K. P. Mohanan, Tara Mohanan
This book is an exploration of the structure of human language. It uses the scientific mode of inquiry, that of building an integrated and interconnected understanding of the information we gather by observing the world. In working through this book, we hope student readers will learn something about language structure as well as about scientific inquiry.
Our primary readers, we expect, will be students of a beginning linguistics course. If you are new to the idea of the ‘structure’ of language, you will find in this book plenty of patterns of language structure to explore. We hope that at least some of the patterns will amaze or delight you by their very existence, and some will make you say, “I’ve spoken this language all my life but I didn’t know it had this pattern.” In the process of trying to understand the patterns, we hope you will experience the joy of building systematic explanations.
We hope that the book will also catch the eye of non-linguists who might be curious about language structure. We also hope that practicing linguists will find in it something of value by way of insights and pointers for both linguistic inquiry and linguistics education.
You can find the book linked here.