Review of the hardback: 'This is an exciting, sometimes dizzying, book, which incorporates ideas from areas rarely brought together, such as chaos theory, linguistic surveys, corpus linguistics, perceptual dialectology, social attitudes to language, and statistics. … Various sections of the book deal with complex ideas from fields … Yet the discussion is very well-pitched, moving smoothly from basic concepts to applications, and so the pertinence of such ideas and models for language becomes starkly clear. Many groups of readers will find something to take from this book: it offers a coherent big picture, but one in which even the smallest pieces of data are visible.' Linguist List

• Introduction; 1. The contemporary marketplace of ideas about language; 2. Saussure; 3. Evidence from linguistic survey research: basic description; 4. Statistical evidence from linguistic survey research; 5. Evidence from corpus linguistics; 6. Speech as a complex system; 7. Speech perception; 8. Speech models and applications.

Review of the hardback: 'This is an exciting, sometimes dizzying, book, which incorporates ideas from areas rarely brought together, such as chaos theory, linguistic surveys, corpus linguistics, perceptual dialectology, social attitudes to language, and statistics. … Various sections of the book deal with complex ideas from fields … Yet the discussion is very well-pitched, moving smoothly from basic concepts to applications, and so the pertinence of such ideas and models for language becomes starkly clear. Many groups of readers will find something to take from this book: it offers a coherent big picture, but one in which even the smallest pieces of data are visible.' Linguist List

• Introduction; 1. The contemporary marketplace of ideas about language; 2. Saussure; 3. Evidence from linguistic survey research: basic description; 4. Statistical evidence from linguistic survey research; 5. Evidence from corpus linguistics; 6. Speech as a complex system; 7. Speech perception; 8. Speech models and applications.

Review of the hardback: 'This is an exciting, sometimes dizzying, book, which incorporates ideas from areas rarely brought together, such as chaos theory, linguistic surveys, corpus linguistics, perceptual dialectology, social attitudes to language, and statistics. … Various sections of the book deal with complex ideas from fields … Yet the discussion is very well-pitched, moving smoothly from basic concepts to applications, and so the pertinence of such ideas and models for language becomes starkly clear. Many groups of readers will find something to take from this book: it offers a coherent big picture, but one in which even the smallest pieces of data are visible.' Linguist List

• Introduction; 1. The contemporary marketplace of ideas about language; 2. Saussure; 3. Evidence from linguistic survey research: basic description; 4. Statistical evidence from linguistic survey research; 5. Evidence from corpus linguistics; 6. Speech as a complex system; 7. Speech perception; 8. Speech models and applications.