An Introduction to Language

Victoria Fromkin was Professor of Linguistics and a member of the faculty of the University of California, Department of Linguistics from 1966 until her death in 2000. She served as its chair from 1972-1976. Dr Fromkin published more than one hundred books, monographs and papers on topics concerned with phonetics, phonology, tone languages, African languages, speech errors, processing models, aphasia and the brain/mind/language interface. Robert Rodman was a Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at North Carolina State University. His research interests included computational forensic linguistics, speech processing, and in particular, lip synchronisation and voice recognition. Nina Hyams is Professor of Linguistics and co-director of the UCLA Psycholinguistics Laboratory and the UCLA Infant Language Laboratory. Her main areas of research are childhood language development and syntax. She is author of the book Language Acquisition and the Theory of Parameters (D. Reidel publishers, 1986) a milestone in language acquisition research. She has also published numerous articles on the development of syntax and morphology in children. Mengistu Amberber is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of New South Wales. His main research interests include the syntax-semantics interface (with particular reference to generative grammar) and linguistic typology. He is the co-editor of Complex Predicates: Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Event Structure (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Felicity Cox is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. She is the Linguistics Department director of undergraduate studies and convenor of the Bachelor of Speech, Hearing and Language Sciences program. She teaches phonetics and phonology at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and has published widely on the phonetics and phonology of Australian English. Felicity is the author of Australian English: Pronunciation and Transcription, 2nd edition (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Rosalind Thornton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University and a researcher in the Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders. Rosalind teaches introductory linguistics, child language acquisition and syntax. Her research focuses on the acquisition of syntax in typically-developing children, and children with Specific Language Impairment.