Introduction to Linguistics
Through the course book The Study of Language by George Yule we will study a comprehensive survey of what is known about language and also of the methods used by linguists in arriving at that knowledge.
There have been many interesting developments in the study of language over the past two decades, but it is still a fact that any individual speaker of a language has a more comprehensive knowledge of how language works than any linguist has yet been able to describe.
So, as you read the following chapters, take a critical view of the effectiveness of the descriptions, the analyses, and the generalizations by measuring them against your own intuitions about how your language works.
By the end of the course, you should then feel that you do know quite a lot about both the internal structure of language (its form) and the varied uses of language in human life (its function), and also that you are ready to ask the kinds of questions that professional linguists ask when they conduct their research.