Bertil Malmberg - Böcker

This introductory textbook in general phonetics was first published in 1976. It will be of use to all with an interest in the nature and working of the sound substance of human language, such as students of phonetics and linguistics, teachers and students of modern languages, speech therapists and audiologists. The emphasis is on the basics: the organs of speech and hearing, the methods of sound production in the vocal tract, the types of sound used in human languages, and the process of speech perception. The focus of attention is always the tongue and ear of the phonetician as an investigator of speech, rather than his instruments or experiments, with due attention paid to the phoneme and the distinctive feature, the units in that border area where phonetics and the study of languages come together.

The point of departure of this general survey of modern structural linguistics is the place of language in human relations. Linguistics will consequently be understood as a science of communication. My book is not intended as an elementary handbook. The readers are supposed to be in the first place advanced students of linguistics and phonetics and of neighbouring fields where a real awareness of linguistic methods and problems is essential (such as psychology, phoniatrics, speech therapy, language teaching, communication engineering). The book may, however, be of some value also for the general reader who is interested in language, in language learning, or in communication processes. It might finally serve as an introduction to structural theories and practice for those linguists of traditional orientation who would like to make contact with the new trends in the study of language. It is self-evident that, under such circumstances, any reader will find certain chapters in this book rather complicated, others irritatingly elementary. This is, however, unavoidable in a work whose aim is to cover a vast field of knowledge and to offer the reader a synthesis of what appears at first sight to be widely disparate facts and phenomena. Many of the facts brought together here may, regarded superficially, seem to have few or no mutual connections. They can, nevertheless, be combined into a wide humanistic and scientific unity within which numerous lines of relationship bind together physical and psychic, individual and social phenomena.

No detailed description available for "Readings in Modern Linguistics".