John E. Joseph is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Nigel Love is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Talbot J. Taylor is L.G.T. Cooley Professor of English and Linguistics at the College of William and Mary, Virginia, USA.

• Introduction 1 Sapir on language, culture and personality 2 Jakobson and structuralism 3 Orwell on language and politics 4 Whorf on language and thought 5 Firth on language and context 6 Wittgenstein on grammatical investigations 7 Austin on language as action 8 Skinner on verbal behaviour 9 Chomsky on language as biology 10 Labov on linguistic variation 11 Goffman on the communicating self 12 Bruner on the child’s passport into language 13 Derrida on the linguistic sign and writing 14 Harris on linguistics without languages 15 Kanzi on human language

'An ideal introduction to the whole gamut of current linguistic ideas ... The ideal introduction for a beginner to the basic issues.' - Ashish Mehta, Jawaharlal Nehru University of India