Written by a team based at one of the world's leading centres for linguistic teaching and research, the second edition of this highly successful textbook offers a unified approach to language, viewed from a range of perspectives essential for students' understanding of the subject. Using clear explanations throughout, the book is divided into three main sections: sounds, words, and sentences. In each, the foundational concepts are introduced, along with their application to the fields of child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, language disorders, and sociolinguistics, giving the book a unique yet simple structure that helps students to engage with the subject more easily than other textbooks on the market. This edition includes a completely new section on sentence use, including an introduction and discussion of core areas of pragmatics and conversational analysis; new coverage of sociolinguistic topics, introducing communities of practice; a wealth of new exercise material and updated further reading.

This textbook provides a concise, clear, and accessible introduction to current syntactic theory, drawing on the key concepts of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. Assuming little or no prior grammatical knowledge, Andrew Radford takes students through a wide range of topics in English syntax, beginning at an elementary level and progressing in stages towards more advanced material. There is an extensive glossary of technical terms, and each chapter contains a workbook section with 'helpful hints', exercises and model answers, suitable for both class discussion and self-study. This is an abridged version of Radford's major new textbook Minimalist Syntax (also published by Cambridge University Press), and will be welcomed as a short introduction to current syntactic theory.