Book Description
Designed for beginners, this best-selling textbook provides a thorough introduction to the study of language. It introduces the analysis of the key elements of language--sounds, words, structures and meanings, and provides a solid foundation in all of the essential topics. The third edition has been extensively revised to include new sections on important contemporary issues in language study, including language and culture, African American English, sign language, and slang. A comprehensive glossary provides useful explanations of technical terms, and each chapter contains a range of new study questions and research tasks, with suggested answers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (15)

Great book
I feel that this a great book. One thing thats great is that the chapters are short enough to get through, especially for those that use the book for college.

Best choice for an introduction
Probably the best introduction into the vast field of linguistics. George Yule covers all parts of language studies; and his book is highly readable (actually entertaining) to boot. Highly recommended for undergraduate classes or as an introductory book in general.

a well-written textbook
This book makes a very good introductory to linguistics. It is easy to read. The concepts are clearly explained.

Not worth its weight in sand
From a student who has studied linguistics in the past, George Yule's book is almost a complete waste of time.He brings up interesting points, describes them, and drops them just as quickly without making any sort of progress.The book has precious few examples of the concepts he is discussing, and his discussion of the concepts themselves is muddy and incomplete.For a much clearer way to learn lingustics, check out Edward Finnegan's "Language: Its Strucuture and Use".There are many other books out there that do a much better job of presenting the theories in linguistics.

Larry's Review
This book has provided me with an excellent insight of the basics of linguistics.The chapters on phonetics and morphology give sufficient detail to understand the logical background of our language. Gorge Yule has written in an easy-to-read style, that keeps the reader captivated. ... Read more

Book Description
This is an introduction to pragmatics, the study of how people make sense of each other linguistically. The author explains, and illustrates, basic concepts such as the co-operative principle, deixis, and speech acts, providing a clear, concise foundation for further study. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Short and Swift
George Yule's "Pragmatics" is a great little introduction on the topic of English pragmatics, but that is all it is. It is a brief insight into some of the key concepts of the field and one that I found very useful. For this reason, I would recommend it.

However, it is a very short book, and those with more experience, (or any experience at all, for that matter), would probably prefer something more substantial. It is really a whirlwind tour of pragmatics and nothing more.

That said, I found it very readable and easily understood. It was certainly not all that taxing on the reading skills, and the main concepts and definitions were well explained.

This is a good book to start with, and I recommend it for a launching point to further reading.

An Introduction to an... Introduction
The series in which appeared this book is designed to give a large-scale view of different areas of language. It should be used as an introduction to more specific ... introductions. The titles in the series are all divided into four sections: Survey, Readings, References and Glossary.

The Survey of Pragmatics contains nine chapters, each of roughly 10 pages: 1) Definitions and background; 2) Deixis and Reference; 3) Reference and inference; 4) Presupposition and entailment; 5)Cooperation and implicature; 6) Speech acts and events; 7)Politeness and interaction; 8) Conversation and preference structure; 9) Discourse and culture.

The Readings are one-page texts extracted from the specialized literature and are followed by a couple of questions. The References help the reader providing him with a selection of titles for every chapter of the Survey. The proposed books are classified in terms of difficulty, from introductory to advanced level. Technical terms are in bold and are explained once more in the Glossary at the back of the book.

I think the author has succeeded in giving a bird's view of several fields of pragmatics. Of course, the discussion is somewhat condensed and could, at least at some points, be clearer or give some more details. But one should be aware of the difficulty of explaining a lot of stuff to people with no assumed prior knowledge of the subject and having only 90 pages at one's disposal! Nonetheless, I missed formal definitions of technical terms in the Survey. The author often gives them only indirectly, and the reader must extract them himself from the text. Sincerely, I did not find the Readings useful at all and I would have wished to find more titles and more details in the comments under each of them in the References. ... Read more

Book Description
The right explanations and practice for your language level, plus the only CD-ROM with interactive 'find and correct the mistake' exercises. ... Read more

Book Description
The authors describe ideas, techniques, and procedures which will enable the practising language teacher to better identify the local needs of particular groups of second language learners, and then work towards meeting those needs. It is full of illustrative examples and practical exercises which teachers can adapt and use in their own classrooms. ... Read more

Book Description
This is a book designed to help teachers understand English grammar and explain it to their students. Each chapter focuses on a problematic area, for example 'Articles', 'Conditionals', and 'Direct and indirect speech', and includes exercises for the reader and teaching ideas. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Connects language functions to grammar
This book is great. It does a lot to bridge the gap between teaching grammar and pragmatics (or language functions).

It goes beyond the decontextualized grammar that most grammar books provide and describes howthe peculiarities and idiosyncracies ofnine difficult areas of Englishgrammar can beexplained to students. The areas include articles, tenseand aspect, modals, conditionals,prepositions and particles, indirectobjects,infinitives and gerunds, relative clauses,and direct andindirect speech. The "Teaching Ideas" section at the end of eachchapter connects grammar up with classroom activities, both the usualgrammar worksheet type of activity and the interactive-communicativetype.

It would have been nice if the book provided more ways to connectspecific types of communicative activities with specific points of grammar,but I've been able to use this book to understand how the communicativeactivities I use regularly contain implicit grammar practice.

JonFernquest ferni@loxinfo.co.th bayinnaung@hotmail.com ... Read more

Book Description
A través de un estilo claro y conciso, George Yule ofrece al lector no especializado una introducción exhaustiva a los aspectos fundamentales del estudio de la lengua. Desde los orígenes del lenguaje hasta el análisis de las estratgias de adquisición/aprendizaje de una primera o segunda lengua; desde los procesos de formación de las palabras, la gramática y la sintaxis hasta los factores sociales, culturales y geográficos que influyen en el desarrollo de la lengua, este manual proporciona la oportunidad de descubrir el funcionamiento del lenguaje y el papel que desempeña dentro de las relaciones humanas. ... Read more

Book Description
Success at school and beyond depends to a large extent on being able to make yourself understood. This book looks at the way adolescents express themselves and concentrates on the discrepancies in language use between academically successful and unsuccessful pupils in an educational setting. The authors analyse situations where transfer of information is the prime consideration and suggest ways in which the teacher can step in with practical help. The book explains in non-technical language and with humour the most important findings of a three-year research project into adolescent language. It uses many examples of transcibed speech to demonstrate how communication sometimes breaks down, disabling a pupil's performance and suggests how that performance can be improved. ... Read more

Book Description
Referential communication is the term given to communicative acts, generally spoken, in which some kind of information is exchanged between one speaker and another. This information exchange is typically dependent on successful acts of reference, whereby entities (human and non-human) are identified (by naming or describing), are located or moved relative to other entities (by giving instructions or directions), or are followed through sequences of locations and events (by recounting an incident or a narrative). These "activities" are examples of events that are more typically described as "tasks" in the area of second language studies. These might be real world tasks encountered in everyday experience or pedagogical tasks specifically designed for second language classroom use.

This volume comprehensively documents and describes the veritable explosion of task-based research in language acquisition. In a succinct, yet easily accessible fashion, it presents the origins, principles, and key distinctions of referential communication research in first and second language studies, complete with exhaustive analyses and illustrations of different types of materials. The author also describes and evaluates different choices for using or modifying these materials, provides analytic frameworks for focusing on various aspects of the data elicited by these tasks, and includes an extensive bibliography plus an appendix showing original task materials.
... Read more

Book Description
Discourse analysis is a term which has come to have different interpretations for scholars working in different disciplines. For a sociolinguist, it is concerned mainly with the structre of social interaction manifested in conversation; for a psycholinguist, it is primarily concerned with the nature of comprehension of short written texts; for the computational linguist, it is concerned with producing operational models of text-understanding within highly limited contexts. In this textbook, the authors provide an extensive overview of the many and diverse approaches to the study of discourse, but base their own approach centrally on the discipline which, to varying degrees, is common to them all - linguistics. Using a methodology which has much in common with descriptive linguistics, they offer a lucid and wide-ranging account of how forms of language are used in communication. Their principal concern is to examine how any language produced by man, whether spoken or written, is used to communicate for a purpose in a context. The discussion is carefully illustrated throughout by a wide variety of discourse types (conversations recorded in different social situations, extracts from newspapers, notices, contemporary fiction, graffiti, etc.). The techniques of analysis are described and exemplified in sufficient detail for the student to be able to apply them to any language in context that he or she encounters. A familiarity with elementary linguistics is assumed, but the range of issues discussed in conjunction with the variety of exemplification presented will make this a valuable and stimulating textbook not only for students of linguistics, but for any reader who wishes to investigate the principles underlying the use of language in natural contexts to communicate and understand intended meaning. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Well done work
This review pertains to the 2004 reprint edition.Aside from the lousy type in the book (an old mimeograph machine could have made clearer print than whoever reprinted this edition), the content is excellent.Though originally copyrighted in 1983, the content is still relevant.The portrayal of DA is balanced, taking into account a wide array of research.The authors have done their readers a service in several ways: (1) the book is a good resource of DA terminology and concepts; (2) they look at the research critically, presenting pros and cons, and where appropriate, provide their own alternative theories; (3) they write in a manner that is surprisingly engaging and fairly easy to follow; (4) the data from which they glean examples are from real world discourse (if contrived, they tell the reader); (5) they provide a solid bibliography for anyone doing work in DA.I recommend this book. ... Read more

Book Description
After a description of the features of spoken English, this text considers how they differ from the features of written language. The text describes practical techniques for teaching listening comprehension and speaking, which apply to ESL and foreign languages as well as English. ... Read more