Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech

The book presents language as a culturally grounded system of symbolic speech, arguing against purely biological or interjectional origin theories. It treats speech components from sounds and articulatory mechanisms to words and sentence structure, and outlines phonetics, phonology, and grammatical processes such as affixation, mutation, reduplication, and stress. It proposes ways to classify languages by conceptual types and degree of synthesis, and traces historical change through drift, phonetic laws, and analogical leveling. It examines language contact, borrowing, and mutual influence, and discusses relations between language, race, and culture and how linguistic features shape literary style and prosody.