Blurb:

Chapter 1, ‘Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies’ describes linguistics and language studies as something that linguists do, rather than simply a body of knowledge to be learned. It asks readers to start thinking theoretically about language through an exercise in categorizing the elements of a clause, and explains the descriptive approach to language that linguists are committed to—rather than providing a set of prescriptive rules to follow, linguistics provide understandings of language as it exists. It further introduces three key linguists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Ferdinand de Saussure, Noam Chomsky and Michael Halliday, to give readers a glimpse of the different ways in which language has been theorized and analyzed through the field of linguistics.