chris Fox, and Shalom Lappin

The Handbook of Language and Globalization
Edited by Nikolas Coupland

The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics
Edited by Manuel Díaz-Campos

The Handbook of Language Socialization
Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, and Bambi B. Schieffelin

The Handbook of Intercultural Discourse and Communication
Edited by Christina Bratt Paulston, Scott F. Kiesling, and Elizabeth S. Rangel

The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics
Edited by Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy and Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre

The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics
Edited by José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea, and Erin O'Rourke

The Handbook of Conversation Analysis
Edited by Jack Sidnell and Tanya Stivers

The Handbook of English for Specific Purposes
Edited by Brian Paltridge and Sue Starfield

The Handbook of Spanish Second Language Acquisition
Edited by Kimberly L. Geeslin

The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics
Edited by C.-T. James Huang, Y.-H. Audrey Li, and Andrew Simpson

The Handbook of Language Emergence
Edited by Brian MacWhinney and William O'Grady

The Handbook of Korean Linguistics
Edited by Lucien Brown and Jaehoon Yeon

The Handbook of Speech Production
Edited Melissa A. Redford

The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, Second Edition
Edited by Shalom Lappin and Chris Fox

The Handbook of Classroom Discourse and Interaction
Edited by Numa Markee

The Handbook of Narrative Analysis
Edited by Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou

The Handbook of English Pronounciation
Edited by Marnie Reed and John M. Levis

The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Second Edition
Edited by Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton, and Deborah Schiffrin

The Handbook of Bilingual and Multilingual Education
Edited by Wayne E. Wright, Sovicheth Boun, and Ofelia García

The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics
Edited by W. Leo Wetzels, João Costa, and Sergio Menuzzi

The Handbook of Dialectology
Edited by Charles Boberg, John Nerbonne, and Dominic Watt

The Handbook of Linguistics, Second Edition
Edited by Mark Aronoff and Janie Rees-Miller

Mark C. Baker
Rutgers University

Steven P. Black
Georgia State University

Lyle Campbell
University of Hawai'i

David Caplan
Harvard University

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
University of Canterbury

J. K. Chambers
University of Toronto

Kiel Christianson
University of Illinois

Abigail C. Cohn
Cornell University

Bernard Comrie
University of California Santa Barbara

Vivian Cook
Newcastle University

William Croft
University of New Mexico

D. A. Cruse
University of Manchester

Peter T. Daniels
Independent Scholar

Nigel Fabb
University of Strathclyde

Elizabeth A. Falconi
Georgia State University

James Paul Gee
Arizona State University

Christoph Gutknecht
University of Hamburg

Kirk Hazen
West Virginia University

Agnes Weiyun He
Stony Brook University

Brian D. Joseph
The Ohio State University

Ruth Kempson
King's College London

Kendall A. King
University of Minnesota

Shalom Lappin
University of Gothenburg

John Laver
Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh

Diane Lillo-Martin
University of Connecticut

Brian MacWhinney
Carnegie Mellon University

Pamela Munro
University of California Los Angeles

Janie Rees-Miller
Marietta College

Suzanne Romaine
University of Oxford

Wendy Sandler
University of Haifa

Roger W. Shuy
Georgetown University

Andrew Spencer
University of Essex

Kathryn D. Stemper
University of Minnesota

Rebecca Treiman
Washington University in Saint Louis

Robert D. Van Valin, Jr.
University at Buffalo

Thomas Wasow
Stanford University

The second edition of The Handbook of Linguistics has been designed to offer an overview of the field of linguistics in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It has now been over two decades since we began work on the first edition of The Handbook of Linguistics, and although our general goals and topics remain much the same as in the first edition, the second edition has been updated to reflect new developments in linguistics since the dawning of the second millennium. New to this edition are chapters devoted to topics not covered in detail in the first edition: psycholinguistics, linguistic anthropology and ethnolinguistics, and second language pedagogy. Other topics that were covered in the first edition have completely new chapters. Specifically, the single chapter devoted to sociolinguistics in the first edition has now been replaced with two new chapters in the second edition, one on sociolinguistic theory and the second on language variation. The topic of language planning has a completely new chapter. Of the remaining chapters, most have been thoroughly revised and updated to incorporate new developments in the field and to refresh any ephemeral examples or references. In a few cases, chapters that have stood the test of time have remained unrevised from the first edition. These are the chapters on languages of the world, history of linguistics, phonetics, the lexicon, and formal semantics.

As in the first edition, the purpose of the Handbook is to provide an introduction to the various subfields of linguistics for the educated reader who does not necessarily have a background in linguistics. It is also a useful resource for linguists who may need to teach or to reference subfields outside their specific specializations. In each chapter, we seek to present a broad introduction to the central questions of the subfield and to illustrate how linguists go about answering these questions. Generalizations are supported with enough detail to provide depth, but we have tried to eschew the kind of minutia that would not be meaningful to the general reader or would not stand the test of time.

The order of topics remains much the same as in the first edition. We begin with the starting points for the study of linguistics: the origins of language, the raw material of language study (languages of the world, their typology and universal characteristics, and writing systems), and how language data is gathered from native speakers (field linguistics). The second section of the book considers theoretical bases, beginning with various approaches to the scientific study of language in the history of linguistics. Two chapters are given over to current theoretical perspectives: generative grammar and functional linguistics. We then proceed to the core fields of linguistics, those formal, structural aspects of language that would be covered in almost any general introductory course in linguistics: phonetics, phonology, morphology, the lexicon, syntax, semantics, and historical linguistics. Chapters in the next section – on neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, natural sign languages, and first language acquisition – all help to illuminate the relationship between language and the human mind. Our section on language use goes beyond the structural aspects of language to consider how language is used to communicate meaning within various social contexts, in the subfields of pragmatics, discourse analysis, linguistics and literature, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistic theory and language variation. The theme of languages in contact is addressed in chapters on multilingualism and second language acquisition. The book ends with chapters concerned with applications of linguistics: second language pedagogy, educational linguistics, linguistics and reading, forensic linguistics, translation, and language planning.

One of the strengths of the first edition of the Handbook was that the contributors were internationally recognized scholars in their fields. The same holds true for the second edition: the majority of the authors are senior scholars who contributed to the first edition, while some new chapters have been authored by younger scholars who have emerged as leaders in the field more recently. Our journey to the second edition has not been without detours and bumps in the road, and we are grateful to our contributors and our editors at Wiley Blackwell for their patience and forbearance. We owe a special debt to Agnes He, without whose encouragement, advice, and support this second edition would never have seen the light of day.

Mark Aronoff

Janie Rees-Miller

For over a century, linguists have been trying to explain linguistics to other people whom they believe should be interested in their subject matter. After all, everyone speaks at least one language and most people have fairly strong views about their own language. The most distinguished scholars in every generation have written general books about language and linguistics targeted at educated laypeople and at scholars in adjacent disciplines, and some of these books have become classics, at least among linguists. The first great American linguist, William Dwight Whitney, published The Life and Growth of Language: An Outline of Linguistic Science, in 1875. In the dozen years between 1921 and 1933, the three best known English-speaking linguists in the world (Edward Sapir in 1921, Otto Jespersen in 1922, and Leonard Bloomfield in 1933) all wrote books under the title Language. All these books were very successful and continued to be reprinted for many years. In our own time, Noam Chomsky, certainly the most famous of theoretical linguists, has tried to make his ideas on language more accessible in such less technical books as Language and Mind (1968) and Reflections on Language (1975). And more recently, Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (1995) stayed on the best-seller list for many months.

Despite these efforts, linguistics has not made many inroads into educated public discourse. Although linguists in the last hundred years have uncovered a great deal about human language and how it is acquired and used, the advances and discoveries are still mostly unknown outside a small group of practitioners. Many reasons have been given for this gap between academic and public thinking about language, the most commonly cited being: that people have strong and sometimes erroneous views about language and have little interest in being disabused of their false beliefs; or that people are too close to language to be able to see that it has interesting and complex properties. Whatever the reason, the gap remains and is getting larger the more we learn about language.

The Handbook of Linguistics is a general introductory volume designed to address this gap in knowledge about language. Presupposing no prior knowledge of linguistics, it is intended for people who would like to know what linguistics and its subdisciplines are about. The book was designed to be as nontechnical as possible, while at the same time serving as a repository for what is known about language as we enter the twenty-first century.

If The Handbook of Linguistics is to be regarded as authoritative, this will be in large part because of the identity of the authors of the chapters. We have recruited globally recognized leading figures to write each of the chapters. While the culture of academia is such that academic authors find it tremendously difficult to write anything for anyone other than their colleagues, our central editorial goal has been to avoid this pitfall. Our emphasis on the reader's perspective sets The Handbook of Linguistics apart from other similar projects.

The place of the field of linguistics in academia has been debated since its inception. When we look at universities, we may find a linguistics department in either the social sciences or the humanities. When we look at the American government agencies that fund university research, we find that the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health all routinely award grants for research in linguistics. So where does linguistics belong? The answer is not in where linguistics is placed administratively, but rather in how linguists think. Here the answer is quite clear: linguists by and large view themselves as scientists and they view their field as a science, the scientific study of language. This has been true since the nineteenth century, when Max Mueller could entitle a book published in 1869 The Science of Language and the first chapter of that book “The science of language: one of the physical sciences.”

The fact that linguistics is today defined as the scientific study of language carries with it the implicit claim that a science of language is possible, and this alone takes many by surprise. For surely, they say, language, like all human activity, is beyond the scope of true science. Linguists believe that their field is a science because they share the goals of scientific inquiry, which is objective (or more properly intersubjectively accessible) understanding. Once we accept that general view of science as a kind of inquiry, then it should be possible to have a science of anything, so long as it is possible to achieve intersubjectively accessible understanding of that thing. There are, of course, those who deny the possibility of such scientific understanding of anything, but we will not broach that topic here.

We now know that the possibility of scientific understanding depends largely on the complexity and regularity of the object of study. Physics has been so successful because the physical world is, relatively speaking, highly regular and not terribly complex. Human sciences, by contrast, have been much less successful and much slower to produce results, largely because human behavior is so complex and not nearly so regular as is the physical or even the biological world. Language, though, contrasts with other aspects of human behavior precisely in its regularity, what has been called its rule-governed nature. It is precisely this property of language and language-related behavior that has allowed for fairly great progress in our understanding of this delimited area of human behavior. Furthermore, the fact that language is the defining property of humans, that it is shared across all human communities and is manifested in no other species, means that by learning about language we will inevitably also learn about human nature.

Each chapter in this book is designed to describe to the general reader the state of our knowledge at the beginning of the twenty-first century of one aspect of human language. The authors of each chapter have devoted most of their adult lives to the study of this one aspect of language. Together, we believe, these chapters provide a broad yet detailed picture of what is known about language as we move into the new millennium. The chapters are each meant to be freestanding. A reader who is interested in how children acquire language, for example, should be able to turn to Chapter 19 and read it profitably without having to turn first to other chapters for assistance. But the physical nature of a book entails that there be an order of presentation. We begin with general overview chapters that consider the origins of language as species-specific behavior and describe the raw material with which linguists work (languages of the world and writing systems), frame the discipline within its historical context, and look at how linguists acquire new data from previously undescribed languages (field linguistics). The book then turns to the traditional subdisciplines of linguistics. Here we have followed most linguistics books in starting from the bottom, grounding language first in the physical world of sound (phonetics) and moving up through the organization of sound in language (phonology), to the combination of sounds into words (morphology), and the combination of words into sentences (syntax). Meaning (semantics) usually comes next, on the grounds that it operates on words and sentences. These areas are traditionally said to form the core of linguistics, because they deal with the most formally structured aspects of language. Within the last few decades, however, linguists have come to realize that we cannot understand the most formally structured aspects of language without also understanding the way language is used to convey information (pragmatics) in conversation (discourse) and in literature, and the way language interacts with other aspects of society (sociolinguistics).

Fifty years ago, many of our chapters would have been absent from a book of this sort for the simple but dramatic reason that these fields of inquiry did not exist: language acquisition, multilingualism, sign language, neurolinguistics, computational linguistics, and all of the areas of applied linguistics to which we have devoted separate chapters (the one area of applied linguistics that did exist fifty years ago was language teaching).

The chapters are of a uniform length, approximately 10,000 words each, or about 25 printed pages. This length is substantial enough for a major essay, while being short enough so as not to overwhelm the reader. Applied linguistics is divided into several distinct areas that would be of interest to students and others who want to know what practical applications linguistics has. Because each of the applied linguistics chapters covers a more specialized area, these chapters are somewhat shorter than the rest (approximately 4,000 words each, or about 10 printed pages).

We have tried not to emphasize ideology, but rather to divide things up by empirical criteria having to do with the sorts of phenomena that a given field of inquiry covers. We have thought long and hard about whether some of the major areas, especially syntax and phonology, should be broken down further, with a chapter each on distinct theoretical approaches. Our final decision was not to subdivide by theoretical approaches, based on a belief that the reader's perspective is paramount in books like this: readers of a companion do not want to know what the latest controversy is about or who disagrees with whom or who said what when. Rather, they want to have a reasonable idea of what linguistics or some subarea of linguistics can tell them. The authors have been able to do so without going into the latest controversies, though these controversies may occupy the linguists' everyday lives. The one area to which we have devoted more than one chapter is syntax, but this reflects the dominance of syntactic research in linguistics over the last half century.

We do not see this handbook as an introductory textbook, which would, for example, have questions or exercises at the end of each chapter. There are already enough introductory linguistics texts. We see it rather as an authoritative volume on what linguists know about language at the start of the twenty-first century. Each chapter covers the central questions and goals of a particular subdiscipline, what is generally accepted as known in that area, and how it relates to other areas.

When we embarked on this editorial enterprise, we expected to enjoy the interaction with many of our most distinguished colleagues that the preparation of this book would entail, which is so much easier now in the age of electronic correspondence. What we did not realize was how much we would learn from these colleagues about language and linguistics, simply from reading their work and discussing it with them. We thank all of the authors for this wonderful opportunity and we hope that the readers, too, will share in the same great pleasure.

Mark Aronoff

Janie Rees-Miller