Exploring Linguistic Science

Allison Burkette is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Mississippi. Her publications include a number of case studies that employ Linguistic Atlas Project data, including 'The Story of Chester Drawers' (2001), 'Stamped Indian: Localism and Lexical Variation in Terms for American 'Cornbread'' (2011), and 'Parlor Talk: Complexity from a Historical Perspective' (2013). She is author of Language and Material Culture (2015). Bill Kretzschmar is the Harry and Jane Willson Professor in Humanities at the University of Georgia. He is Editor of the American Linguistic Atlas Project, the oldest and largest national research project to survey how people speak differently across the Americas. His The Linguistics of Speech (2009) and Language and Complex Systems (2015) have pioneered the study of complex systems in language.

• 1. A new science; 2. Complex systems in nature and human behavior; 3. Complex systems in language; 4. Language basics: sounds; 5. Sounds: IPA and acoustic phonetics; 6. Sounds: atlas evidence; 7. Language basics: morphology; 8. Morphemes: empirical data; 9. Parts of speech; 10. Language basics: grammar and discourse; 11. Grammar: sentences and construction grammar; 12. Cognitive linguistics; 13. Language acquisition; 14. Language evolution; 15. Text type; 16. Style; 17. Sociolinguistics; 18. Big data: using a corpus; 19. Historical linguistics; 20. Conclusion: the future of interaction and emergence.

'This lucid book - elegantly written and brimming with memorable examples of both language and complex systems across the sciences - will guide readers through the intellectual adventure of a new science, one that will transform, not only perspectives on language, but also their sense of themselves as linguistic agents.' Michael Adams, Indiana University, Bloomington